Sometimes, Emma Thompson will enter a room and burst into tears. “This year and last year, the times I’ve really cried is when I’ve walked into a space my daughter used to be in and she isn’t there anymore.” The scene, featuring one of cinema’s top blubberers, is easy to picture – afternoon light, a little dust in the air, untouched bed, “and tears like a river,” says Thompson, who on top of seeing her grown-up daughter, Gaia, move out last summer, turned 60 a couple of years ago and has been feeling a bit “limbo-ish” ever since. “I have gone,” she says, that famous voice as smart and self-pillorying as ever, “a tad on the existential ticket.”
It is an early afternoon in late winter, and London is going about its business in what feels like a bowl of cold potato soup. Thompson is in her office at home, three miles away from me, yet in the shared gloom a strange intimacy builds through our screens. Perhaps it is the low-level insanity of these dog days of lockdown? Or, more likely, the ever-present personal charisma of ET (as she signs off her clever, rambling emails). As interview subjects go, the 62-year-old double-Oscar-winning Dame does not disappoint.
Certainly, it’s hard to get enough of her signature vanity rejection. “Hang on,” she booms, “I absolutely have to cover the bit of the screen that shows me.” Cue the sound of masking tape being ripped as she affixes a strip to her laptop. “There we go. Otherwise, I can’t bear it,” she says of the modern ordeal of staring at one’s own pixels, throwing in a comedy “blurk!” for good measure. How’s it been going at home? Thompson lives in West Hampstead, on the same street where she has lived since she was seven, now with her actor husband, Greg Wise, and across the road from her actor mother, Phyllida Law. “Well, I tried to do Dry January, which was a total disaaaaster,” she drawls. “It got wet so quickly, I couldn’t even look at myself in the mirror.” When did you crack? The 10th? “The fifth.”
Say what you like about Thompson – and people say plenty, especially the British tabloids, who for 35 years have flip-flopped between thinking her delightful or delusional – but she will always be a delicious ham. She’ll be in full force this summer. At the end of the month, Disney is serving up its latest live-action confection, Cruella, a punky, zesty origin tale about what sent the young villainess dotty for Dalmatians. Thompson plays Baroness von Hellman, the chic, mean overlord of London’s 1970s fashion scene, who mentors Emma Stone’s young De Vil with life advice such as, “You can’t care about anyone else, everyone else is an obstacle,” while wearing a selection of towering wigs.
“The wigs,” sighs Thompson, seated at her desk, mane streaked with silver, in a comfy blazer and cream dungarees. The dungarees are another ET hallmark. Stone, who had a hoot with her on Cruella, checklists the Thompson allure for me: “Unapologetically herself, autonomous, free, unbelievably intelligent and damn funny. And on a more surface level, she’s my inspiration to wear overalls much more often.”
“Love her,” says Thompson, for whom mutual thesp appreciation is a moral imperative. She tells a story from her months filming Cruella in London, where, having been “heaved” into an elaborate creation by costume designer Jenny Beavan and done up to the nines at the film’s base in a South Bank car park, she had to get to a location across the river. “There was a demonstration and we got stuck,” she says. “The worst thing you can do on a film set is be late, so I said, ‘We’ll get out and go by Tube. It’s fine. It’s Sunday morning, it’s 9am.’” She quivers. “It was rammed. I was on the Tube in a dressing gown, Ugg slippers, a wig 3ft high, eyelashes out to here. And do you know what? Everyone completely ignored me. They just thought I was a drag act on my way home after the last performance.” She pauses wistfully. “I love London.”
Just as well. In honour of her upcoming turn as the capital’s most-feared fashion maven, the weekend before we speak, Vogue had taken Thompson to Trafalgar Square with suitcases of spring haute couture and pieces from the spring/summer 2021 collections for our shoot. She won’t mind me mentioning that she wasn’t keen on having a sleek, po-faced style moment. “I am uncomfortable trying to look slim and fashionable because I am not, and now it’s allowed that I am not,” she wrote in a pre-shoot email, the merry-but-firm tone typical of her correspondence. She didn’t want to pose; she wanted to perform. “I fancy a bit of fun.”
So fun is what she got, striding the pavements of WC2 in the season’s most eye-catching creations “welded to my post-menopausal body and looking like a Christmas pony,” she says happily. She leans back in her chair, considering how many of her past insecurities have recently evaporated. Turning 60 was “a watershed,” she says. “I think what I feel principally now is free.”
