Commencement Address

Sunday, May 19, 2024
by Emily Mortimer

Thank you, President Bradley, the Board of Trustees, Vassar faculty, and graduating students for inviting me to Vassar on this special day. It’s a great privilege to be here.

My name is Emily Mortimer. I’ve been an actor in films and television for most of my adult life and in the last few years, I started writing and directing films and television too. When Jason Blum, founder and CEO of Blumhouse Pictures, Vassar alum, Vassar board member and good friend, asked me to be the Commencement speaker today I thought for sure there had been a mistake.

I mean, I know a lot of people say that kind of thing at this kind of thing. And it’s kind of annoying when they do. But I really did genuinely think that. I can read you the text chain to prove it:

I wrote “T, I think they’ve got the wrong person.” He wrote T .. (we call each other T and I’ve completely forgotten why) ‘It’s True!!’ exclamation point, exclamation point.

I wrote “but T, no one will know who the hell I am.” To which he replied “everyone knows you T… you are very famous”

Which of course isn’t true and was him buttering me up. But by that point I also knew he was seriously asking me to do this. And I thought two things.

1. It’s kind of the biggest honor ever and I have to do it.
2. I can’t possibly do it because what do I know? About anything??? I have nothing whatsoever to impart or say. I know nothing useful. I actually know nothing. There is no way I can do this… I literally KNOW NOTHING.

I know nothing because I went to school on the other side of the world—in a dim and distant place called England.

I know nothing because college in England is nothing like it is here. When you apply to college there, no one cares if you were on the squash team at school. Or play the guitar very well. Or if you went to Tanzania or had a life-changing experience that made you value the important things. All they want to know is you got good marks in your GCSEs and then again in your A-levels. And when you’re there, you only study one subject–English, History, Law, Classics, Maths or whatever—for three years solidly until you leave.

I know nothing because I really didn’t learn much at college. I learnt how to drink and have sex and didn’t do much of anything else. Apart from sleep. I slept a LOT. I slept everywhere—in the library, in pubs, in bed, at my desk, on park benches. I think I was constantly exhausted from going to parties, and discovering boys, and drinking too much gin and ginger ale. I once got taken on a first date to, for Oxford in 1990, a kind of fancy restaurant. I remember the guy going to the loo and me thinking, “I might take this opportunity to just quickly rest my head on the table for a few seconds.” He came back to find me fast asleep and dribbling all over the tablecloth. An inauspicious start to our romance—but at least I was equally as uncommitted to my romantic relationships as I was to my academic studies.

I know nothing about graduating because “graduation” isn’t really a thing in England and anyway I did my best to avoid it. I hadn’t done very well in my final exams, and I felt ashamed of myself. I couldn’t bear to ever again meet the gaze of my English tutor, an expert in the romantic poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge, who I think had high hopes for me but who had no idea how much sleeping I’d been doing.

I know nothing about being young because I’m old, as my children often remind me. I haven’t had the same set of experiences as you guys at all. So much has turned around in your short lifetimes. I look at you and marvel at how much more you’ve experienced than I had at your age and how much stronger and wiser you are for it.

I know nothing much about any one thing because I’ve done a lot of things. A jack of all trades—actress, writer, director, producer. I sometimes write all that down on insurance forms and things, and I look at it and think—what kind of weirdness is this? And then I cross it all out and put “storyteller” and I think “yuk—that’s even worse.” As an actor, I’ve learned to dance, sing a bit, pretend to ride a motorbike, pretend to get eaten by lions, pretend to be addicted to morphine, pretend to fight ghost soldiers in Moldova, pretend to be a teacher, a CIA operative, a florist, a child murderer, a Russian internet bride. And knowing not much at all about a lot of those of things, I guess, has given me a kind of strange and interesting life.

There was one time, quite soon after I left college, I forgot I knew nothing and thought I knew something, and it was disastrous. I’d done a play which had gone down quite well in London and when, as a result, I got asked to be Portia in The Merchant of Venice, I decided I knew everything about being in a play because I’d already done one. So, I didn’t bother to work very hard and concentrated instead on getting a mad crush on the guy playing Basanio. I was so ill-prepared that on the opening night I got terrible stage fright and was all but paralyzed during the first act–only just remembering each line milliseconds before I had to say it. In the interval, I looked at my terrified self in the dressing room mirror and said: “pull yourself together, no matter what, just pretend you know what you’re doing and stride on with confidence for Act 2.” But I strode back on with such desperate determination that I completely forgot a 20-foot fiberglass pillar denoting Belmont was flying in from the ceiling and I coincided with it, breaking my nose, and knocking myself out. I got terrible reviews (no sympathy vote for me), and waking up every morning for the next few weeks knowing I had to do that play was one of the most excruciating experiences of my life. I thought I knew about Portia, I thought she was just a nice girl who was good at giving speeches. I didn’t know the half of it. I didn’t know anything.

It took breaking my nose on stage to understand the business of getting something ready to show the world is really just an effort to not embarrass yourself or have the scenery fall on your head. The terror of being lame keeps you refining, trying to learn more, admitting your ignorance until it isn’t lame anymore. The understanding that you don’t know but must try to find out, gives you the patience to work on something till it’s maybe one day good enough for someone else to read or see.

