I wish it wasn’t so rare when we get to hear Emma Thompson’s thoughts on life and films cause as I’ve said before, she’s damn smart and also realistically grounded.
She graces the cover of the February issue of More Magazine available this week.
Here are some things of note from the piece:
A tireless advocate of causes, Thompson campaigns against sex trafficking and for AIDS awareness.
The issues of women and aging, women and sexuality, are not far from her mind as she raises Gaia. “I hate the fact that on the front of every magazine there’s a scantily clad woman posing in a sexual manner,” she says. “I find it offensive, and I don’t care who knows it.” She saw an ad for the Sun newspaper on a double-decker bus, featuring a woman’s nude torso with enlarged 10- pence coins covering the nipples, and wrote to Ken Livingstone, then the mayor of London: “I said, ‘Take those fucking images off! It’s a bus!’
Clearly, the feminist fire Thompson displayed in her years at Cambridge University is still burning. When she was filming Brideshead, the producers asked 25-year-old Hayley Atwell, who was playing Julia Flyte, to lose weight. “I went absolutely ballistic,” Thompson says. “She didn’t need to lose weight, and it upset her deeply. It was an evil thing to do.” Thompson threatened to quit; the producers backed down. Now she feels justified: “She looks so beautiful and womanly, you think, that’s what God intended!”
Thank you Emma! Oh the times I’ve wanted to write to mayors or anybody about such publicly displayed nonsense.
She’s simply terrific.