Emma: Men thought I was ‘up for it’
EMMA Thompson has spoken frankly about fighting off sexual predators in showbusiness, saying she spent her 20s ‘trying to get old men’s tongues out of my mouth’.
The Oscar winning actress said men thought she was ‘up for it’ and would launch themselves at her.
Miss Thompson branded Harvey Weinstein a ‘predator’ and said that his abuse in Hollywood was akin to the Jimmy Savile scandal.
She said that there were systemic problems that allowed Weinstein to get away with it and criticised what she called ‘blind eyes’ who allowed it to happen.
Miss Thompson, 58, described Weinstein as being ‘at the top of a very particular iceberg’ of toxic masculinity and said he was an ‘emblem of a system that is sick’.
The Love Actually star said: ‘I don’t think you can describe him as a sex addict, he’s a predator. That’s different. He’s at the top of, as it were, the ladder of a system of harassment and belittlement and bullying and interference.
‘This has been part of our world, women’s world, since time immemorial.’ Speaking on the BBC2 programme Newsnight on Thursday, she said she threatened to walk off the film Brideshead revisited after Weinstein called her co-star Hayley Atwell a ‘fat pig’.
But her own experience proved the problem went further.
She said: ‘Whether it’s being felt up on the Tube – happened to my daughter the other day – whether it’s being nine years old at a children’s party and some magician sticking his tongue down my throat, whether it’s being in a lift with an older, powerful man who I was getting on with quite well when I was 24 and suddenly he lunged at me.
‘Everybody’s got stories like that. I spent my twenties trying to get old men’s tongues out of my mouth because they just thought: “Well, she’s up for it”.
The actress was one of the few women to stand up to Weinstein.
Around the time she was filming the 2005 film Nanny McPhee for his Miramax studio she said her ‘bolshy’ and ‘ extremely feminist’ character meant she shouted at him down the phone ‘that I never wanted to go out with him ever, ever, ever’. Miss Thompson said that after that he looked ‘actually frightened’ and avoided her during business meetings.
She said that ‘if you call out a bully they tend to avoid you’.
The actress added: ‘Whenever I was in a room with him, he gave off the most appalling aura’.
Miss Thompson, a mother of two whose husband is actor Greg Wise, 51, said that people who worked for Weinstein and helped him commit his abuse were ‘pretty filthy’ and part of a ‘conspiracy of silence’.