Emma Thompson: On Acting

My parents were, they were both actors and when I was born I was a mistake because they didn't have the money. It really was hard for them when I was little. So they had to work and do everything and they just took whatever they could. Dad was in things like Z cars and did a couple of episodes of the original Doctor Who with William Hartnell and stuff like that. I thought that I would be perhaps a writer, well I suppose I am a writer but I didn't think that I was going to be an actor. From quite early on I thought I would try to be a comedian. I wanted to be somebody like Lily Tomlin who wrote with Jane Magner her own material and did shows that were character based. That was the area I was interested in. I went to university, I studied English, I met Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Robbie Coltrane, Ben Elton. We all did comedy together, sketch comedy for two years after I left university at the very least. I did my own sketch show, I did musical theatre, I did mime, I did all sorts of stuff. I didn't act until I was 27 years old and then it was by accident. Robbie was doing a thing called Tootie Fruity. John Byrne had written it, it's a Scottish character. They said we need someone who can do the accent. My mum's Scottish, I happen to know Robbie. He said do you want to come and meet them and it happened by accident and I didn't know how to do it. I'd not been trained and I was quite nervous and I thought oh well I suppose it's just like doing a sketch only for longer which is exactly what it turned out to be. Probably the one I've just done, Pia Travers, probably the most challenging because she's so complicated and in two hours you've got to indicate how complex she is and why and she's very inconsistent and you know how people sometimes you just don't know what you're going to get from them and this happens with a lot of people who are addicted to things like drugs or alcohol or all their own anxieties. She was someone who was so badly damaged when she was a child she spent her whole life trying to metabolise that damage. I think a lot of us do. Preparation, it depends on the part. There was so much information about this woman so I ingested as much information as I could over a period of six months, listened to everything, watched everything, read everything. Then the trick is to let go of all of that information because you've got to trick your psyche into pretending that it's someone else and you can't do that by being conscious of being that person. So it's a very odd magic trick. It's more like a magician's trick than anything else I think. Never let yourself be defined by how you look. Never do that because it'll be over soon and you won't develop so it's just over. So if people go on and on about how you look you have to challenge it. You can't just take it in, you have to challenge it. You have to put up a barrier against that and you have to exist as a person and a character and a brain and that counts for boys as well. But it's particularly bad for girls at the moment because they seem to be required to be models as well as actors. If someone asks you or says to you that you have to be thinner then you have to challenge them by saying, why is my character a thin person? Is my character thin because they are suffering from some sort of eating disorder? Give me a reason because if this is a cosmetic reason then what you want is a model and not an actress. So be firm and know who you are and what you are because you are not a model. That is other people do that and they do it very well and it's a difficult job so don't be put upon and do not feel as though that's how you have to be because it's not true and the more of us who counteract that the more it will go. As for the rest, don't ever desire to be a star. Fame is a by-product of what you do. It's just an accident. What you do you must do because you love it, because you enjoy it, because you're good at it, because people enjoy watching you. Anything else is by the by really and we're all very lucky if we get work and good work. So make your choices carefully and don't do things just because they might pay well. Do the things that really interest you. Do mad, wild things. Go off. Go off. Do strange things. Develop yourself. Challenge yourself.