Donald Trump asked Emma Thompson on a date.
“A phone rang in my trailer, and it was Donald Trump. I thought it was a joke. I said: ‘How can I help you’? I thought he needed direction. He said: ‘I would love for you to stay in one of my beautiful places, and we could have dinner.”
She added: “I realized that on that very day my divorce has finally come through. I bet he has people looking all over for nice divorcees – I mean, he found the number of my trailer! That’s stalking! So yes, I could have gone on a date with Donald Trump. I could have changed the course of American history!”
Thompson was never afraid of some political humor.
“I did jokes about Margaret Thatcher – and herpes, you know? It’s the simplest thing you can get from unprotected sex. I said that Thatcher and herpes were both very difficult to get rid of. It still stands to this day,” she said, recalling her early days as a comedian.
“Later, I wrote a series of comedy sketches and one of them was about a Victorian woman coming to see her mother. Her husband appears to have a ‘small creature’ attached to her body. She’s talking about his penis, of course, and it’s about sexual ignorance, but it’s funny. The producer of ‘Sense and Sensibility’ saw that and thought: ‘This woman can adapt Jane Austen!’ That’s so weird.”
At first, she didn’t want to be an actor at all, she admitted. “It seemed like a precarious job. A hospital administrator came to our school once, and I thought it was a nice job. Mostly because she had nice shoes.”
But acclaimed roles in “Howards End,” “The Remains of the Day” soon followed. For the latter, she was inspired by her grandmother and “intergenerational trauma.” “It really informed [the performance of] Miss Kenton. “My grandmother was never really happy and fulfilled.”
Hollywood took notice as well. “If you remember the Monica Lewinsky scandal, poor Monica, that happened when we were making ‘Primary Colors’. We sat down, thinking: ‘What are we going to do?’ We are making a film about something that’s happening at the same time. It seems like such a long time ago. Oh, if only we could have a nice sex scandal and none of THIS, please.”
Thompson also picked up the Leopard Club Award at the fest. “I nearly had an aneurism – I was so astonished and so happy,” she said, recalling an especially crowded screening of Brian Kirk’s “Dead of Winter”.
“Most of the women I know are incredibly heroic. And the fact that [this character] was old and grieving, I haven’t seen it before.”
