‘Good Luck To You, Leo Grande’: Emma Thompson On Nudity Onscreen, Sex & Female Pleasure

60-something-year-old Nancy has never had good sex, and she’s going to pursue it on her own terms, even if that means going to lengths she would have never considered in her younger days. And so goes the premise of Sophie Hyde’s quietly revolutionary “Good Luck To You, Leo Grande,” a mostly single-location dramedy in which a flawless Emma Thompson perceptively plays a widowed and retired school teacher who hires Daryl McCormack’s handsome sex worker Leo Grande to learn what all the fuss is about finally.

READ MORE: ‘Good Luck To You, Leo Grande’ Review: Emma Thompson Is Terrific In Sophie Hyde’s Perceptive Look At Female Pleasure [Sundance]

Bold and pioneering in all the ways it engages with the legitimacy of sex work and the many mysteries and complexities of female pleasure, ‘Leo Grande’ subtly underscores the shame and pressure we as women place on our bodies, a feeling Thompson seizes with a lived-in sense of compassion in one of the most daring performances of her career. We recently spoke to the legendary actor about her character Nancy, nudity on screen, and the ongoing societal misperceptions about female pleasure.

I love your character, Nancy. And I recognize her from people I know daily and from movies. What was new to me, what I didn’t recognize, is how she took matters into her own hands.
Oh, absolutely. We recognize Nancy, because she’s every woman in a way, isn’t she? She’s a person who’s done everything right and behaved very well, and then suddenly something clicked or got triggered in her. But I have never ever seen this story, and so as soon as I read the script and the knock comes on the door and in comes a sex worker, I’m going, “What? Really? I can’t wait to see what happens.” It was such a joy to get that script, because it was such a joy to play a very normal woman, recognizable woman doing something unrecognizable.

You are mostly in one location in this film, surrounded by the most limited props and resources. I am wondering what that minimalist setting means to you as an actor; if that perhaps creates a different kind of challenge in approaching a role.
In a way, the minimalism of it made us focus so completely on what was going on between these two people, between their eyes. Every single moment had to be so dynamic – it was quite releasing because all we could do was look at one another and listen to one another and respond to one another. And so, in a sense, it’s the purest form of acting that you can have, you’re not messing with props, and you’re not distracted by anything, and that’s true for the audience as well; they’re just in this dynamic. So, Sophie Hyde, our wonderful director, said she wanted us, as an audience, to feel with them. And if you were looking at things and them doing things too much, you wouldn’t have that slow entry into their inner lives via the landscape of their bodies and their faces.

And it’s also a very cinematic experience despite all that minimalism, exactly because of the focus on this interaction. How did you and Daryl McCormack establish that palpable sense of connection, chemistry and even vulnerability between you two?
In a way, with a story like this and with a script like this, it does do the work for you. We had six days of rehearsal that gave us a wonderful calming prep time. We discussed everything, we worked out vaguely where we wanted to be, we all took our clothes off so that we could just get used to nudity—but that was okay, you just get used to that quite quickly because it’s a normal, ordinary thing really. As we played it, as we carried on playing it, our relationship grew and deepened and deepened and deepened. So it happened with Nancy and Leo in a way. If we’d known each other too well at the beginning, it would’ve been perhaps a little bit more difficult to act, but because we got to act it right from the start, it meant that by the end of the three weeks, we had earned everything and we had earned the chance to play and act Nancy and Leo’s intimacy with great freedom and joy, and without any anxiety.

It sounds like you more or less shot chronologically to mirror the story arc.
Yes, we did. Because we shot it in 19 days, we had absolutely no spare, there was no fat on the schedule, there was no time to discuss, we had to get in there, and we had to really focus and do it and give Sophie as much material and good material and different versions of it as we could in the time. I mean, we literally shot right up to the last shot, which was the last shot of the movie, the nude shot, in chronological order, and that was hugely important.

I read earlier that Sophie Hyde also took her clothes off to join you two in solidarity. What did that act from your director mean to you?
It was a great privilege. We make an awful lot of fuss about nudity, don’t we? It’s something that we do every day. It’s just a body, and Sophie just felt, “No, it’s okay, I’ll join them.” We were just looking and examining our skin and just touching to see, “What is this thing that we’ve got to inhabit?” We drew around our bodies on paper and drew little maps of where we felt things and the bits that we liked, the bits we didn’t like, the scars that we had inside and outside, and that was very instructive as well, and what it was, was an act of trust. It was a trust exercise in a sense.

