14 The Times Magazine’ve never been to a sex party. Have you
ever been to a sex party? I’ve never been
invited to a sex party. Not once. Am
I upset? Nooo. Hahahaha! Oh God, no.”
Dame Emma Thompson is sitting
in her house in Scotland, clad in a jolly
red Nordic jumper and red bobble hat
with LED lights on it, eating a Rocky
chocolate bar. (“I have to say, on first
mouthful? Disappointing. This is a poor-
quality chocolate bar.”) Her appearance leads
me to believe that a) it is currently not quite
as warm in Scotland as it is in London, and
possibly b) that she also moonlights on the
quiet helping Santa prepare wooden toys for
boys and girls who have been good. It’s a
borderline Buddy the Elf look.
We were supposed to be doing this
interview in London, but Thompson is
having a difficult month – first, an old family
friend in Scotland is dying, and she has
cancelled all her current promo schedule, save
this interview, to be with them. And then,
yesterday, she fell over by a stream – “It feels
like a very 16th-century thing to be doing,
falling over by a stream” – and tore a ligament
in her leg. Hence the current “maximal cosy”
vibe of her rig-out, which complements her
house’s pine panelling, comfy sofa and lamp
made from a very old, very corroded copper
kettle with a glowing bulb inside (“Greg [her
husband, the actor Greg Wise] made it”),
which appears to be the manifestation of
Leonard Cohen’s Anthem (“Forget your perfect
offering/ There’s a crack in everything/ That’s
how the light gets in”) in a single accessory.
“Yes! Very ‘how the light gets in’,”
Thompson confirms, taking her second bite
of the Rocky bar (“Second bite: it’s becoming
kind of all right now”).
The kettle, and the lyric, seem very
apposite metaphors for what Thompson has
spent the past 40 years doing: although she’s
played a range of characters in disparate
projects, from Disney villain in Cruella to
Elizabeth I in the sitcom Upstart Crow, one of
her specialities is playing the light that shines
through people when they crack. Often quite
a painful, unbearable light: think of Miss
Kenton in The Remains of the Day, desperately
trying to hide her white-hot filament of
longing for Anthony Hopkins’ catastrophically
repressed Stevens, or sensible Elinor Dashwood,
weeping all the way through Hugh Grant’s
unexpected yet longed-for marriage proposal
in Sense and Sensibility.
Perhaps the most famous scene in her
entire career is when Karen in Love Actually
breaks down on realising that her husband,
Alan Rickman, is having an affair. He gives
her a CD instead of the gift-wrapped necklace
she had earlier discovered in his coat pocket,
which is clearly intended for another woman.
As she palms the tears off her face and tries tocalm her breathing before going back down to
her family – so jolly! So capable! – she shows a
marriage for what it is: the biggest emotional
stakes most humans ever play for.
It’s greater than any Marvel movie, where
the whole Earth is in peril. Those films are
like two-hour-long search beams. In Love
Actually, it’s the tiny cracks of light in a
middle-aged woman alone – her love bleeding
out as she frantically remakes the marital
bed – that still makes any audience gasp
with her pain. I don’t know anyone who isn’t
utterly destroyed by watching it. This scene
is her Purple Rain, her Let It Be. Famously,
technical difficulties meant she had to shoot
it four times. Four times she gave that
performance. How?
As she explained in an interview in 2018,
“I’d had my heart broken very badly by Ken
[Branagh, her husband at the time] – so
I knew what it was like to find the necklace
that wasn’t meant for me.” In other words,
that remembered pain was absolutely real.
Today, however – and please forgive the
segue – we’re talking about very different
kinds of cracks. We’re talking about sex. SEX!
Thompson’s latest movie, Good Luck to You,
Leo Grande, is one of those films likely to cross
over from the film pages of newspapers to
news and social media, as its topic presses
any number of “Incoming Hot Take!” buttons.
It centres on Nancy, played by Thompson- a repressed, dutiful, 55-year-old RE teacher
who, despite a 30-year marriage and two
children, has never had an orgasm. Now
both widowed and retired, Nancy decides - in a moment where something, finally,
cracks, and the light gets in – to have an
adventure. She hires a hot young high-class
escort, Leo Grande, to see if she can finally
“see what all the fuss is about”.
The script takes on all the chunky issues
around sex, sex work, ageing, power, class
and feminism, while also providing lots of
unexpected, tender backstory for what is
essentially a deeply emotional, sexy and often
very funny two-hander set in a mid-priced
hotel room in Norwich.
However, the world being what it is,
the headline news is that Dame Emma
Thompson, now 63, has done not only a full-
on, all positions, no-holds-barred explicit sex
scene but also full-frontal, no-filter nudity.
Tits, muff, the lot. Why?
“I’ve never really been offered sex scenes,”
Thompson says, pouring herself a cup of tea.
“As my mother said, I’ve basically played a
series of ‘good’ women. I do ‘cerebral’. And
I have also never conformed to the shape
or look of someone they might want to see
naked. And by ‘they’, I mean male executives.
I’m too mouthy, not pretty enough, not
the right kind of body. And, crikey, you are
constantly told what kind of body you have.
In one interview I did, the male journalist
wrote that I’d put on a lot of weight since
I appeared in Fortunes of War, and that my
legs were ‘now like tree trunks’, and that I’d
‘let myself down’. I was 31 and, quite frankly,
no longer starving myself. I don’t think
anyone realises quite how thin most actresses
are in real life. They look quite... unreal.”
It’s fascinating to note how Thompson’s
career is the inverse to that of most actresses.
Usually, doing nude and sex scenes is the price
young actresses have to pay to get their feet
on the ladder – thankfully donning a cardigan
as they hit middle-aged character roles,
relieved never again to spend two days on a
closed set, desperately negotiating just how
much of their left tit will be visible on camera.
Thompson, on the other hand, seems to
have waited until she had enough power and
confidence to do sex and nudity in a way that
matters. When, towards the end of the movie,
Nancy finally stands, naked and postcoital, in
front of a mirror and really looks at herself,
it’s a moment as powerful as it is novel. To my
knowledge, it is the first time we have ever
seen on film an older, naked woman look at
herself with simple joy. Such a tiny thing – but
such a huge thing.
At the press conference for Good Luck
to You, Leo Grande at the Berlin Biennale,
the 30 seconds in which Thompson talked
about this scene subsequently went viral on
social media: “Women have been brainwashed
all our lives to hate our bodies – that’s the
fact of it,” she said, as a room full of seasoned
hacks burst into spontaneous applause. She
then stood up, away from the microphones,
and shouted, “So women, you try standing in‘
I
‘I’ve never been offered
sex scenes – not the
right kind of body for
male executives’
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