‘This is it!’: Olivia Colman on the Aussie film that reignited her love of acting
A koala named Florence, a glass of Adelaide’s finest - the Oscar-winner speaks to the film that convinced her to travel ‘so far away’ from home.
‘I am going into a tunnel briefly, so if you lose me, I will come back!” warns Olivia Colman, her charming Norwich accent trickling down a subpar phone connection as she navigates London’s labyrinthine road system.
Also on the line is Australian filmmaker Sophie Hyde, beaming in from her home in Adelaide. Hyde flashes a smile, and stifles a laugh. She knows full well the direction our interview is likely to take.
“Getting through London is loads of tunnels.”
There’s a lengthy pause. The actor’s line cuts out. Hyde bursts into a fit of laughter.
Colman, the Oscar winner who has played Queen Elizabeth II, the queen mother and the fictionalised Queen Anne, for which she won an Academy award, loses her mobile reception, suspended momentarily between driving to a set for a production for which she has yet to learn the lines and discussing her first Australian film in a decorated 25-year career.
Speaking to her – an actor accustomed to boundary-pushing roles and well known for her offscreen candour – feels closer in spirit to her early days as the endearingly neurotic Sophie Chapman on Jesse Armstrong’s cult-favourite Peep Show than to the seminal roles she has landed in The Favourite or Broadchurch.
Before becoming a fixture on screen, Colman has never let meteoric success get in the way of her comical gaffes, from notably being starstruck by co-star Judi Dench while filming Murder on the Orient Express in 2017 to promising to give anyone she forgot to thank in her Oscar acceptance speech a “massive snog”.
A ping interrupts the conversation.
“She just texted me, ‘I’m out of the tunnel’,” Hyde says, smiling.
The 48-year-old director and the 51-year-old actor have formed a powerful artistic partnership, albeit not bound by the typical on/offscreen dynamic.
They began shooting in Adelaide in March 2024 and then across Europe for the upcoming release Jimpa, a co-production between creatives from Australia, The Netherlands and Finland that has been hailed as Hyde’s most personal work yet.
Written with long-time collaborator Matthew Cormack, the semi-autobiographical drama details what happens when a child’s optimistic dream of an overseas life with their grandfather begins to fray.
It’s an unorthodox family portrait, dissecting a universal truth with which all families inevitably deal: the volatile interplay between why young people are “offended by everything” and why old people simply don’t get it.
The film premiered at the opening slot for Sundance and will open 2025’s Adelaide Film Festival on October 15. The story is inspired by Hyde’s experience with an activist gay father, Jim (portrayed by John Lithgow), and a non-binary child, Frances (Hyde’s own, Aud Mason-Hyde in their debut feature).
Colman plays a fictionalised version of Hyde – a mother and filmmaker – who takes the family to visit her father, who leaves the small-mindedness of 1970s Australia and carts himself across the world to find himself.
Jimpa is a portmanteau of “Jim” and “grandpa”, and Hyde’s lens explores universal tensions: the resentment a child can feel towards a parent who chose themselves over convention, and the complicated love between generations.
Colman’s voice comes through the call again, announcing a triumphant return. She has escaped the winding gridlock of inner-city London, finding herself out on sprawling wide roads beyond the city limits.
“I need you to go first, Sophie, ’cause I can’t remember much about (the film),” she says. Colman has a knack for misremembering characters she has played – and she may be forgiven, considering her immense workload. Famously, she forgot the details of a work she was promoting on British television chat show host Graham Norton’s signature red couch. The film was Cuban Fury, for reference.
She warns that if there’s a “massive delay” in any of her responses it’s not out of shyness.
“That’s just me not having a f..king clue what I’m talking about,” she says, laughing.
Jimpa is an intergenerational coming-of-age story and a reminder that even trailblazers can struggle to keep up with change. While Lithgow’s Jim is a pioneer for gay rights, advocating for equality amid the AIDS epidemic, the film grounds itself in reality through its often humorous exploration of the frustrations that come with navigating an ever-expanding “woke”-abulary. The personal nature of the work raises that age-old dinner party question – who would you get to play you in a film about your life? A glittering star, perhaps? Someone universally adored, a classic beauty who strikes the rare footing between unparalleled talent and infectious humility?
“Well, I do also have short hair!” Colman says, joyfully.
Hyde laughs at the idea the actor is a direct reflection of the filmmaker, calling it a “good choice”, but quickly clarifies that while the film draws on elements of her own story, the process of making it often diverged from that reality.
Hyde’s father died before the events of the film could ever pan out. In a way it was an act of empathy, says the filmmaker, who has sought to explore how people across three generations might deal with shifting boundaries and ideas, in a story that stretches from 1970s Australia to present-day Amsterdam.
“The actors take on a life in your story that shifts out of what it was actually like to grow up in – it’s only later that you go, oh yes, this is really personal again,” she says.
Off set, the pair would look through the archives of the real-life inspiration for the film, images and people who knew Hyde’s father.
