Leo Grande director Sophie Hyde joins Emma Thompson for nude rehearsal

When Emma Thompson joked to Australian director Sophie Hyde that she should strip down for a nude rehearsal for her new film, Hyde initially replied: ‘No way!’

Director Sophie Hyde at The Langham Hotel. Hyde directed Emma Thompson in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande. Picture: John Feder

When British megastar Emma Thompson joked to Australian director Sophie Hyde that she should strip down for a nude rehearsal for the new film, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, Hyde initially replied: “No way!’’

In the critically acclaimed film, Thompson plays a 60-something widow and former religious studies teacher who has never had an orgasm and hires a young, handsome male sex worker. Hyde said when Thompson and her co-star, Peaky Blinders actor Daryl McCormack, agreed to do a nude rehearsal to instil courage for the shoot, “Emma made a joke about that. She was like, ‘You’ll get naked too’.

“I was ‘ha, ha, ha no way!’ And then she said, ‘Of course not, you don’t need to’. And then I thought, ‘Well, that was a real challenge’.’’

The Adelaide-based director eventually changed her mind and joined in the camera-free, nude rehearsal because she wanted her film “to strip away some of the shame that we carry around our own bodies’’.

“We didn’t just strip off,’’ she said. “We did an exercise where we showed parts of our bodies to each other and told stories about those parts … So that became a really different way of approaching nudity and obviously was a big part of the movie.’’

Hyde said it was “thrilling” and “irresistible” to work with Thompson, a two-time Academy Award winner and star of films including Cruella, Saving Mr Banks and Sense and Sensibility, while the British star said Hyde was “extraordinary”.

In a revealing interview to be published on Saturday in The Weekend Australian Review, Thompson says Good Luck To You, Leo Grande is “radical” in its depiction of non-romantic intimacy between an ordinary, mature woman and young man, as she dismissed the cougar archetype as “vomit-inducing crap”.

Daryl McCormack and Emma Thompson in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande.

The 63-year-old dame, touring Australia this week to promote the film, said men and women needed to talk about sexual pleasure more openly, rather than seeing our desires as “perhaps a little bit dirty”.

“We’re really quite puerile about it,’’ Thompson said. She also said that “for most women, nobody asks, nobody is interested in whether the women have sexual pleasure or not, it’s not at the top of any agenda’’.

The film, which has earned a 94 per cent critical approval rating on the Rotten Tomatoes website, opens nationally on August 18.

Hyde, whose previous film, Animals, and AACTA award-winning mini-series The Hunting, also dealt with human sexuality, conducted extensive research on paid sex work for her latest film and engaged sex workers as consultants. The movie portrays such work as neither exploitative nor without risk.

“It’s not about them being rescued or the trauma of it,’’ she said. “There are many people engaging in this work all the time.’’

The film was written by British comedian Katy Brand and Hyde revealed: “In the original script Katy sent me, there was no sex … I actually said to Katy, ‘We are gonna need some sex in the movie’.’’

She said that, ultimately, the characters’ psychological connection is as vital as their physical relationship.

TOMORROW IN REVIEW IN THE WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN: Pleasure Principle: Emma Thompson