I wish movies like this, characters like Nancy, and bodies like hers that most women live in were commonplace in cinema. But unfortunately, we are still not yet living in that world. So in taking this role, which feels like a pioneering act, did you feel a heightened sense of responsibility?
Yes, I think [that I did]. We all felt quite responsible because we’re representing an awful lot of things. I think that the real key was knowing that our intentions were very pure and that our instinct about the tone of the piece was very finely tuned.

So it was as thoughtful as it could be; as carefully calibrated as it could be. And the work was designed to produce something that’s full of laughter and joy and pleasure, as well as pain and darker things. Mostly it’s a comedy, but [we] never ever let it tilt into something that was a caricature of anything. So, that was the challenge: to make it absolutely authentic. And that was hard; for it to be authentic, you just needed to be absolutely present in the moment. So, for me, it was one of the purest acting jobs I’ve ever done, partly because of what you said at the beginning: there were no distractions, no props, a minimalist set, it was two people, and therefore that clears the ground for you only to be there with this other person. I was very lucky because Daryl had all that character and soul and humanity at his disposal.

I love how this film tackles the topic of female pleasure and the legitimacy of female pleasure. Usually in cinema, in the movies I’ve seen in my younger days, they’re in bed and boom, she is all of a sudden consumed with pleasure. But the truth is a lot more complex than that and this film captures it.
I think we’ve seen a little bit more of women’s sexual pleasure [lately], but I don’t think this movie would’ve landed in the same way even five years ago. And you’re absolutely and hilariously right about the fact that endlessly, you are seeing a woman who when a man just goes up and touches them. It’s all started, one twiddle and they’ve gone off like a bloody Roman candle. And of course, in our experience, or at least mine and most of my friends, it is, as you say, more delicate than that. So it’s like the Australian definition of foreplay: “Brace yourself, Sheila.” (I’m going to Australia with this movie and I will be reminding them of that.)

I think films are very guilty of signifying a performative nature as well: when women have orgasms, they’re very obvious and loud and performed. I think that in real life, a lot of women find it difficult not to perform, because they think, “If I don’t perform this or if I’m pretending (which happens all the time), no matter what, it can’t be a private experience because they’ll be disappointed or they’ll think that they haven’t achieved it for me!” That’s another huge and hilarious myth about female sexuality that the man is there and a really highly developed man will give you a good orgasm.

So it’s all about them. It’s still about them. Everything’s about them. Instead of going, “Okay, I’m a woman, my sexuality exists in mysterious highways and byways, and actually, you might really turn me on just by the way you ask me something, or by the way in which your hand will just touch my back. You don’t know, because you’ve never bothered to ask and we’ve never had this discussion.” And [another way] that cinema’s given us a completely false [sense of sex]: In the films that I was watching, everyone just looked angry when they were having sex. It was just this sort of fury, and I thought, “Why do you look so unhappy?” And so there is a myriad of different ways in which we have misrepresented what female pleasure is. It’s not important to people, because if it were important to people, we’d understand it better.

And if you think about the orgasm itself, you realize that actually for some women, it’s genetically difficult to have an orgasm. Most people don’t know that. But when it came to erectile dysfunction , a drug was created for that decades ago, because men’s sexual pleasure is important to the world, because we live in a world that’s built for them. But ours is not important to them unless we perform it for them to make them feel good like they’ve achieved it for us, and that’s a real problem.

And hopefully, with movies like this, we will start seeing a little shift that will remove the shame around our own pleasure.
Indeed. We don’t think we deserve to have that pleasure…We don’t even know what we want, because we’ve never been asked or we are not used to saying to ourselves, “What is it you actually really want?”

And that was a brilliant thing in the movie: the constant checking in, the asking, even the consent. It’s not something that interrupts intimacy, but it’s something that propels intimacy.
That’s a very brilliant way of putting it. Each time consent is asked and then given, it is a step towards pleasure. When you see Leo going, “Is this okay?” Nancy is a bit [reluctant] at first: “Yeah. Oh yeah,” she’s not sure. But then she says yes [more confidently], and there’s something so sexy about that.