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 \u2013 both celebrated, cherished writers \u2013 discussing divorce, secrets, faith and the loss of it, the status of women, fear, anger and love.<\/p>\n
In 2014, Dolly Wells \u2013 actor, writer, director \u2013 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 \u2013 full of paintings and fascinating objects \u2013 with her American actor husband Alessandro Nivola and their son Sam and daughter May since 2000.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt 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,\u201d Wells recalls. \u201cHer home is like a beating heart and she\u2019s always cooking delicious food, with no fuss. There\u2019s always good conversation and someone inevitably plays the piano or the guitar \u2013 it\u2019s always a really lovely time.\u201d<\/p>\n
The two friends are about to go on holiday together. \u201cI haven\u2019t spoken to her for a couple of weeks, which is the longest ever, and I\u2019m missing her terribly,\u201d Wells says.<\/p>\n
Our interview is on Zoom from her mother Teresa\u2019s book-lined study \u2013 the walls painted a dusky pink \u2013 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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
After her meaty role as the vampire-hunting nun Sister Agatha Van Helsing (the nemesis of Claes Bang\u2019s Dracula) in Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat\u2019s gender-switching 2020 BBC drama Dracula<\/a>, Wells is back in a second big bruiser of a part, working with Moffat again on Inside Man<\/a>, which he created and wrote.<\/p>\n She is Janice Fife \u2013 tough, solitary, possibly on the spectrum \u2013 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.<\/p>\n When Wells\u2019s character takes out her phone to film him on what she calls \u201cFacebook Live\u201d \u2013 where, she says, the footage is going straight to the police \u2013 every woman in the carriage picks up her phone to do the same, shouting \u201cMe too!\u201d in a fierce rising chorus.<\/p>\n Has Wells ever experienced that kind of toxic masculinity herself?<\/p>\n \u201cI haven\u2019t been in a situation where I\u2019ve had to do what Janice does,\u201d she says. \u201cI hope I would. When you\u2019re 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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. \u201cOne of her friends leaned in and said, \u2018Dude, we\u2019re 14 and you look about 40! What\u2019s wrong with you?\u2019 which was so cool.\u201d<\/p>\n At other times, she verges on despair at how little changes. \u201cWhen you\u2019re young, you\u2019ve got that fast heartbeat feeling [of danger from men on the streets] and then you\u2019ve got a little while in the middle where you\u2019re, \u2018Ooh, I\u2019m not quite as visible now and I feel more in control and I\u2019m not necessarily more confident, but grumpy and intolerant, and I just wouldn\u2019t tolerate that sort of thing.\u2019 But then you get to an age, in a short while, when the heartbeat begins to go faster again because you feel vulnerable.<\/p>\n \u201cIt doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s just really\u2026 demoralising.\u201d<\/p>\n John Wells, satirist, actor and writer, died in 1998 at the age of 61 of non-Hodgkin\u2019s lymphoma. On Wells\u2019s 18th birthday, the man she had been brought up to believe was her father, Edward Gatacre, wrote her a letter imparting some seismic news. \u201cHe 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,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n Edward Gatacre, from a Dutch Catholic family, and Wells\u2019s mother Teresa Chancellor divorced in 1977. Five years later, Teresa married John Wells, when Dolly was ten.<\/p>\n Four years later, a hint dropped by her mother made Wells suspect that her parentage wasn\u2019t as it seemed: \u201cI look very like my dad. I\u2019ve got exactly the same funny top lip, for instance, but I wasn\u2019t told properly until I was 18 and once you start to try to un-pull what happened, it gets twisted into a huge thing.<\/p>\n \u201cAt 14, I was struggling with it in my head and thinking, \u2018I don\u2019t really want this,\u2019 because you don\u2019t want to be different. But I\u2019ve made my peace with it and I was very lucky that I had two dads.\u201d<\/p>\n Wells leans over to show me a tattoo on her hand which says DAD, \u201cbecause I never called him Dad so I\u2019m calling him Dad daily now,\u201d she says. \u201cI had a very lovely, close, fun, sweet, encouraging, daft, helpful relationship with my dad \u2013 I just didn\u2019t know he actually was my dad.\u201d<\/p>\n Her biggest sadness is that her children never had the chance to meet their grandfather, \u201cand he\u2019s still very much missed even though it\u2019s 24 years ago that he died. But look, the world is in total chaos and people are having really horrible times so I don\u2019t feel moany or sad about myself.\u201d<\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n \u201cWhen 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\u2019s not like I\u2019m a movie star and want to \u2018acknowledge\u2019 it in that way, but I wanted to share it with the people I\u2019m fond of. I was pleased I did because I got really sweet, private messages, saying \u2018Good luck,\u2019 and \u2018I love you\u2019 and \u2018I\u2019m thinking of you.