Why Emma Thompson’s making a stand
The outspoken actress talks global warming, sexual harassment and the power of youth over a cup of tea with Mary McNamara.
If you want to understand why the number of female directors, cinematographers, studio heads and screenwriters remains so maddeningly low, all you have to do is ask the only woman who has won Oscars for acting and screenwriting.
Men, says Emma Thompson, have a huge motorway to power, with lots of lanes in it, which makes it easy for them to aid other men along the same path.
‘‘Women, on the other hand, have a kind of rutted track, on which there are many boulders. ’’
After more than a decade spent interviewing famous people, my usual response to any friend who expresses envy that I’ve interviewed [fill in the blank] is, ‘‘Yeah, it was cool, but it’s not like I’m invited over for Christmas dinner’’. But I have secretly always wanted Emma Thompson to invite me over for Christmas dinner.
She did recently invite me for tea, and that’s something. ‘‘My husband is in the kitchen with next-to-nothing on,’’ she says, greeting me at the door of a big, crazy Mulholland-adjacent house she and her husband, Greg Wise, found on Airbnb, ‘‘and Hannah’s here as well’’.
Wise is, in fact, wearing swimming trunks and ‘‘Hannah’’ is comedian Hannah Gadsby, whom Thompson famously befriended after one of Gadsby’s shows in Edinburgh.
Thompson slid into American consciousness almost 30 years ago with the amnesia thriller Dead
Again, in which she co-starred with then-husband Kenneth Branagh and quickly became an awardsseason fixture (Howards End, The Remains of the Day, In the Name of the Father, Sense and Sensibility, Angels in America).
In those early years, she was part of a power couple – ‘‘Ken and Em’’ – and a power crowd that toggled easily between Shakespeare (Branagh, Derek Jacobi, Anthony Hopkins) and modern comedy (Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry). She is still part of a power couple, now married to Wise
(The Crown), and that power crowd has only grown to include all manner of younger people, including Mindy Kaling, who wrote the movie Late Night just for Thompson.
The toggling also continues – she recently starred in a TV version of King Lear with Hopkins, and this southern hemisphere
winter, in addition to Late Night, she reprised Agent O for Men in
Black: International and plays a populist Trump-like politician in Russell T Davies’ upcoming HBO series Years and Years (which will screen in New Zealand on Sky TV’s SoHo channel).
Yet Thompson has always been very much her own self – outspoken, political, continually present in public conversations about a wide range of topics including urban development, public education, the environment, equal pay (for it), Brexit (against it) and climate change.
She has been known to tell female co-stars to not lose weight and threatened to quit a production
(Brideshead Revisited) if pressure were put on an actress to do so.
Earlier this year, she began her own #MeToo boycott.
When Skydance hired John Lasseter, who had left Disney after multiple allegations of sexual harassment were made against him, Thompson pulled out of a Skydance animated film. Then she made the stinging letter in which she explained her decision available to The Times.
In Britain, Thompson is often referred to as a ‘‘luvvy’’, a derogatory term used to describe an actor who talks about issues other than acting. Throughout her career, she has been trashed in portions of the British press, most recently for flying first class from Los Angeles, where she was working, to London, where she lives, because she then participated in an Extinction Rebellion demonstration.
Her response? She regrets that she wasn’t there in time to be arrested on her 60th birthday.
Thompson, apologises for not having ‘‘real’’ tea, motions to the enormous professional stove and announces: ‘‘Look at this thing, and there was nothing to cook with when we got here. Greg had to go out and buy pots and pans.’’
We chat briefly about Meghan Markle – Thompson doesn’t think much of the royal family but ‘‘everyone’s making an effort, and she looks like a nice bird’’ – before getting down to business. Which in Thompson’s case, means her recent projects, yes, but also about global warming, sexual harassment, the power of youth in an age of existential despair and the radical politics of napping.
And, of course, the gauntlet she threw down over Lasseter.
The decision to pull out of the Skydance film was the only option because ‘‘I can’t speak up about women’s rights and then not do it. It doesn’t work.’’
Although Skydance has made no response to her letter she has heard from many other people, including Brenda Chapman, who was fired as director of the Pixar film Brave, for which Thompson voiced the main character’s mother.
