Emily Mortimer and Alessandro Nivola.Photo: Getty Images
At last night’s Cinema Society screening of Transsiberian, star Emily Mortimer was overrun by fans and interviewers, which left her supportive husband, Alessandro Nivola, to stand by the side with a glass of bourbon. Which, as we all know, is the best time to talk to anyone. New York’s Darrell Hartman pulled the Laurel Canyon star aside to get the skinny on what it’s really like to be an indie celebrity living in Brooklyn.
How good a driver are you? Ever been in an accident?
No, but Emily once again takes the cake for these kinds of — she’s dying to get a car in Brooklyn, where we live, and I haven’t wanted to just because you can’t park it anywhere. So we borrowed our friend’s car and in one day she got two traffic violations and three parking tickets … The Brooklyn police are ruthless. It’s supposed to be under control there. They like to think that Brooklyn is the kind of nice, tidy suburb, which in fact it is now.
I live out there, and I keep running into Keri Russell!
Yeah, well, I’m the one who talked her into moving there. Because we were doing this movie together called The Girl in the Park, with Kate Bosworth. And we were filming in a brownstone just two blocks away from my house. And we were there for a week and every day for lunch we used to walk home to my house and we’d all hang out and have a nice lunch and then go back to work.
So aren’t she and her husband working on their place? He always looks like he’s been painting and pounding nails and stuff.
Well, yeah, it was weird. In the movie I was playing a contractor, a carpenter, who had bought an old brownstone that was a wreck and was fixing it up, and she was pregnant in the movie. In real life she was pregnant, and the father of the baby to be [Shane Deary] was a contractor-carpenter who ended up buying a brownstone while we were filming and started fixing it up then. It’s just incredible. In fact, I even hired him to fix my fucking windows.
And is he one of those contractors who shows up?
Yeah, he a genius. He’s a skilled craftsman. He was slumming it to help me out. And he’s also really handsome.
So you’re getting your windows done. Have your neighbors ever seen you naked?
Well, we have this au pair, and apparently the first week that we moved in, I wasn’t very discreet about closing the shutters on the windows and she told me that the au pairs who were in the house across the street had told her that the family that they worked for were horrified that they’d seen me walking around in my underwear.
Horrified? But you’re a studly actor. Shouldn’t they be grateful?
Well, I mean I didn’t think it would be so upsetting!
Has that made you reevaluate certain things?
Yeah, I guess it meant I should have been spending more time at the gym.