“I’m not really scared anymore,” she continues. “Well, I get scared.” Though mostly it’s the small stuff. Not, for example, death. “I feel like I could die at any time,” she says breezily. “Then Covid turned up. I’ve had pneumonia, so I thought I’d better be careful, but no one’s through the woods yet. Anyone could die of this thing.”
“I feel interestingly impermanent,” she continues, so delighted with the little phrase that a smile dances upon her lips. “Which is odd given I’ve been a permanent fixture here for decades.” She is talking about her corner of north-west London suburbia, but could just as well mean her place in the cultural consciousness. Thompson’s is a fame forged pre-internet, the sort that has crept into the marrow of the nation, lodging her in minds less as a working actress than as a favourite aunt.
The daughter of Eric Thompson and Law, beloved actors themselves, she exploded out of Cambridge University in the early 1980s, a rare woman in the Footlights, and into a showbiz career that saw her take the West End (15 months in 1985’s Me and My Girl) and blaze across TV screens (1987’s Fortunes of War, an eponymous sketch show, Thompson, in 1988), before bouncing to Hollywood, Howards End (1992), The Remains of the Day (1993) and onwards into Love Actually (2003) and the Harry Potter franchise. A case worth of awards followed – her 1996 Oscar for Sense and Sensibility makes her the only actor to win for both screenwriting and performing – and, in 2018, a damehood, picked up at Buckingham Palace, in Adidas by Stella McCartney trainers.
Naturally, all this was on top of the normal wear and tear of life – divorce, depression, IVF – and some unusual pressures, too. The paparazzi tailspin during the Kenneth Branagh years was pretty intense, not least when she married him at Cliveden in a knee-length, fuchsia-ikat wedding dress. Her activism also wound people up – still does – though an excoriating interview on Newsnight in 2017, when the extent of Harvey Weinstein’s sex crimes had been made plain, briefly took her to saint status. “This has been part of our world… since time immemorial,” she told Emily Maitlis, with captivating, clear-headed rage. “What we need to start talking about is… the crisis of extreme masculinity.”
But, boy, does the press not let her have a moment for long. She has campaigned to bring attention to the climate crisis for decades, and in 2019 spoke at an Extinction Rebellion rally in London, having come straight from working in America, hosting Saturday Night Live, which had booked her flight back. Although she hadn’t flown first class for seven years – “Are you f**king kidding me?” she sighs – there she found herself. The press went wild. “They said I’d flown in for the demo, which was bollocks. I’d come home from work, was all. I’m used to tabloid treatment but I really don’t like it when they lie,” she says. (She now has it in her contract that she is never to be booked first class.)
“I fully expected the shitstorm,” she says. “If you’re transgressive in any way, and you’ve also been lauded or feted, you will get shit. My transgression was commensurably greater because of my age and station, and I needed to be punished. That’s how it is in this country. There’ll be a wave of shite, and then it sort of dies away, then there’s another.” She doesn’t believe a stiff upper lip is healthy, so it’s sad to see hers hardened by cold experience. “You think to yourself this will be a six monther or a yearer,” she says. “Your resentment takes longer to process and get rid of. And your rage. You have all the normal human reactions.”
It would be tempting to never answer a question again, yet remoteness has never suited her. Thompson adores a chat. How did your marriage fare in lockdown? She chuckles warmly. “My mum said to me once, ‘The first 20 years are the hardest.’ I know that sounds funny, but Greg and I have been together for 26 years now and I would say the last six years have definitely been the best. I feel very, very fortunate. But, again, there’ve been shitstorms,” she says, with an old-fashioned look, “so you get through them and do the work.” She smiles, “Annoyingly, it mostly turns out to be work you have to do on yourself.”
We talk a little about politics. Being half-Scottish – she has a house in Argyll, on the banks of Loch Eck, where she decamps for long summers – what’s her take on independence? “Inevitable,” she says evenly, at least eventually, later adding that she doesn’t think either result would be a disaster. In 2019, she was one of scores of women – including politicians, lawyers and academics – to sign an open letter to The Herald in support of trans rights. Since then, in the wake of author JK Rowling’s comments on transgender issues, which offended some people, it has become routine for celebrities connected to the Pottersphere to have their opinion on trans rights sought. Is it something that she (Thompson played Professor Trelawney in three of the Harry Potter films) has discussed with Rowling?