In this case, Thompson’s politics play right into her next big project. In Late Night, she stars as a latenight host whose show has gone stale in part because its writers room is, as it’s ever been, filled with white men.
Thompson’s first reaction to discovering Kaling wrote the part with her in mind was anxiety: ‘‘If you’ve written something for someone it’s often a mistake.’’ That feeling was quickly assuaged by the script. ‘‘I just thought it was wonderful,’’ Thompson says. ‘‘A lot of politics without being pious or obvious.’’
It was also a comedy, and that, Thompson says, is what she wants to be doing in the future.
‘‘We’re all suffering from existential despair at the moment. So I feel now that that’s where I should put my best efforts – into
‘‘Get a grip, guys, it’s not rocket science. You just behave with respect and courtesy. Now shut up and get on with it.’’
Emma Thompson
making things that are funny, things that might have serious intent but funny.’’
It is where she started, after all. At Cambridge, Thompson was a member of the Footlights Dramatic Club. After college, she did solo shows (in Late Night, the video of her character Katherine’s old stand-up is actually that of Thompson in 1983) and then joined Fry and Laurie on their comedy shows The Crystal Cube and Alfresco.
In 1988, she launched her own series called Thompson. And that was the end of her career in comedy, at least for a while.
‘‘Thompson was ripped apart by critics,’’ she says. ‘‘They said it was ‘man-hating’. You can’t imagine how terrible they were. So I got into serious acting,’’ she says, adding with a straight face: ‘‘I’m quite good at serious acting.’’
Thompson is not afraid to show anger. During a wide-ranging
conversation, her voice rises when she talks about the complaint that increased attention to sexual harassment has left men unsure of how to behave. ‘‘Get a grip, guys, it’s not rocket science. You just behave with respect and courtesy. Now shut up and get on with it. And please don’t make this your problem. I’m so fed up with that I just want to smack them.’’
She’s also had it with arguments about pay equity: ‘‘I’ve had people say, ‘Well, it’s more complicated than that’. No, it’s not. It’s work that has to be done, and you pay someone to do it and you don’t pay them less because she’s a woman.’’
But the notion that her comedy career was derailed by male critics doesn’t appear to bother her.
‘‘I think my response was a sensible one,’’ she says. ‘‘I had to support myself. I had to earn money. I really mean that. You must be able to earn your own living. You cannot be dependent upon someone else’s wage. Money is so important to young women.’’
Thompson feels strongly about how she can help young women, generally and specifically, off-set and on. ‘‘Wherever you are, there’s always something you can be doing different and it’s usually about communication with the people. You have to talk to the people who are not paid very much and find out what is going on with them.’’
To help make women feel safer, Thompson plans to have a meeting before her next movie begins shooting, to arm young women in advance, to let them know they have someone they can talk to.
‘‘Bullies and predators are very clever about when they try to intimidate and abuse. They don’t do it when there’s someone right next to them who’s going to say, ‘What … do you think you’re doing?’’’
The problem, she says, is that there are still too few women in power and that those who are often lack the time or energy to mentor younger women.
There’s also a confidence issue; Thompson says she has always been quite confident, but she knows many women who aren’t and for no good reason.
‘‘Men will say they can do things they can’t and the women will say they can’t do things that they can do. They will be offered a job that they are perfect for and they’ll say, ‘Oh, I can’t do that’, and some bloke who can’t do it will stand up and say, ‘I’ll do it, it’ll be great’.’’
She isn’t quite sure why she has never been afraid to say what she is thinking.
‘‘I guess I just don’t care,’’ she says. ‘‘I’ve been trashed in the press, my career was absolutely changed by the response of those misogynistic critics. But I just don’t care. It’s not to say that it wasn’t painful, but I knew I couldn’t work properly in a false environment because nothing would be any good at all. It’s exhausting.’’
Maybe. Yet for a woman who claims at least three times in an hour to be in the midst of an existential crisis, Thompson has a lot of energy – in addition to Late Night, Men in Black, Years and Years and Last Christmas, she has been working on a stage version of Nanny McPhee.
More important, she is galvanised by climate change. ‘‘Everything is changed by the horrific cataclysm that is happening – the sixth extinction,’’ she says. ‘‘We have to recognise our part and change; it’s so hard to change. We are in charge of all this.’’ – Los Angeles Times
Late Night (M) opens in cinemas on Thursday.