“My whole career has led me to this film”

“I think my whole career has led me to this movie. If I hadn’t done everything else before, I wouldn’t have had the skills to play this role”. In the film “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande”, presented at the New York Tribeca festival, Emma Thompson plays a 55-year-old widow who has never had an orgasm and who decides to hire a sex worker to finally discover this intimate pleasure. About her character, Emma Thompson comments: “I have never met a person like this”. For the 63-year-old British actress, it’s one of the most important roles of her career: “I think it’s probably the best performance of my career”.

To prepare her two main actors, Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack, director Sophie Hyde spoke with them during rehearsals about their relationship to sexuality, nudity and invited them to undress before entering the set. One of the strong messages that Sophie Hyde wanted to convey with this film is to “to present the body as a living, moving, evolving being, not as something that offers itself to the gaze of the other”.