She is quiet for a moment. “I have lots of thoughts on it, which I talked to lots of people about, which I’m not going to bring up in this,” she says, carefully. “The forum and fora in which it’s been discussed have been filled with such horrifying violence, on both sides.” She tells me the rare place she finds “succour” is with her 21-year-old daughter, Gaia. “She’s streaks ahead of me and I have very interesting conversations with her friends who are gay or who are trans or who aren’t sure, and there I find great nourishment and love.”
Initially, I was going to leave all this out of the interview – it felt wrong to chuck a fearful Thompson unwillingly into the toxic Twitter waters (she doesn’t do social media), and how necessary were the thoughts of another cis celebrity anyway? But it says something about her character that a worry persists that she hasn’t said enough; that a matter of societal importance has been raised and a show of empathy, and a point of view, have not been forthcoming.
A couple of days later, an email pings in: “I have too much in my head at the moment to sleep very well and have been pondering the nature of human rights and my relationship with same,” she writes in her fast, fluid style. “I like using the word tools now – for what we call rights I think are merely the tools that we need to conduct ourselves through life in a healthy and humane fashion. So trans rights, which to some have come out of the blue and seem staggeringly strange – but which of course have always been needed because like female intelligence and homosexuality, transsexuality has always been there but hidden or unseen or forced into hiding – for self-protection – must be fought for and upheld just like any other.
“My passion for women’s rights has driven me all my life,” the message continues, “and so, of course, I am bewildered when women of my age are insulted and threatened and fired because they haven’t said the right thing. I fear that kind of event. So both feelings are true – trans rights are as incontrovertibly necessary and desirable as women’s rights. The space in which we discuss and put these rights into process must be made safe for everyone. I guess that’s the bottom line, or at least one of them. Onwards.”
The wakeful nights when you’re both a mother and a daughter in late middle age are certainly relatable. For all her acting and activism, Thompson’s great emotional focus has always been her family, and she is prone to taking long periods away from performing. (There was yet more media fuss when she took her daughter out of school to travel the world for a few months in her mid-teens: “Ridiculous!” she honks.) In March last year, having finished Cruella, she was in Venice with Greg, fulfilling a long-held wish to learn Italian, when the pandemic broke. The family bolted to their Scottish hideaway.
“It was eight months with three generations of my family, with my mum and looking after her, and my daughter, who was looking after us, really. I suppose I properly slowed down. My mum is 88 now and she’s got Parkinson’s, so there’s quite a lot of care. You know, once a week managing to get her into the shower, which was a challenge. To which she rose very brilliantly, actually,” she adds, smiling at the importance of small victories. Thompson made periodic trips south for her charity work – including to Manchester to film with “wonderful” Marcus Rashford. But mostly, “I didn’t think about anything except walking up the hill and seeing what the heather was doing.”
In short, it was the pandemic reset some got, and many more yearned for. It left her with a renewed desire to do film work that matters. “We tell ourselves so many lies about motherhood… about sex… about death,” she says, and she doesn’t want to lie anymore. Of her upcoming projects, which include playing Miss Trunchbull in the movie-musical adaptation of Matilda, she sounds most excited by Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, in which she will play a widowed teacher who, after a stable but stale marriage, books a twentysomething sex worker (played by Irish actor Daryl McCormack) for a night. “It’s one of those ones where I read the script and thought, ‘I really want to see this movie.’”
Slowly the gloomy day has begun to brighten, so she hoicks me from her desk and takes me on a little office tour. Bookshelves filled with easy fiction; photos with family, including her informally adopted grown-up son, Tindy Agaba, and trips with ActionAid or to Downing Street; a knitted Nanny McPhee that a fan made sits on her mantelpiece. It is cosy. Safe. But life can always blindside you, even when you think you know what’s coming. She recalls the day Gaia moved out, last summer. “I came down to London with her to move her into her flat, which is very close and it was very exciting,” she says. Then she looks properly sad for a second. “She’s grown up. She’s left. You don’t expect it. But grief of any kind is like that, isn’t it? It just leaps upon you.”
Thompson believes life works in 30-year cycles, and she is intrigued by what her final one will bring (“if I’m lucky enough to see some of it”). Mostly she is thankful to feel less scared. “I don’t mind about any feeling now,” she says. “Feelings are what pass through us, you know. It’s our internal weather. It will always be there and it will always pass.” She smiles, her eyes squinting wisely. “That’s the nature of it.”
Cruella will be released on 28 May
