Awards Insider Exclusive

Emma Thompson Has Nothing Left to Hide

The British icon gives her first interview since Good Luck to You, Leo Grande was deemed Oscar-eligible—one sign of Hollywood changing. She’s ready for an industry overhaul.
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Photograph by Charlotte Hadden/The New York Times/Redux. 

Emma Thompson wasn’t sure she’d be talking about the Oscars this year—indeed, she didn’t know whether her film, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, would even be eligible. But following an appeal by Searchlight Pictures, the Hulu-released film—centered on a retired teacher (Thompson) who hires a sex worker named Leo (Daryl McCormack) to help her achieve her first orgasm—is, in a reversed decision, officially up for Academy consideration. And rightly so, since Leo Grande features one of the 63-year-old Thompson’s best, most beautifully vulnerable performances to date.

“It is a wonderful thing. Having said that, of course now we won’t get nominated for anything at all,” Thompson cracks on this week’s Little Gold Men, in her first interview since the Academy’s decision. (Listen or read below.) “This podcast will become a famously hubristic and slightly embarrassing thing that people will roll out.”

On the contrary, our wide-ranging conversation marks the occasion for Thompson to cover a number of pressing, thorny topics—on the state of Hollywood and independent film, on the ways the industry is moving forward and how it’s staying frustratingly stagnant. The Oscar-winning actor and writer (Howards End, Sense and Sensibility) has reached a point in her career where she wants to be part of the change. “At least I can be honest,” she says. And so, here, she very much is.

Vanity Fair: So Leo Grande has been newly designated eligible for Oscar consideration.

Emma Thompson: Thank God. [Laughs] I mean, I didn’t mind at all because it’s not why we do it at all. But I think for the writer and the director, it is a wonderful thing. Having said that, of course now we won’t get nominated for anything at all, and this podcast will become a famously hubristic and slightly embarrassing thing that people will roll out. “Do you remember when she did that podcast on that thing called Little Gold Men, and then the film was roundly ignored by every single award ceremony after that?” Well, that’s what happens when you get too big for your boots. That’s the good thing that happens in this country, David. I’m just telling you.

But we’re here, so we may as well make the best of it. Right?

Let’s do it.

It’s an interesting streaming-only movie in that you are more naked as an actor—I mean, that figuratively for the most part—than you are typically. You’re really going straight into people’s living rooms and homes. Did that feel like a vulnerable kind of experience for you? How did you observe the release of the movie from that perspective?

It was a very interesting journey actually for me, the release of the movie. When we first saw it, we saw it in a tiny little screening room in SoHo, and the pair of us sat there, and we had to hold onto each other all the way through. And then at the end, we couldn’t really speak because it’s been such an intense experience, and in a bizarre way, an extremely private experience that then became a public one. I would say that the most vulnerable I felt was in Berlin at the film festival in this massive cinema. It was a bloody football field—I mean, huge wraparound room, where we were pretty large on screen. When they told me that it was going to stream, I thought—in a way, in America, there’s more puritanism about sex and sexual pleasure even than there is here. And there’s a lot here. I thought maybe it’s easier for people to see it in their homes.

I’ve spoken to so many people who’ve watched it in different ways, and they’ve said, “I prefer to watch it on my own—I was watching it with my husband, dad, whatever—to actually stop for a minute.” Because for every person, it brings an awful lot of things up for people. So I thought it was a very good decision. I was also extremely glad that we opened it all around the world in cinemas, but I watch a lot of things that I can’t get to in the cinema. When I get to them on the small screen or my telly, which is reasonably large, I’m very, very grateful to have had the chance to see them. And I think that with Leo, which is a tiny little independent movie, this was the best way of getting the most people to see something that’s, after all, about two people in a bedroom. It couldn’t be more intimate, and therefore perhaps in a sense, more appropriate for home viewing.

And to the point about it being a small movie, a very dialogue-driven movie. It does make you wonder how a film should be considered, say, for an Oscar nomination because this is the path it could take to find an audience. As someone who’s worked in film for a long time—who’s been a part of big movies, small movies, everything in between—what did you make of the debate of whether it needed to be released in the US theaters to be considered? And basically the state of independent movie—because, increasingly, it is in a streaming world.

Yeah, absolutely. It reminds me of a little bit of all the debate that came around when video started. I’m old enough to remember that, you see. Everyone said, “It’s going to kill cinema.” Didn’t kill cinema. “Cinema’s going to kill theater.” Didn’t kill theater. “COVID’s going to kill theater.” Everyone’s gone back to the theater. We all get into a bit of a panic. And I’m old enough to remember all of those panics and to know that actually in the end, really great stories do find their way out a lot of the time. I’m not underplaying the fact that I’ll find something and suddenly go, “God, why didn’t I see this at the time?” Everything’s under the huge tsunami of massive movies. If at the Cannes Film Festival you’ve got literally got fighter jets going over for Top Gun: Maverick, I go, look, if we’re not going to be supported by independent movie film festivals, then that’s something that’s got to be taken responsibility for.

