It’s the first white hair shock you’ll notice at Emma Thompson. This is a much more chic shade than the average 63-year-old would dare to choose, but it doesn’t ignore her age either. It is accompanied by her big and wide smile and her known facial expressions, suggesting both witty wisdom and willingness to make jokes.
Still, Thompson initiates a video call by MacGyvering his computer monitor with paper and tape so that he can’t see himself. “One of the things I can’t stand about zooming is having to look at my face,” she said. “I’m going to hide myself.”
We’re here straddling two computer screens to discuss perhaps her most obvious role to date.In a new movie “Good luck, Leo Grande” Sophie Hyde’s Thompson is emotionally trained, physically naked, and not a modest and sexy way.
Thompson plays Nancy, a widow’s former religious school teacher who has never experienced orgasm. Her devoted wife and her loyal mother have a lot of regrets about her life she wasn’t alive and the boring and poor children she raised. Nancy hires a sex worker. Darryl McCormack (“Peky Blinders”) — To bring her the long-awaited joy. The audience could have been this very friendly woman, your teacher, your mother, you, in Thompson’s words, “beyond all the boundaries she has ever recognized in her life.” So work on this monumental act of rebellion.
“Yes, she made the most extraordinary decision to do something very unusual, brave and revolutionary,” Thompson said from her office in North London. “Then she makes at least two or three decisions not to do that, but she is fortunate enough to have a fairly wise and instinctive person with an extraordinary level of insight into the human condition. Behind this, because he chose, he can understand her, understand what she is experiencing, and gently suggest that there may be a reason. “
Thompson faced the challenge with what she calls “healthy horror.” She knew this character at the cellular level — the same age, the same background, the same willingness to do the same. “A little piece of paper and a coincidence pull me away from her,” she jokingly said.
Still, that role required her to reveal emotional and physical levels of vulnerabilities she was unfamiliar with. (To prepare for this intimate, sex-positive hands, mostly in hotel rooms, Thompson, McCormack, and Hyde say they spent a day of rehearsals nude.) Despite their 40-year career. Admired for both quality and irreverence, he has won two Academy Awards for acting (“Howards End”) and writing (“Howards End”).“Sensibleness and Sensation”), Thompson appeared naked on the camera only once: 1990 comedy “Tall Guy” The other side of Jeff Goldblum.
She said she wasn’t thin enough to direct such a type of bare skin role, and for some time she tried to conquer the diet industrial complex, but much. Like all the other young women seeking parts on the screen, she starved herself, and soon she realized it was “ridiculous.”
It’s unfair to say, “No, I’m just this shape naturally.”It’s dishonest and makes other women [expletive]”So, if you want to change the world, and the iconography of a woman’s body, you should be part of the change. You should be different.”
In the case of “Leo Grande”, it was her choice to undress. She did it with fear, but Thompson believes that “without it the movie wouldn’t be the same.” Still, the moment she had to stand quietly naked in front of her mirror, accepting her facial expressions was the most difficult she’s ever done, as the scene demands. It was a thing.
“To be honest, I’m never happy with my body. It will never happen,” she said. “I was brainwashed early on. I can’t undo those neural pathways.”
But she can talk about sex. Both the absurdity of it and the complexity of women’s joy. “I just can’t have an orgasm. I want time. I need love. You just can’t rush to the clitoris with it and expect the best. It doesn’t work, everyone. They are me. When she touches this little button, she thinks she’ll come off like Catherine’s wheel, and that would be great. “
There is a moment in the movie where Nancy and Leo start dancing in a hotel room Alabama Shakes’ “Always Alright”.. The two meet for the second time — a meeting with a checklist of sexual activity that Nancy is determined to go through (with the intention of her pun). The dance should relieve all the stress of her Type A organized teacher who could upset the session. Leo has his arm around his neck, and when he sees Nancy’s face, she closes her eyes and shakes. She is one of gratitude and greed, and she is also worried.
Played on the other side of Thompson to screenwriter Katie Brand Second “Nanny McPhee” movie And for those who imagined Thompson as Nancy when writing the first draft, its appearance is the point of the whole movie.
“That’s all,” the brand said. “She feels her lost youth and the kind of organic and natural sexual development she might have if she didn’t see her husband. Just what happened. But there is also a sense of what we can do in the future. “
The brand is not the first young woman to write a script specifically for Thompson.Mindy Kaling did it for her “Midnight,” Writer Jemaima Khan proved that he had loved Thompson since he was 11 years old. She wrote her role in the next movie, “What Does Love Do With It,” because she has always wanted the actress to be her mother, the writer Jemima Khan.
“I think what Emma gives to everyone and what she does directly to people and also through the screen is that she always feels like she’s always somehow on your side,” Brand said. rice field. “And I think people really react to it. She will meet you at a very human level.”
Producer Lindsay Doran has known Thompson for decades. Doran hired her to write “Someday Sunny Day” after watching her short-lived BBC TV show “Thompson” starring her. The two collaborated on the movie “Nanny McPhee,” working on a music version with Thompson, working on a book, and co-writing a song with Gary Clark (“Sing Street”).
For the producer, this movie is an encapsulation of a writer who really understands her actress.
“Katey felt like she knew the instrument. She knew what the instrument could do within seconds,” Doran said. “That’s not all. Here I’m dramatic. And here I’m funny and here I’m emotional. It can all go over her face right away, and you Literally has this feeling, can be said to have this feeling. “
Lisa Kennedy, who reviewed The New York Times’ Leo Grande, called Thompson “terribly agile in screenplay ginger and revelation,” and Harper’s Bazaar said Thompson was “urgently postponed for the next Oscar nomination.” It’s a treasure that transcends. “
The obvious trajectory of such a movie would probably be the award-winning circuit journey that would result in Thompson robbing her fifth Oscar nomination. However, the movie, which will debut on Hulu on Friday, will not be released in theaters in the United States.
Thompson doesn’t care. “It’s a small movie without a gun, so I don’t know how many people actually want to see it in America,” she said in a wink.
That may be true. However, as a result, “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” is no longer considered by Oscar due to a change in the rules of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to return to the pre-pandemic requirements for a seven-day theatrical release. This isn’t really what director Sophie Hyde is happy with.
“That’s really disappointing,” Hyde said. “I understand the desire to protect movies, but I think the world has changed a lot. Last year, streaming movies won the Best Film Award.” She has her own movies and other movies about streaming services. Claimed not for TV. They are cinematic, “it’s something the academy should protect, not which screen it’s on,” she added.
Thompson, as an example, seems to be quite optimistic about the whole problem. “Given the fact that there may be a little pure undercurrent in life where you are, people share something as intimate at home and turn it off to make themselves. I think it might be easier to do, “a nice cup of really bad tea,” Thompson said with a laugh. “No American can make delicious tea.”