So I sat down to write this speech convinced I didn’t know anything, but after a few days of extreme panic I started to think, well, maybe “not knowing” is a prerequisite for beginning to tell a story (I am a storyteller after all). You begin by banishing your preconceptions. Because people aren’t just one thing, they’re many things. Othello is prone to murderous sexual jealousy but he’s also a noble soldier, and deeply romantic; Tony Soprano’s a villainous mafia boss and a loving family man; Miss Jean Brodie is both an inspiring, adored teacher and a boundaryless manipulator with a penchant for Mussolini. When you write a story or get ready to play a part you challenge the simplistic notions you have about your characters until they start to become more complex–less just good or just bad, less only successes or only failures, less just strong or just pathetic, more altogether messy and human.

We often tell stories about people at moments in their lives when things are complicated, when they aren’t able to behave all that well. They may have behaved very badly in fact. At first glance these characters may seem awful, mean, depraved, murderous even. But in fiction, rather than dismiss them as we often do in real life, we have to get to know them. And even if we can’t let them off the hook—if by the end of the story we know they must die, or go to prison or whatever, I think making the effort to know them dignifies both the storyteller and the listener.

It’s harder as an actor or writer to tell the story of an obviously “good” person. When I got the part of the grown-up Jane Banks in Mary Poppins Returns, I thought, how am I going to find the nuance or complication here? She’s just really nice. I remembered in the original film, Jane had a slightly dotty, possibly drunk, certainly distracted mother who was always singing suffragette anthems and leaving the childcare to nannies. I decided as a result, Jane had probably grown up to be a people pleaser, desperately in need of her mother’s attention. I’m not sure this line of enquiry resulted in the best performance ever (please don’t check–I can’t believe of all the parts I’ve done I’m talking about Jane Banks), but at least–terrified of repeating the Portia debacle–I looked for Jane’s complications and started off with knowing I knew nothing.

And as I grappled with the speech I suddenly thought—wait a minute, wasn’t it Socrates who came up with that? “All I know is I know nothing.” And my next thought was—I’m kind of like Socrates! The founding father of scholastic thought and academic study.

When the Oracle proclaimed him the wisest person in Athens, Socrates set off in search of someone cleverer. But politicians claimed wisdom without knowledge; poets touched people with words without knowing what they meant; and craftsmen only knew about very specific things. Socrates concluded nobody knew much, and he was only cleverer because he admitted to his own ignorance. Socrates’s dialectic method of teaching was based on the same revelation–that he knew nothing. He and his students felt the only way to get to the truth was through dialogue and questioning.

And then I remembered the one thing I really did learn at college was that an essay (on the odd occasion I wrote one) requires a carefully considered, respectful argument. It insists you only make a point, have an opinion, claim to know something once you’ve fully explored and acknowledged the other side. And because you guys have had an academic education at the highest level, this is something you all know too. You know the value of knowing nothing.

With tuition fees so high, online learning so accessible, the feeling of carpe diem after COVID making kids want to hurry up and get out into the world, a college education is no longer a foregone conclusion. It’s an active choice you made. And maybe there have been occasions over the last four years when you’ve questioned whether it was worth it.

Well, of course it was. For a million reasons it was. But I passionately believe you are graduating at a time when, more than ever, the world is in desperate need of people like you. People who have been taught to challenge preconceptions, to be measured, to make considered arguments, people who are allergic to doctrine, dogma, easy sanctimony. People who have running through their veins the need to seek out nuance and complication. More than ever before, we need wise scholars like you who are smart enough to know they know nothing, and patient enough to seek the truth through dialogue, humility, and openness. Whatever you choose to do, whether it be writing screenplays or performing them, running for public office, pursuing scientific research, inventing something brilliant, your education here will have encouraged you to be more interested in learning than in knowing.

And so that lonely feeling you sometimes get eating dinner with your overly inquisitive parents or your more diligent roommate, wondering when your life will begin, when the future is ever going to actually happen? Well, that feeling is now a thing of the past. Starting today, the future has rushed up to meet you. It will be very confusing—life. At times as hard as hell, but nothing will be as hard as what you’ve just done—15 years of unpaid labor, terrible working hours and conditions, sitting on hard floors, eating bad food, being graded, assessed, told to do better, often terrified out of your wits.

I imagine if you’re graduating a college as excellent as Vassar, you need to be approved of, be top of your class, be liked and admired by teachers, parents, classmates, boyfriends, girlfriends, whoever… and all that is important. But trying to be approved of only gets you so far. Please remember to please yourself—it’s taken me a lifetime to learn that. I really hope you guys can do it quicker (I’m sure you will—I’m the ultimate people pleaser, worse than Jane Banks. I used to kiss someone and then feel I had to go out with them for three years (minimum). I really have been happier, more successful and I think weirdly nicer since I got better at trying to work out what interests me instead of wildly guess what other people want from me.

You must remember arriving here, full of apprehension—your parents settling you in. Four years later they’re back, seeing all that you’ve become, proud as punch and not a little heartbroken. The paradox of parenting is you’ve only succeeded once your children have left you, once they’re out in the world. And the paradox of being someone’s child is you love them more than anything, yet you continue to be irritated by them and then feeling guilty about it for the rest of your life.

It’s important to make other people proud, but don’t forget it was you who did this. You who managed to keep your wits about you, keep putting one foot in front of the other, while the world went crazy, day by day, hour by hour, learning, being open, humble, admitting you know nothing, and now you have a degree. There’s no nuance to that, no consensus arrived at via Socratic dialogue, no two ways about it. It’s just empirical FACT. You guys did it. You should feel incredibly proud of yourselves today. I congratulate you from the bottom of my heart.