It’s the shock of white hair you first notice in Emma Thompson, a much more elegant tone than anything your average 63-year-old would dare to choose, but who also doesn’t ignore her age. It is accompanied by that big, wide smile and that look of knowledge, which suggests both an ironic wit and a will to joke.
Still, Thompson begins our video call by MacGyvering his computer monitor with a piece of paper and some tape so he can’t see himself. “The only thing I can’t stand for Zoom is having to look me in the face,” he said. “I’m just going to cover myself.”
We are here through two computer screens to discuss what is possibly their most revealing role to date. In the new film “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” directed by Sophie Hyde, Thompson is emotionally worked and physically naked, not in a sexy, low-light way.
Thompson plays Nancy, a former religious teacher who has just become a widow who has never had an orgasm. At the same time, a devoted woman and an obedient mother who harbors volumes of remorse for the life she did not live and the boring and needy children she raised, Nancy hires a sex worker, a much younger man played by the relatively newcomer Daryl McCormack (“Peaky Blinders.”) – to bring you the pleasure you’ve longed for. The audience follows this very identifiable woman — she could have been your teacher, your mother, you — who, in Thompson’s words, “has crossed all the boundaries she has recognized in her life,” struggles with this monumental act of rebellion.
“Yes, he has made the most extraordinary decision to do something very unusual, brave and revolutionary,” Thompson said from his North London office. “Then he makes at least two or three decisions not to do it. But he’s lucky because he has chosen someone who turns out to be rather wise and instinctive, with an unusual level of understanding of the human condition, and he understands it, what is happening, and he is able to gently suggest that there may be a reason behind this. “
Thompson faced the challenge with what she calls “healthy terror.” I knew this character at the cellular level: the same age, the same training, the same drive to do the right thing. “Just a piece of paper and chance separates me from her,” he joked.
However, the role forced her to reveal a level of emotional and physical vulnerability to which she was not accustomed. (To prepare for this intimate and sexually positive two-handed game that takes place primarily in a hotel room, Thompson, McCormack and Hyde have said they spent one of their rehearsal days working naked.) Despite a four-decade career that has been praised for both its quality and irreverence, it has won two Academy Awards, one for “Howards End” and one for “Sense and Sensibility.” ), Thompson has appeared naked in front of the camera only once: in the 1990 comedy “The Tall Guy,” opposite Jeff Goldblum.
She said she wasn’t thin enough to master this kind of bare skin papers, and even though for a while she tried to conquer the diet industrial complex, starving like all the other young women screaming. for parts on the big screen, she soon realized it was “absurd.”
“It’s not fair to say,‘ No, I’m just that way naturally. ’He’s dishonest and makes you feel like other women. [expletive]”So if you want the world to change and you want the iconography of the female body to change, you better be a part of the change. You better be different.”
For “Leo Grande,” the choice to undress was his, and while he did so with trepidation, Thompson said he believes “the movie wouldn’t be the same without it.” Still, the moment she had to stand naked in front of a mirror with a serene, accepting look on her face, as the scene demanded, was the hardest thing she had ever done.
“To be really honest, I’ll never be happy with my body. It will never happen,” he said. “They brainwashed me too soon. I can’t undo these neural pathways.”
However, you can talk about sex. Both the absurd and the complexes of female pleasure. “I can’t just have an orgasm. I need time. I need affection. You can’t run to your clit and get baptized and wait for the best. That won’t work, guys. They think that if I touch that button, it will go off like a Catherine wheel. , and it will be wonderful.
There’s a moment in the movie when Nancy and Leo start dancing in the hotel room with Alabama Shakes’ “Always Alright.” The two meet for the second time: an encounter that comes with a list of sexual acts that Nancy is determined to plow. The dance is supposed to relieve all the stress of your organized type A teacher who threatens to derail the session. Leo has his arms around his neck and is swinging with his eyes closed as a look crosses Nancy’s face, one of gratitude and nostalgia along with a bit of worry.
For screenwriter Katy Brand, who starred opposite Thompson in the second film “Nanny McPhee” and who imagined Thompson as Nancy as she wrote the first draft, this look is the point of the whole film. .
“That’s all,” Brand said. “She feels her youth lost and the kind of organic, natural sexual development she would have had if she hadn’t met her husband. There’s also a tingling sensation, not only of what she might have been, but of what she might have been from from now on “.
Brand is not the first young woman to write a screenplay specifically for Thompson. Mindy Kaling did it for her on “Late Night,” testifying that she had loved Thompson since she was 11 years old. Writer Jemima Khan told Thompson that she had always wanted the actress to be her mother, so she wrote her a role in the upcoming film. movie “What has love got to do with it?”
“I think what Emma gives to everyone and what she does in person to people, and also through the screen, is that somehow she always feels like she’s by your side,” Brand said. “And I think people really respond to that. She’ll get to know you on a very human level.”
Producer Lindsay Doran has known Thompson for decades. Doran hired her to write “Sense and Sensibility” after watching her short-lived BBC television program “Thompson” which she wrote and starred in. The two collaborated on the “Nanny McPhee” movies and are working on the musical version, with Thompson. handling the book and co-writing the songs with Gary Clark (“Sing Street”).
For the producer, the film is the encapsulation of a writer who really understands her actress.
“It seemed to me that Katie knew the instrument and knew what the instrument was capable of in a matter of seconds,” Doran said. “It’s not just, I’m going to be dramatic here. And I’m going to be funny here, and I’m going to be emotional here. Everything can go through your face so quickly, and you can literally say there’s that feeling, there’s that emotion.”
In a review of “Leo Grande” for The New York Times, Lisa Kennedy said Thompson was “extremely agile with the mood and revelations of the script,” while Harper’s Bazaar said Thompson was “an ageless treasure that he was urgently expected for his next Oscar nomination. “
The obvious trajectory of a film like this should be a circuit of awards that would likely make Thompson get his fifth Oscar nomination. But the film, which will be released on Hulu on Friday, will not have a theatrical release in the United States.
Thompson doesn’t care. “It’s a small, unarmed movie, so I don’t know how many people in the United States would want to come and see it,” he said with a wink.
That may be true. But more importantly, due to a change in the rules of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that returns to the pre-pandemic requirement of a seven-day theatrical premiere, “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” is not eligible for the Oscar consideration, a reality that director Sophie Hyde is not satisfied with.
“It’s really disappointing,” Hyde said. “I understand the desire to protect cinema, but I also believe that the world has changed a lot. Last year, a streaming movie won the best movie. “He argued that his film and other streaming services are not made for television. add: “This is what the academy should protect, not what screen it is on.”
Thompson, for example, seems quite optimistic about the whole issue. “I think, given that you may have a slightly more puritanical background in life where you are, it might be easier for people to share something as intimate as this at home and then be able to turn it off and do it. “A good, very bad cup of tea,” said Thompson, laughing. “None of you Americans can make good tea.”