![]() We discussed everything, we worked out vaguely where we wanted to be, we all took our clothes off so that we could just get used to nudity-but that was okay, you just get used to that quite quickly because it’s a normal, ordinary thing really. We had six days of rehearsal that gave us a wonderful calming prep time. In a way, with a story like this and with a script like this, it does do the work for you. How did you and Daryl McCormack establish that palpable sense of connection, chemistry and even vulnerability between you two? And if you were looking at things and them doing things too much, you wouldn’t have that slow entry into their inner lives via the landscape of their bodies and their faces.Īnd it’s also a very cinematic experience despite all that minimalism, exactly because of the focus on this interaction. So, Sophie Hyde, our wonderful director, said she wanted us, as an audience, to feel with them. And so, in a sense, it’s the purest form of acting that you can have, you’re not messing with props, and you’re not distracted by anything, and that’s true for the audience as well they’re just in this dynamic. Every single moment had to be so dynamic – it was quite releasing because all we could do was look at one another and listen to one another and respond to one another. In a way, the minimalism of it made us focus so completely on what was going on between these two people, between their eyes. I am wondering what that minimalist setting means to you as an actor if that perhaps creates a different kind of challenge in approaching a role. You are mostly in one location in this film, surrounded by the most limited props and resources. But I have never ever seen this story, and so as soon as I read the script and the knock comes on the door and in comes a sex worker, I’m going, “What? Really? I can’t wait to see what happens.” It was such a joy to get that script, because it was such a joy to play a very normal woman, recognizable woman doing something unrecognizable. We recognize Nancy, because she’s every woman in a way, isn’t she? She’s a person who’s done everything right and behaved very well, and then suddenly something clicked or got triggered in her. What was new to me, what I didn’t recognize, is how she took matters into her own hands. And I recognize her from people I know daily and from movies. ![]() We recently spoke to the legendary actor about her character Nancy, nudity on screen, and the ongoing societal misperceptions about female pleasure. READ MORE: ‘Good Luck To You, Leo Grande’ Review: Emma Thompson Is Terrific In Sophie Hyde’s Perceptive Look At Female Pleasure īold and pioneering in all the ways it engages with the legitimacy of sex work and the many mysteries and complexities of female pleasure, ‘Leo Grande’ subtly underscores the shame and pressure we as women place on our bodies, a feeling Thompson seizes with a lived-in sense of compassion in one of the most daring performances of her career. And so goes the premise of Sophie Hyde’s quietly revolutionary “ Good Luck To You, Leo Grande,” a mostly single-location dramedy in which a flawless Emma Thompson perceptively plays a widowed and retired school teacher who hires Daryl McCormack’s handsome sex worker Leo Grande to learn what all the fuss is about finally. 60-something-year-old Nancy has never had good sex, and she’s going to pursue it on her own terms, even if that means going to lengths she would have never considered in her younger days.
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