I wouldn’t have wanted to watch Dune on a telephone. I went to the biggest cinema in London to see Dune, and I just adored every second of it, the massiveness of it and feeling like you are really on a different planet. It was absolute heaven. But I know that you don’t have to go to a huge cinema to see Leo. It’s a completely different experience because Sophie Hyde has rendered our faces and our bodies on this landscape. It’s so interesting, isn’t it, how movies play differently in different shapes and sizes…. All of these questions are questions we have to ask the public. What is it they want? And if they want independent cinema, they have to go and see it. They have to go to the independent cinemas and support them. You can’t just say, “Oh, independent cinema. Oh, isn’t it a shame?” Blah, blah. You have to actually go and support them by going to the independent cinemas and choosing them over the big complexes. We have to make this happen ourselves. It’s a personal responsibility as well as a philosophical discussion about art.

One of the benefits of making a movie like this, for you as an actor, and what’s so striking about your performance, is that this character is so complete and complex—or ordinary, to an extent. I was thinking about some of your recent performances that I’ve really enjoyed, like Years and Years, Cruella, Late Night. They’re are all larger than life figures. And here you get a very different key to play.

The way I always put it when I was thinking about it is that she’s the person who is always standing next to the person who’s doing the interesting thing and suddenly she’s the one doing the interesting thing. And you suddenly realize that this very ordinary woman who’s lived a very ordinary, decent, useful, complex-in-all-the-normal-human-ways life has suddenly decided to do something absolutely extraordinary actually and really see it through. Even though it’s like watching someone who’s never done a bungee jump before, just moving just slowly pace by pace towards the edge of the cliff. Playing her terror was really one of the most enjoyable things I’ve ever done because it was so funny. But at the same time, it was also so heartbreaking.

You’ve mentioned rehearsing with Daryl, your costar, for a day in the nude, which is, I would imagine, a first-time experience for you and for him. What did that give the two of you in terms of your chemistry in the movie? And what was that experience like for you just in terms of being so vulnerable in that way?

I knew that we had to do it. I had done nudity before. I spent two delightful days nude with Jeff Goldblum when I was in my 20s. We were both so nervous. It was in The Tall Guy, and we were so nervous. We both had indigestion I think for two weeks beforehand. But once we got into it, we just had the best time. That has always stood me in good stead because I always remember thinking, “Oh, it’s okay, it’s fine. It’s all right.” As long as you are calm, everyone else is calm. So I knew Sophie and me and Daryl, we’d all said, “We have to take our kit off before the day, otherwise it’ll just feel too pointed,” if you’ll pardon the unfortunate expression.

Sophie Hyde, our director, arranged it. We only had 19 days to shoot the whole thing, which was a lot. We shot 12-page sections often, so the performance aspect of it was just so intense. We needed to get as much under our belts, as it were, as possible. Then the last day, she cleared the little rehearsal space, which had already become quite womblike, and I jokingly said, “Soph, you’ll have to take your clothes off as well.” And she said, “Oh no, no, no, I’m not going to do that.” Then she thought about it, and then she said, “Oh, all right then.” So we all took our clothes off bit by bit. And each time we did, we said, “This part of my body means this to me. And in this part of my body, I have felt these things. And in this part of my body, I’ve got this scar which came from this experience,” or, “I’ve got an internal scar,” or, “This is the bit that I like. This is the bit I don’t like. I find this bit difficult.”

You’ve said this movie made you recognize “the waste of time” of not accepting one’s body. Obviously a lot comes with that, as an actress who’s been in this industry for a long time. Did you come to a new kind of place in that process? I would imagine there’s a certain amount to unlearn in making a movie like this, which counters a lot of what Hollywood tells particularly women.

You can’t unlearn it because it’s brainwashing. I’ve been brainwashed since I was very young and the brainwashing continues. I think it’s worse actually now because it’s continued on social media. So instead of people saying, “We are now going to inhabit the world in our real selves, in our real forms,” people are taking their forms and photoshopping them themselves. Everything that I was brought up with, which only happened in magazines, is now happening to people on people’s phones. This notion of the ideal and the perfect, industrialized, banal and tedious though it is, has been made even more of a thing. And thus we’re looking at kids as young as eight saying, “I don’t like my thighs. I don’t like this.” Anorexia’s hugely on the rise. It’s something that I’ve fought against all my life, but I can’t fill in those runnels. I just can’t do it. But I can try to be the change. At least I can be honest. And at least I can say, “Look, I accept this now.” I accept my body. I don’t have to love it, but I accept it.