“Soph has such a light touch, I never felt like I had to do an impression of her,” Colman says. “She empowers you to do what you need to do.”
The actor calls the experience of working closely with Hyde and her child – Aud, who served as producer on the show – deeply impressive, likening their familial bond to a relationship that transcends the typical parent-child love, something so “beautifully close”.
Hyde is no stranger to critical acclaim or working with high-profile talent.
The director won Sundance’s World Cinema Dramatic Directing Award and Berlinale’s coveted Crystal Bear for her debut feature 52 Tuesdays just more than a decade ago, earned a British Independent Film Award nomination for Animals in 2019, and most recently guided Good Luck to You, Leo Grande to Golden Globe recognition for Emma Thompson’s lead performance, alongside numerous BIFA nods and several BAFTA nominations.
The drawcard for Colman was curiosity, the actor says.
“I was nervous about going to Australia. I’d never been so far away from home before,” she says, adding the nerves marked something deeper. “I had just come off the back of a film where I just didn’t enjoy the process quite so much.” The actor worried she had “lost the joy in acting”. “My agent said: ‘Meet Sophie Hyde, I think this is going to really work’. And I said right after that first call, ‘Oh, god, yes, this is it again. This is it!’ ”
Where Lithgow’s performance is fearless – picture the veteran actor with enough award nominations and wins under his belt that they have their own Wikipedia page appearing stark naked, aside from a leather vest, in his late 70s – Colman’s is quietly magnetic, navigating a swirl of complicated emotions.
The film incorporates numerous flashbacks, hypnotically manoeuvred by cinematographer Matthew Chuang, unravelling the depth and texture of Jim in particular, from the bittersweet moment he leaves his wife and family in Australia in the past, to the societal changes he observes from a new life in Amsterdam.
Hyde drew on her relationship with her own father, “a very provocative man who’d say the wrong thing to provoke you into answering. And then he’d go and use your argument in a room with someone else. It could be quite mean, but it certainly worked.”
It’s a tension Hyde has encountered many times – not only as a parent but also as an artist – and one that fed directly into Jimpa’s creative DNA. “I guess I was interested in that,” she says.
“At the same time, just like Hannah (in the film), I understand how scary and weird it can feel when language changes so much, and for it to feel like it is the centre of things – it was always that situation of trying to sit between and see both sides.”
There’s no shortage of opinion when it comes to sexuality and gender, and no shortage of criticism over what role the arts play in politicised debate. In the town square of public discourse, actors routinely find themselves crucified for saying too much or too little.
Colman walks a fine line between the two: publicly advocating for causes ranging from refugee rights and an ambassadorship with UNICEF UK, to most recently signing a pledge, along with more than 5000 film professionals, vowing not to work with Israeli film institutions they say are implicated in the ongoing conflict in Gaza.
“I don’t think of it as an artist’s responsibility,” she says. “It’s a human being’s responsibility. If you feel strongly about something, you should say: ‘I feel strongly about it’.”
She pauses. “I don’t have any social media, which helps, so if anyone hates what I stand for, I can’t see them slagging me off.”
That push and pull – between empathy and discomfort – forms the emotional and intellectual bedrock of Jimpa. The film arrived at a particularly charged moment, premiering at Sundance just days after US President Donald Trump’s inauguration speech during which he announced there were “only two genders”.
The timing underscored the stakes of storytelling itself – how cinema can confront societal tensions while illuminating experiences that are often overlooked.
So what compels Colman to advocate for her chosen causes?
“I know that artists probably have more of a platform so it is a greater responsibility, but I think you should just do it,” Colman says. “I’m very simplistic about things. You’ll often find the most upset and most anger in the community is where those (opposing) shoulders don’t rub together, and that’s what I find so confusing.”
Hyde vividly recalls the dissonance of premiering her film in a tense political moment.
“We were making a story which is about love and is about a family gently dealing with each other, it was like: whoa, we’re being hit in a world that’s all about division and extreme points of view,” she says.
“It was sort of this amazing bubble that we were in of our cast and crew, and the audience just being so beautiful, and then being like ‘the world is on fire!’ ”
Such a contrast, she says, serves to highlight Jimpa’s quiet radicalism. As they prepare to bring the film to Australian audiences, Hyde and Colman detail the bond that grew through the production – over a few glasses of Adelaide wine between shoots, and Colman’s unforgettable first encounter with a koala named Florence.
When asked what reignited her joy in acting, Colman laughs and says: “Sophie is an enabler of sorts more than a director. She made me feel very free.”
“I like the word enabler,” Hyde says, chuckling. “I felt like I couldn’t really go wrong, the whole experience was lovely,” Colman says, before pausing. “But now Sophie can totally go ‘absolute bollocks’. It was hell from start to finish.”
Jimpa will have its Australian premiere at the Adelaide Film Festival on October 15. It will be released in Australian cinemas on February 19, 2026.
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