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n But it\u2019s also a public forum so the news is on her Wikipedia page, which is how I found out. \u201cI didn\u2019t know what was the right thing,\u201d she says. \u201cI 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 \u2013 like, \u2018There you go\u2026 and on we go.\u2019\u201d<\/p> She believes that it\u2019s time to review the idea that when a long marriage ends, it\u2019s always a failure. \u201cWe 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\u2019t speak for him. My mum\u2019s quite posh and I was brought up in a certain way \u2013 like, supper is at eight o\u2019clock so you\u2019re going to be sitting at the table at that time, unless you\u2019ve been shot!<\/p>\n \u201cBut with my ex-husband you could say to his family, \u2018I don\u2019t really feel like dinner, I might just read in my room,\u2019 and that would be fine. To me that was absolutely incredible.<\/p>\n \u201cEmily 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, \u2018What do his parents do and where are they from?\u2019 They were beatniks who lived in the Chelsea Hotel [in New York].<\/p>\n \u201cHe\u2019s really special, but when things are difficult for a long time and it\u2019s not making anybody happy, you have to be brave. I don\u2019t 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\u2019t fix it.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a sort of freedom for us both now, but it doesn\u2019t mean that it doesn\u2019t come with feelings of loss and sadness for me. But I\u2019m very lucky to have an incredible best friend and lots of close friends and siblings. I\u2019ve chewed everybody\u2019s ear off at times.\u201d<\/p>\n 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: \u201cI wasn\u2019t actually looking up convents! It was more like, \u2018Ooh, I could be a nun or\u2026 I could work in a sweetshop?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n 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: \u201cIt\u2019s easy to knock but I do think it\u2019s great to have something spiritual in your life.\u201d<\/p>\n In the meantime, she would love to team up with Mortimer again for a third series of Doll & Em \u2013 the Sky comedy based on their friendship but heightened and distorted, with \u201cEm\u201d an actress who hires \u201cDoll\u201d to be her assistant.<\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s about someone coming out of a long relationship\u2026 and that\u2019s all I\u2019m saying.\u201d Not autobiographical at all then! \u201cNot at all,\u201d she says. \u201cYou won\u2019t recognise anything or anyone.\u201d But first, there\u2019s that holiday to enjoy with her best friend.<\/p>\n Inside Man continues on BBC One and\u00a0BBC iPlayer<\/a> tonight (Monday 3rd October) at 9pm. Check out more of our Drama<\/a>\u00a0coverage or visit our\u00a0TV Guide<\/a>\u00a0to see what\u2019s on tonight.<\/strong><\/p>\n The latest issue of Radio Times magazine is on sale now \u2013\u00a0<\/strong>subscribe now<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0and get the next 12 issues for only \u00a31. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to the\u00a0<\/strong>Radio Times podcast<\/strong><\/a> with Jane Garvey.<\/strong><\/p><\/body><\/html>\n By Ginny Dougray Published: Monday, 03 October 2022 at 12:00 am 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 \u2013 both celebrated, cherished writers \u2013 discussing divorce, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":23059,"template":"","categories":[5],"acf":[],"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/56\/2022\/10\/dolly-wells-on-bbcs-inside-man-her-friendship-with-emily-mortimer-and-writing-a-film-script.jpg",1439,959,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/56\/2022\/10\/dolly-wells-on-bbcs-inside-man-her-friendship-with-emily-mortimer-and-writing-a-film-script-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/56\/2022\/10\/dolly-wells-on-bbcs-inside-man-her-friendship-with-emily-mortimer-and-writing-a-film-script-300x200.jpg",300,200,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/56\/2022\/10\/dolly-wells-on-bbcs-inside-man-her-friendship-with-emily-mortimer-and-writing-a-film-script-768x512.jpg",768,512,true],"large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/56\/2022\/10\/dolly-wells-on-bbcs-inside-man-her-friendship-with-emily-mortimer-and-writing-a-film-script-1024x682.jpg",800,533,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/56\/2022\/10\/dolly-wells-on-bbcs-inside-man-her-friendship-with-emily-mortimer-and-writing-a-film-script.jpg",1439,959,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/56\/2022\/10\/dolly-wells-on-bbcs-inside-man-her-friendship-with-emily-mortimer-and-writing-a-film-script.jpg",1439,959,false]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"importmanagerhub@sprylab.com","author_link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/radiotimes\/author\/importmanagerhubsprylab-com\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"By Ginny Dougray Published: Monday, 03 October 2022 at 12:00 am This interview was originally published in Radio Times magazine. 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