Emma Thompson was characteristically candid about the Hollywood double standard during a recent interview for the CultureBlast podcast. The “Nanny McPhee” star, who is also a prolific screenwriter, was talking about her upcoming film “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande”, which she said was an invigorating change of pace from the typical Hollywood film about women who they have romances with men decades older than themselves.
Directed by Sophie Hyde, “Leo Grande” is the story of a widow whose husband had been an unsatisfactory lover, so she decides to seek a sex therapist in her 20s.
Thompson’s character in the film says, “The only people willing to sleep with me are my age and I want to sleep with someone younger than me.” But it is very rare for women to express this desire for a younger man on the screen, she says. “If I have someone playing against me in a romantic way, they have to exhume someone, because I’m 61 now,” she jokes.
“You are over 50 and invisible.”
Meanwhile, she says it is completely acceptable for George Clooney to have an on-screen romance with someone who is 30 or 40 years younger than him. “It is completely unbalanced,” she says.
But she hopes that the sector is changing. “If people are not averse to seeing someone 61 years old almost naked, with a much younger person, it will be very interesting. We must continue to be courageous ”.
Thompson told podcast interviewer Farah Nayeri that she welcomes efforts to make film sets safer since the Me movement. In “Leo Grande”, “we had to do a whole thing, someone comes to talk to you about sexual harassment”, which she says is a good idea because a movie set has “such a powerful hierarchy and power structure”.
During the filming of the recent “Last Christmas” release, which Thompson co-wrote and starred in, “I had a big meeting with all the women and said, ‘We’re here to take care of each other,’” she says.
Thompson made a strong statement when he left the voice cast for the movie “Luck” after Skydance hired John Lasseter as head of his animation division. “I didn’t understand why he was being hired,” she says. If a company takes culture change seriously and still hires the animation executive, who has been accused of sexual harassment, “it’s pretty clear that you don’t care.”
“It’s changing, but not fast enough,” she says.