This interview was originally published in Radio Times magazine.
We start as we end: talking about Emily, her best friend since they were four, weaving in and out of that key relationship via their dear fathers – both celebrated, cherished writers – discussing divorce, secrets, faith and the loss of it, the status of women, fear, anger and love.
In 2014, Dolly Wells – actor, writer, director – moved to New York with her (now newly ex) photographer husband Mischa Richter and their daughter Elsie and son Ezra (then aged 12 and nine respectively). Her great friend Emily, the actor daughter of John Mortimer, had been in her wonky 1880s Brooklyn brownstone – full of paintings and fascinating objects – with her American actor husband Alessandro Nivola and their son Sam and daughter May since 2000.
“It was quite a big deal moving to America, at times confusing, and to have Emily and Sandro and the kids there in that beautiful chaos was so precious,” Wells recalls. “Her home is like a beating heart and she’s always cooking delicious food, with no fuss. There’s always good conversation and someone inevitably plays the piano or the guitar – it’s always a really lovely time.”
The two friends are about to go on holiday together. “I haven’t spoken to her for a couple of weeks, which is the longest ever, and I’m missing her terribly,” Wells says.
Our interview is on Zoom from her mother Teresa’s book-lined study – the walls painted a dusky pink – in her house, not far from Brighton. Wells was brought up in Kensington, London, but when she was 16, her parents decamped to the East Sussex countryside. John, her father, spent the last nine or ten years of his life there – with a railway station he could walk to, and a church at the end of their garden; twin stipulations before he would acquiesce to the move.
After her meaty role as the vampire-hunting nun Sister Agatha Van Helsing (the nemesis of Claes Bang’s Dracula) in Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat’s gender-switching 2020 BBC drama Dracula, Wells is back in a second big bruiser of a part, working with Moffat again on Inside Man, which he created and wrote.
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She is Janice Fife – tough, solitary, possibly on the spectrum – who comes into her own in the frightening opening scene. On a London Tube, an ordinary-looking bloke starts aggressively harassing a young woman, with no one intervening. Then another young woman tries to help, and he transfers his menacing moves onto her.
When Wells’s character takes out her phone to film him on what she calls “Facebook Live” – where, she says, the footage is going straight to the police – every woman in the carriage picks up her phone to do the same, shouting “Me too!” in a fierce rising chorus.
Has Wells ever experienced that kind of toxic masculinity herself?
“I haven’t been in a situation where I’ve had to do what Janice does,” she says. “I hope I would. When you’re not 20 any more [she is 50], you have that maternal feeling where you check to see if there are girls travelling alone on the Tube.”
Wells believes that women have got stronger at dealing with such issues. When her daughter Elsie was 14 and walking home from school with some other girls, a man began driving his car really close to them. “One of her friends leaned in and said, ‘Dude, we’re 14 and you look about 40! What’s wrong with you?’ which was so cool.”
At other times, she verges on despair at how little changes. “When you’re young, you’ve got that fast heartbeat feeling [of danger from men on the streets] and then you’ve got a little while in the middle where you’re, ‘Ooh, I’m not quite as visible now and I feel more in control and I’m not necessarily more confident, but grumpy and intolerant, and I just wouldn’t tolerate that sort of thing.’ But then you get to an age, in a short while, when the heartbeat begins to go faster again because you feel vulnerable.
“It doesn’t really stop. It just goes on and on and on, the things that are terrifying to you as a woman. And then you have Ghislaine Maxwell, a woman doing the opposite of looking after other women, and it’s just really… demoralising.”
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John Wells, satirist, actor and writer, died in 1998 at the age of 61 of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. On Wells’s 18th birthday, the man she had been brought up to believe was her father, Edward Gatacre, wrote her a letter imparting some seismic news. “He wrote that he had always known that John was my birth father and it made no difference to him and now that I was grown up I should know the truth,” she says.
Edward Gatacre, from a Dutch Catholic family, and Wells’s mother Teresa Chancellor divorced in 1977. Five years later, Teresa married John Wells, when Dolly was ten.
