Emma Thompson on not being offered sex scenes: 'I ... never conformed to the shape or look of someone they might want to see naked'
Despite her multi-decade career in Hollywood, Emma Thompson says she rarely received offers for roles that included nudity.
The Cruella actress, 63, stars in the new film Good Luck to You, Leo Grande as a widow who has never had an orgasm. Her character's later-in-life discovery of her sexuality is one that Thompson identifies with, as she claims Hollywood never recognized her as a sexual being.
“I’ve never really been offered sex scenes,” Thompson told told U.K. newspaper the Times. “As my mother said, I’ve basically played a series of ‘good’ women. I do ‘cerebral’. And I have also never conformed to the shape or look of someone they might want to see naked. And by ‘they’, I mean male executives."
Throughout her many years on the big screen, Thompson has received an influx of criticism regarding everything from her looks to her personality.
"I’m too mouthy, not pretty enough, not the right kind of body. And, crikey, you are constantly told what kind of body you have," the Love, Actually star explained. "In one interview I did, the male journalist wrote that I’d put on a lot of weight since I appeared in Fortunes of War, and that my legs were ‘now like tree trunks’, and that I’d ‘let myself down’. I was 31 and, quite frankly, no longer starving myself."
It's a phenomenon the actress recognizes throughout Hollywood. "I don’t think anyone realizes quite how thin most actresses are in real life," she added. "They look quite… unreal.”
Thompson isn't one to avoid speaking candidly about the aging process. In February, she penned a personal essay for the Guardian in which she said she's both "grateful" and "depressed" by her body.
"I'm grateful I can still get up a hill and I'm depressed about my thighs," she wrote.
That said, Thompson is not willing to change herself to fit Hollywood's mold. In January, she had some choice words for the phenomenon of plastic surgery.
“Why would you do that to yourself? I simply don’t understand,” she told The Wrap. “I do honestly think the cutting of yourself off to put it in another place in order to avoid appearing to do what you’re actually doing, which is aging, which is completely natural, is a form of collective psychosis. I really do think it’s a very strange thing to do.”
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