British actor, screenwriter and environmental activist, Dame Emma Thompson, says her latest film challenges the 'cougar' label put on women who're in relationships with younger men.
In Good Luck to You, Leo Grande she plays a widow, Nancy, who hires a younger male sex worker.
Photo: supplied
She said yes to the script as soon as she saw it, she tells Nine to Noon.
“Katy [Brand] had just said, ‘oh, you know, look, I've written this with you in my head’. And one's heart sinks, because you think, ‘Oh God I hope it's good’.
"But I knew that Katy was a brilliant writer and a wonderful comedian, I thought at the very least it's going to be intelligent and funny, because she has that in spades.
"But when I started reading it, I realised it was more than that. It was intelligent and funny, but it was also something completely unique.”
Nancy has led a fairly typical life, Thompson says
“What Nancy's gone through is just a normal life, she's ticked all the boxes, been a really good girl, she's done her exams, gone to university, become a teacher, married, had two children. She's really done it all right.
“And she's got to the age of my age, 63, and thought, Why do I feel like this? And I think that's a very common experience for women.”
Younger women have also responded positively to the film, she says.
“What's been fascinating as we've been taking the movie around is how younger women have responded to it. That they've felt released by it to a certain degree, and also able to acknowledge the fact that they may not themselves found any kind of way of accessing pleasure.
“Because it's all been so industrialised, it's all been taken away from us and sold back, and we've separated somehow sexual pleasure, from our normal everyday conversation, because we have made it taboo, we've made it something that's dirty, that's to do with patriarchal values and views on women's freedoms and it's built into most systems, religious systems in particular.”
This is certainly not a sex film, Thompson says.
“What I'm trying to do is make sure that people don't think that somehow this is sort of a sex film that we're all just bouncing around nude the entire time it’s a very tiny, tiny bit of the movie.
“And also, it's very much earned, it comes at the end of this very long series of conversations between these two people. And it's a kind of reward in a way for her, that somehow, she's able to look at herself with a neutral gaze for the first time in her life and also feel that she's inside her body, she's been sort of given it back somehow, in a very real way, by this extraordinary young man.”
Thompson's film credits include The Remains of the Day, Love Actually; Saving Mr. Banks; Much Ado About Nothing; Carrington; and acting and writing both Nanny McPhee movies.
