Emma Thompson on the longevity of holiday favorite Love Actually, but it’s actually SEX that gives her the buzz in Leo Grande

Looks like Christmas and Emma Thompson go together. The award-winning actress, who won an Oscar twice, did not only act in 2019 last christmas, but in what became a certified holiday classic in 2003 love actually A Christmas romantic comedy that has become so popular and recurring year after year that ABC News recently devoted an entire Diane Sawyer hour to investigating it.

Thompson also takes on the chosen role of Agatha Trunchbull in the new film adaptation of the Tony Award-winning musical. Matilda the Musical by Roald Dahl it’s in theaters internationally and when else will it start streaming on netflix? , Christmas Day.

This season, Thompson also brought good news on another front, after being nominated for Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical at the Golden Globes and Best Actress at the AARP Movies For Grownups Awards for her hit Sundance. Good luck to you Leo Grande which debuted on Hulu in June, but also received a special qualification qualifying it for the Oscars despite not being in theaters before it was streamed.

In a close race for this year’s best actress, Thompson, who is also nominated for a London Film Critics Circle award this week, is being considered for what will undoubtedly be one of her best roles. Maggie Gyllenhaal recently hosted a special screening of the film for Academy members in NYC, followed by a conversation with Thompson.

The film is essentially a two-hander in which Thompson plays Nancy, a 60-year-old retired teacher in a fun but boring marriage who is looking for a chance to spice up her life for some adventure and some sex through to get a sex for hire. worker Leo Grande. (Daryl McCormack). Shot during the pandemic, it’s actually the perfect vehicle for the situation. It’s essentially two actors in a hotel room. I spoke to Dame Emma recently and suggested that it might have been a play. Katy Brand wrote it and Sophie Hyde directed it. In fact, Thompson believes that the cinema is the right setting for this very intimate story, which says a lot about the human condition and our understanding of ourselves.

“I know a lot of people say it’s like a play because two people are talking to each other, but actually it won’t work like a play at all, because then you won’t be able to look into the landscape of the soul. access in the same way in the film, and the way Sophie Hyde used our faces and our bodies as a landscape, so you could really feel these seismic changes in these two people. That’s why it worked for me, because it could have gone so wrong if it had been handled almost differently.” she said on Zoom from New York where Mathilde Premiere.

And I don’t think Katy even realized how deep she actually went, and I didn’t realize how deep it went in Nancy until we started reading it and rehearsing it. , that loss, that feeling of not having lived fully, not necessarily because of orgasm or sex per se, but something much deeper than that, which is a lack of connection with yourself, with your own body, and with my i think it hits the mark for a lot of women because they just aren’t asked what they want.

Good luck to you Leo Grande is fiercely independent, but with its focus on a woman over 60, her sexual needs, her desire to visit places she’s never been before, it’s probably not a film Hollywood studios want to make these days, but here it is published by Searchlight. a company owned by Disney no less.

“You won’t see that in movies at all. Sometimes you see it in European films, and indeed when you take an old Italian director like Vittorio De Sica and you take his film The Holiday (aka Short Holiday), you know, where he takes an ordinary factory worker, a woman who gets sick and goes to a sanatorium, and it’s all about her. That’s the closest I can get. Of course it’s tragic because it’s De Sica, but he, Fellini, they were interested in ordinary women because they’re Italian, and there’s something about Italians who know that about women,” she said.

“I’ve said before that it’s the person standing next to the person who’s doing the interesting thing and suddenly the perspective changes and you see this ordinary woman who lived and there’s nothing tragic about her. Nothing at all. She lived a life that people would say was a pillar of society. She did exactly what we needed to keep everything going. A woman who behaves well, supports her husband, raises her children and keeps her mouth shut. Well done. Big fat tick.”

I point out to you that 2022, starting with Leo Grande at Sundance in January was a very strong year for female roles in films and even behind the camera. Thompson knows a lot about that, as one of her two Oscars for writing (sense and sensitivity) while the other was for the leading lady Howard’s end. She knows both sides of the business and what it takes to bring about change. She is unsure if this is the beginning of a new era for women in film.

“Who knows? I mean, the industry doesn’t suddenly wake up to anything, does it? It’s a very slow, icy pace of change. I think this is probably one of those years, and it could easily be next year, I don’t think interest in middle-aged women has changed that much. And it will change, of course it will change, but it’s very slow. We still do a lot of hero shots, you “So yeah. I don’t think it’s kind of fundamental change and now everything is going to be great. no I don’t think so,” she said.

Thompson doesn’t do social media and says she’d probably go crazy if she had access to strangers’ reactions to the film or any of her films, but she’s learned a lot from traveling the world asking and answering questions for the film. makes and is strengthened by the reaction. There was an 82-year-old black American who started talking to his wife about their sex life after seeing the film, a gay couple in Melbourne who said it made them feel much better about their bodies, a 23-year-old London woman who saw the film and soon after had her first orgasm.

“There’s a large percentage of women who don’t want or can’t have an orgasm, so it’s a really good and interesting discussion, but of course it’s not just about that. It’s about self-acceptance and it’s not easy to reach. In the consumer society, it’s not easy to reach. It’s different in other parts of the world. When you start talking about the world, you talk about a very different reaction to this film. In Liberia or Myanmar, for example, I can imagine what it would be like, but they will never show it,” she said.

“It’s absolutely fascinating. It’s been fascinating, and I think it’s probably one of the most satisfying and fulfilling things I’ve ever done, and I consider it one of the best jobs I’ve ever done, because I don’t think I’ve had it for 10 years didn’t have ago I think it hit me at exactly the right time in my life. Everything came at the right time at my age, just as I think it came at the right time in Daryl’s life and development.”

As for the sheer amount of nudity, much of the film was shot with daylight streaming into the room, and she said they got the awkward part out of the way quickly when she suggested that she, McCormack and even director Hyde should be all naked for a rehearsal. She joked, but Hyde picked her up. “That morning when we just talked about our bodies and pointed out the parts we liked, the parts we had problems with, the parts that felt scarred, the scars, inside and out, and it was very helpful, reassuring to have that to do because you actually get used to it very quickly after a very short time. Honestly. It’s going to normalize pretty quickly,” she said of the half-day training they took from filming, which was done in just 19 days. .

Before our interview ended, I had to ask her about the phenomenon love actually. Did she have any idea she would do this? quiet talking about it almost 20 years later? Right now, people all over the world are watching it this week.

“None. None of us. Neither of us had a clue. I saw Richard Curtis the other day and Diane (Sawyer) came and she interviewed both of us, you know, and we just talked about it and said it wasn’t the weirdest thing? It’s a wonderful lifeIt says everything you do matters,” she said.

“You know, it’s the sum of every kind of act that creates a tapestry that’s a web that saves people. It’s such a beautiful thing, and love actually, which finally says this thing, which I think we don’t treat with respect long enough, we don’t make it part of our institutions or our government or our civil society, which is what it should be, because love keeps us Sanne that keeps us Connections, those bonds are the most important things we will ever have and that says it all. That’s a good thing to remember.”