Imagine hiring your best mate as your personal assistant? Well, actresses Emily Mortimer and Dolly Wells did, and the result is the sitcom called Doll & Em, Jaine Blackman reports

If Emily Mortimer and Dolly Wells have any regrets in their lives, it’s filming the pilot for their new series minus hair styling and make-up.

“We just wanted to film 20 minutes to see if it was something we were going to make,” says Wells, 41, who’s previously appeared in Star Stories, The IT Crowd and Peep Show. “I flew out to LA for three days, we all put in $150 and we shot it guerrilla-style in a trailer.”

Doll & Em sees the real-life best friends play heightened versions of themselves. It went on to be picked up by Sky and HBO, which means it’ll air in the US too. Aside from everyone seeing them au natural, the pair are sure people will have an opinion on them using their own names: another impromptu decision the director, Azazel Jacobs, decided to run with.

“We didn’t quite have the energy to argue ourselves out of it. It’s only now when we see billboards emblazoned with ‘DOLL & EM’ that we think our friends are going to hate us,” says 42-year-old Mortimer, laughing. “But in a way, I’m glad he didn’t let us change it. It allowed us to go to quite dark, weird places, because we were being ourselves.”

With roles in Woody Allen’s Match Point and Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island among her credits, Mortimer’s the bigger star of the two. It’s a dynamic the pair play on in this semi-improvised comedy, which explores what happens when a Hollywood actress hires her childhood friend to be her personal assistant. “That co-dependent dynamic was fascinating to us,” admits Mortimer, who performed in several plays while studying at Oxford University, where she read Russian at Lincoln College. Indeed, she was spotted by a producer while acting in one of those student productions, ‘The Trial’ at Oxford Playhouse, who later cast her in the lead in a television adaptation of Dame Catherine Cookson’s The Glass Virgin in 1995.

The rest as they say is history. This new series begins with an inconsolable Doll ringing Em from London after breaking up with her boyfriend, interrupting the actress while she’s walking a red carpet with Bradley Cooper (one of numerous famous cameos; Chloe Sevigny, John Cusack, Andy Garcia and Susan Sarandon also pop up). “Susan was amazing, so willing to be silly and as a result, she seems sexier and more beautiful than ever,” reveals Mortimer. “But then none of them came in with weird attitudes where you had to coddle them or change things to make them happy.”

The pair were determined to retain the feeling they’d experienced while filming the pilot. “It was like being a kid again, putting on a play for your parents,” says Wells. “It was really fun and we tried to make it feel like that throughout the series.”

Em invites her old friend to stay with her in Hollywood, and insists she’s a personal assistant in title only. “But the very fact you’re giving your best friend the job of being your servant doesn’t bode very well,” Wells notes, chuckling.

In real life, the pair have been writing “for an embarrassingly long time” but with little success. “Then one day, we had this idea, just from having observed that relationship between the assistant and the person they’re assisting, and how it can be very close and also very complicated,” explains Mortimer.

They felt it was important not to end up with a “goodie” and a “baddie” but instead, they examine what happens when the power shifts. “Doll injures her ankle and I end up being the servant and she becomes the diva and is adored by everyone, so it really turns into an exploration of jealousy and competitiveness between friends, and that feeling of being very threatened by someone you love very much,” explains Mortimer. They both behave monstrously at times. “That's what was fun about writing it,” says Wells. “You start backing my character but as it goes on, you look at Em’s character and the fact this person has a big responsibility on her shoulders. “The whole crew’s depending on her, while she’s not feeling very strong, worrying about getting older and feeling deeply threatened.”

They weren’t setting out to reveal anything new about Hollywood. “It’s just a world we both know, being on a set and how, if you’re already feeling rubbish about yourself, it can make you feel worse,” explains Mortimer. “Everybody around the ‘talent’ is told they have to look after them, so they’re totally coddled and told they’re brilliant. “But, as most people do when they start a new job, the actor’s thinking, ‘I can’t do this’, so it’s easy to spin out. “There’s a disconnect between the way you’re feeling and the way people are talking to you. It’s a hotbed for paranoia.”

The women, who were born in London but now live in New York, discussed who’d have which role ahead of the pilot. “I think it would’ve been so weird [if I’d played the actress], because Em’s got experience,” says Wells. “Even though she’s saying sweetly that I know about film sets, I played about two lines in Bridget Jones’s Diary and I wouldn’t know what it feels like to be the main part in a film, whereas she does.”

Wells has visited her pal on big sets in real life and found herself in similarly comic situations: Like the time Andy Garcia knocked on the door of Mortimer’s trailer and Wells answered it in her nightie. “That’s what would make me laugh when she’d come and visit me,” recalls Mortimer, grinning. “I’ve never known anyone to actually have a shower in those trailers but Doll would, and then get into a nightie and get into bed.”

Their first memory of each other is at the age of seven, when they met through their late famous fathers, the writer Sir John Mortimer and comedic actor John Wells. Their dads’ deaths also feature as material in the series, with the pair competing over who’s more distraught. “Hopefully they [our dads] would’ve been proud that we’ve written something together and made it happen. I think they would've got a kick out of it,” says Mortimer.

She and Wells didn’t attend the same school but spent time together as teens (“I have a very clear memory of Doll trying to bleach my jeans with me still in them at about 14,” recalls Mortimer) before becoming best friends in their early twenties.

“We were gossiping about life and how the hell to deal with it all and it started to become apparent that no matter what awful thing was happening, it’d be OK, we could talk to each another about it,” she adds. “We’re never mean to each other,” says Mortimer. “So annoying, isn’t it?” adds Wells, laughing. “We spend hours going through everything, analysing what the other one feels, cheering each other up and reassuring them. We’re like sisters.”