Four years later, a hint dropped by her mother made Wells suspect that her parentage wasn’t as it seemed: “I look very like my dad. I’ve got exactly the same funny top lip, for instance, but I wasn’t told properly until I was 18 and once you start to try to un-pull what happened, it gets twisted into a huge thing.
“At 14, I was struggling with it in my head and thinking, ‘I don’t really want this,’ because you don’t want to be different. But I’ve made my peace with it and I was very lucky that I had two dads.”
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Wells leans over to show me a tattoo on her hand which says DAD, “because I never called him Dad so I’m calling him Dad daily now,” she says. “I had a very lovely, close, fun, sweet, encouraging, daft, helpful relationship with my dad – I just didn’t know he actually was my dad.”
Her biggest sadness is that her children never had the chance to meet their grandfather, “and he’s still very much missed even though it’s 24 years ago that he died. But look, the world is in total chaos and people are having really horrible times so I don’t feel moany or sad about myself.”
The week after our interview, Wells and her husband were divorcing on Zoom, something she announced on Instagram. What prompted her to share the end of their 22-year marriage on social media?
“When I put it up it was in a moment of honesty when I was feeling a little bit sad, and I just wanted to acknowledge it in a way. It’s not like I’m a movie star and want to ‘acknowledge’ it in that way, but I wanted to share it with the people I’m fond of. I was pleased I did because I got really sweet, private messages, saying ‘Good luck,’ and ‘I love you’ and ‘I’m thinking of you.’”
But it’s also a public forum so the news is on her Wikipedia page, which is how I found out. “I didn’t know what was the right thing,” she says. “I mean, no one really cares apart from my family and friends and there was something absurd about it being on Zoom. I also wanted to put it out gently – like, ‘There you go… and on we go.’”
She believes that it’s time to review the idea that when a long marriage ends, it’s always a failure. “We were very, very young when we got together, and we were very, very different to each other and it was magical for me, I can’t speak for him. My mum’s quite posh and I was brought up in a certain way – like, supper is at eight o’clock so you’re going to be sitting at the table at that time, unless you’ve been shot!
“But with my ex-husband you could say to his family, ‘I don’t really feel like dinner, I might just read in my room,’ and that would be fine. To me that was absolutely incredible.
“Emily made the most beautiful speech at our wedding saying Mischa was like a Picasso in the blue period. He was very beautiful and strange to me. There was no way my mother was going to say, ‘What do his parents do and where are they from?’ They were beatniks who lived in the Chelsea Hotel [in New York].
“He’s really special, but when things are difficult for a long time and it’s not making anybody happy, you have to be brave. I don’t know if women carry this more than men but there is a feeling of being a bit disappointed in yourself. Like breaking a plate and you can’t fix it.
“There’s a sort of freedom for us both now, but it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t come with feelings of loss and sadness for me. But I’m very lucky to have an incredible best friend and lots of close friends and siblings. I’ve chewed everybody’s ear off at times.”
She was raised Catholic (although John Wells was Church of England; she says that they were hugely competitive about who would get to do the longer reading in church) and wanted to be a nun as a schoolgirl: “I wasn’t actually looking up convents! It was more like, ‘Ooh, I could be a nun or… I could work in a sweetshop?’”
Her faith waned when first her mother had a brain haemorrhage, followed by her father becoming so ill. Then, when she got together with Mischa, his atheism was stronger than her Catholicism. She describes herself as lapsed now, but it is something she would like to revisit: “It’s easy to knock but I do think it’s great to have something spiritual in your life.”
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In the meantime, she would love to team up with Mortimer again for a third series of Doll & Em – the Sky comedy based on their friendship but heightened and distorted, with “Em” an actress who hires “Doll” to be her assistant.
Wells loves directing as well as acting and writing, and wants to do more of it all. There is a completed first draft of a film script that she is itching to get back to and polish. Can she disclose the storyline?
“It’s about someone coming out of a long relationship… and that’s all I’m saying.” Not autobiographical at all then! “Not at all,” she says. “You won’t recognise anything or anyone.” But first, there’s that holiday to enjoy with her best friend.
Inside Man continues on BBC One and BBC iPlayer tonight (Monday 3rd October) at 9pm. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide to see what’s on tonight.
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