“It’s quite a challenge to do a nude at 62 years old.” – Emma Thompson
Nobody can doubt that Emma Thompson is one of the most outstanding actresses of her generation, a versatile and dedicated performer who dares with all kinds of projects. Her next work, the film Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, has brought with it a new challenge for the British: frontal nudity.
Now that the film, directed by Sophie Hyde, has been presented at the Sundance Festival, Thomson has revealed how she and her partner Daryl McCormack rehearsed for the sequence in question. “Sophie, Daryl and I rehearse totally naked and we talk about our bodies, about our relationship with our bodies, we draw them, we discuss the things that cost us, what we like about them, we describe the bodies of the others”, has ensured the actress.
“It’s quite a challenge to do a nude at 62 years old,” said the actress, saying that her character “stands in front of a mirror and lets her robe fall.” In this dramedy, Thompson plays Nancy Stokes, a widowed teacher who hires an escort (McCormack) for a date, hoping to experience an orgasm for the first time in her life.
The British actress has also referred to how women are still required to have a perfect body: “Nothing has changed in the terrible requests made to women in the real world and in acting. This thing of having to be thin is still the same as it has always been, and in some things I think it is even worse now.
Thus, Thompson believes that showing real bodies is important, assuring that she would not have dared to do nude scenes in any other phase of her life: “I don’t think I would have been able to do it before the age I am now. And yet, Of course, my current age makes it extremely challenging because we’re not used to seeing live bodies on screen.”