Emma Thompson： Where are all the female heroes？
3 Video Views·Apr 6, 2026
Emma Thompson says female heroism is not celebrated enough on screen.
In her latest film, The Dead of Winter, the preeminent British actor plays Barb, a widowed Minnesotan fisherwoman. Despite being soft-spoken, Barb transforms into a saviour after finding a kidnapped teenager locked in the basement of a nefarious couple.
“I got [the script] and thought, ‘This is so unique,’” Thompson tells Yahoo UK. “The writers, Nicholas Jacobson-Larson and Dalton Leeb, who are Minnesotans, based this character on these women in their lives, so the authenticity of it really grabbed me.
The Dead of Winter is in cinemas from September 26.
I mean, it's such a unique character.
It feels like someone we haven't necessarily seen on screen,
this kind of very nice woman
who's drawn into this terrible circumstance.
I mean, how many scripts like that do you get sent?
Is this a very unique project, or is it the sort of, yeah?
It's none, none.
That's why I did it,
because I got it and thought, this is so, well, unique.
And of course, the writers,
Nicholas Larson and Dalton Leib, who are Minnesotans,
based this character on these women
in their lives that they knew.
So the authenticity of it really grabbed me.
And then it was so surprising, everything she did.
As I was reading, I thought, oh my God,
oh, that's so interesting.
I'd never read anything like it or seen anything like it.
And so I was so grateful that it came my way,
because I've always been looking for the female hero.
Who is she?
What does she do?
I don't want her just to be the same as the male hero,
only female.
That's not what I want.
That's not what I'm interested in.
I'm interested in where female heroism is,
because we all know women who are utterly heroic.
But as George Eliot says, it's sort of,
it's hidden in all of these small actions in everyday life.
Female heroism keeps us going.
If we didn't have it, we wouldn't be here.
But we don't tell stories about it,
not nearly enough anyway.