“Emily Owens M.D.” is the first starring role for Mamie Gummer, the expressive daughter of Meryl Streep and sculptor Don Gummer.
But, she told reporters at the TV Critics press tour in Beverly Hills Monday, “I feel like I’ve been the star of my own show for a while now, and I’m just really glad that everyone’s decided to tune in.”
Growing up in Northwest Connecticut, she said, “I was always putting on shows as a kid, and obviously my household was really creative, and my parents both really supported and let that strive in all of us.”
Attending Miss Porter’s School and the Kent School, “I was, yes, a dork,” Gummer says. “I was not a cool kid in high school.”
But she found a life in the drama departments.
“And I just liked it so much and kept doing it and kept doing it,” says Gummer, who went on to Northwestern. says. “I was at drama school and I was doing it, and then I graduated, and all of a sudden I was a person in the world doing it for real.”
“So there wasn’t, like, any ‘spotlight shine down on me’ kind of epiphany moment. I just really loved it and obviously grew up around it,” she said.
Obviously.
And she uses a little bit of her experience as a self-described high school dork in creating her self-doubting young doctor character.
“It’s endearing,” she says. “She’s a human being. She kind of trips and falls down, but she gets back up and you want the best for her.”
It’s fun to play, Gummer says, and “to have license to slip up, you know. And it’s funny, too, because she is so together in some areas of her life. Like when she does key into [it], she’s really good at her job, and that’s really clear. It’s just all the other stuff she falters a little bit.”