Emma Thompson: 'Why can't older women have sex on screen with a much younger man?'
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Emma Thompson - Ian West/PA
Pick a Hollywood film at random and chances are that the leading man is paired with a much younger woman.
Emma Thompson would like to turn that on its head, and in her next film we will see her “largely naked” with a man in his 20s.
Good Luck To You, Leo Grande, stars Thompson as a recently widowed teacher who hires a young sex worker for a night of passion.
“It’s very interesting with this woman I’m about to play. This young man says, ‘You’re perfectly attractive, why can’t you find another chap?’ And she says, ‘Because the only people willing to sleep with me are people my age, and I want to sleep with someone younger than me.’
"Now I’ve never heard a woman say that on screen. With men, it’s completely acceptable,” Thompson said of Hollywood’s double standards.
“It’s completely acceptable for George Clooney - who is delightful - to have someone who is 30 years younger than him. If I have someone playing opposite me in a romantic way, they have to exhume someone, because I’m 61 now. Do you see what I mean? It’s completely and utterly unbalanced.”
While male actors are considered distinguished when they reach middle age, women “get past 50 and you’re invisible”.
To change attitudes to older women with younger men, Thompson told the Culture Blast podcast, you “just have to show it” on screen.
“If Leo Grande, the film that we make, speaks to people and people aren’t averse to seeing someone who’s 61 largely naked with a very much younger person, it’s going to be very interesting. We’ve got to keep being brave about that.”
When the podcast’s host, Farah Nayeri, asked Thompson why she was so unafraid to discuss taboo subjects, the actress joked: “It’s a personality disorder, really.” She added: “I probably could do with being slightly more boundaried, but I don’t feel much of a boundary between myself and other human beings.”
Good Luck To You, Leo Grande is written by Katy Brand, the comedian. Thompson’s character is Nancy Stokes, 55, a former religious education teacher who spent years in a stable but stale marriage and finds a new lease of life after her husband’s death. Casting is under way for the male lead.
Asked if the #MeToo movement had made the film industry a better place for women, Thompson said it was changing “but not nearly fast enough”. There is still a dearth of intelligent roles for women, she explained.
“It’s not good enough simply to give the women the guns and then make the women bad-ass as well. Now women have to bad-ass… they’re not allowed to cry any more, apparently, because we’ve got to be just like men. I remember thinking, ‘That’s not what we meant.’"
Women characters shouldn’t have to ape Superman or the Godfather to be considered great, Thompson said. “That’s not where our heroism lies. So how do we make it heroic? Why are there no films about birth, for crying out loud? Does anyone even know about that? No, it’s all hidden.
“All our heroism is hidden because what we’ve done is we’ve just given women the same parts as men and that’s not the point.”
Emma Thompson: 'Why can't older women have sex on screen with a much …
archived 23 Dec 2020 02:40:30 UTC