This is Katy Brand’s first feature script, which is pretty remarkable. You starred in Mindy Kaling’s first scripted feature as well, Late Night. And you of course came out with a bang yourself with your first scripted feature in Sense and Sensibility. It feels to me like there is a nice full-circle element there, of getting these really rich roles written by women who’ve said that they were inspired by you to some extent.

That’s sustainability in essence, isn’t it? It’s like you make something, and then you make something for the next generation, or you be the thing. Then the next generation says, “Ah yes, okay, that’s possible. I’ll do that.” That’s sustainability. That’s the sort of circle, as you talk about it. It’s how we feed each other, it’s how we support each other. I’m incredibly privileged to have had those women write those pieces. They’re things we’ve never seen before. We’ve never seen [that] late-night talk show host. We’ve never seen a woman in search of an orgasm in that way, exploring as well other entirely taboo subjects like motherhood and being a useful member of society. She says, “I could have done something else. Why did I do that? It might have been better if I hadn’t. I might have had a better life.”

We can’t just go off and say, “Well, I’m going to do this and it doesn’t matter about everybody else.” I don’t adhere to that either. I think we are social animals, we belong in social groups, and when we’re in those groups, we are in service to one another. I think that’s right too. There’s a difference between the baleful kind of suppressive and repressive effect of patriarchy on women, particularly on women’s freedom, that have to be changed because they’re not good for anybody.

For directors and screenwriters specifically, do you see that changing at all? I spoke to Maggie Gyllenhaal last year about her directorial debut, and she’d mentioned you saw an early cut of the film, and you’d spoken about it. She said that she just had no mental space to consider herself as a filmmaker, even though she realized that’s really what she’s been all along.

That’s what we talked about. And her presentation of the hell and the torment of motherhood, if it’s not what actually you want to do, was brilliant. And of course, it’s Elena Ferrante as well, who’s also represented female relationships with other females and with themselves so brilliantly in all her Neapolitan novels. Maggie and I met on Stranger Than Fiction. She came and did my Nanny McPhee. We’ve been mates for a long time and have talked about all of this for a very long time. And actually, one of the things that should be, and I think is becoming part of a mainstream conversation, is that you don’t have to have babies to be a complete woman. You just don’t have to do it. And I think there’s still a huge taboo about that—huge. You become a mother and you realize that everything’s your fault because everything’s the mother’s fault, everything. In popular psychology, that’s changing a bit, but certainly when psychology began, that was everything. It was all written by men, and it was all very bad science. All of this stuff has to be unpacked, taken apart and redefined, re-explored. And all of these movies that we’re talking about are doing that. I find that quite hopeful because if I, as a single person, have been of part of three of those journeys, either in actual person or in conversation, I feel that’s quite—well, it’s hopeful, isn’t it?

Yeah, quite meaningful I think.

To me, it’s very meaningful, very meaningful.

The other side of that is, are there things that you look at now and you say, “I don’t want to do that anymore”? We are talking about a collection of very interesting characters and films. That isn’t necessarily the journey many actresses of a certain age get to have. I’m curious how you’ve navigated that particularly the past few years.

There are certain stories we really do have to stop telling because I think they’re quite damaging. One is, “And they lived happily ever after.” That’s just bullshit. Noah [Baumbach] did that brilliantly, I thought, in Marriage Story, really exploring how something can be become utterly destroyed and then something else can grow out of it. That’s a very good example of the destruction of, “And they lived happily ever after,” because it represents the first stages of love, and then how terribly wrong that can go, how painful. That happens to most people in their lives at some point. Any good marriage actually involves death and rebirth and death rebirth, but we don’t tell that story. So everybody goes, “Oh my God, a death’s come along. I can’t deal with it. I’ll move on.”

The other story that we really need to stop telling is about one man saving the world. This is just a very, very dull story, and it has to stop. I’m so bored. When I talk to my brilliant producer friend, Lindsay Doran, she does a talk about the female hero and what writers are told. They’re told the most extraordinary things now—today they’re told, “Well, she can’t cry. She can’t cry because that’s showing feminine weakness. She’s got to be badass.” All the female tropes now have to be like the men. You go, “Hang on a second." It’s the same story. We have to go into the in-between bit and say, “But what is this that we’re representing?” We are just saying the same thing again and again.

I think Leo Grande is a good example of a movie that does the very opposite of that.

Yeah, it really does because it actually acknowledges, in really genuine ways and authentic ways, the complexity of the human condition. We’re not very good at recognizing how complicated we are. If we were better at it, we’d be much calmer, actually. We’re so anxious. Human beings are naturally anxious anyway, but we don’t recognize that either. So many of our stories are about how to be certain, and that’s one of the most vulnerable places you can be.

This interview has been edited and condensed.