The actors bonded while filming Last Christmas, a rom-com cowritten by Thompson. The film’s message, per Thompson: “Love is the best tool that you have, but you better make sure that you direct it toward yourself first.”
Emilia Clarke was renovating her home when the Game of Thrones actor started filming Last Christmas, the holiday romantic comedy costarring and cowritten by Emma Thompson. The moment Thompson discovered that Clarke was spending her few hours off set in, essentially, a construction zone, the Oscar-winning actor and writer (Howards End, Sense and Sensibility) put an immediate stop to it.
“She was like, Darling, this is fucking ridiculous. Come and stay with me,” Clarke told Vanity Fair last month. “So I did. I lived in a flat that Emma had [down the road] from her house for a lot of the filming. She used to make me dinner every night…. We would just have a martini, digest the day, and then maybe watch a little something or read the paper. Then I’d go home and the next day we’d drive in together.”
Sometimes Thompson’s mother, the actor Phyllida Law, would join the duo. Other times, Clarke and Thompson would dig into Thompson’s stack of award screeners and unwind with a movie.
It was a nontraditional working relationship on a nontraditional romantic comedy. Last Christmas—based on the 1986 Wham! song—marked Thompson’s first rom-com. And Thompson—who had previously written Sense and Sensibility, Nanny McPhee, and Effie Gray—briefly panicked about the prospect of tackling the genre. Her worry faded, however, when she realized she would just do the rom-com her way. “It was so clearly not going to just be about two people who ought to be together,” Thompson told Vanity Fair in a separate interview. “It was so clearly going to be about one person figuring herself out as well.”
When audiences meet the film’s protagonist Kate (Clarke), she is hurtling between temporary housing situations. An aspiring singer who supports herself as a holiday-sales elf, Kate clacks aimlessly across London’s cobblestone streets with a suitcase in tow and a chip on her shoulder. Though Kate meets a romantic interest of sorts in Henry Golding’s Tom, the film primarily tracks her trajectory toward self-fulfillment and a repaired relationship with her mother (Thompson). Continue reading »
Nov 13, 2019
