Where this was said
Playing Characters to Expand Yourself
At 36:27 · chapter starts 34:20
Jason Bateman opens a candid thread: he has occasionally accepted roles not just for story or director or cast, but because the character embodied something he himself wanted to develop. [1] — Jason Bateman "Jason Bateman admits he sometimes takes roles specifically because the character has a personality trait he wants to try on in his own life…" 34:10 Emma latches onto this immediately, and connects it to her recent television series 'Down Cemetery Road', based on a Mick Herron book from the Slow Horses world. Her character Zoe grew up in 1960s London and is emphatically not a good girl — unapologetic, impolite, and not reflexively kind. Emma reflects that she was brought up to be emollient, accepting, tolerant: the very traits that, she argues, women in her culture are socialised to perform. Playing Zoe was liberating precisely because Zoe uses kindness judiciously, not as a scattergun to avoid conflict or judgment. Will tries to clarify: is Zoe's kindness weaponised? Emma says no — it is simply instinct, which is different.
Emma Thompson was born in 1959, only 14 years after the end of World War II, which she says shaped her London childhood and explains her artistic obsession with the two World Wars.
Emma Thompson's father was a working-class boy from Guildford who escaped his circumstances to become an actor. His mother — Emma's grandmother — was a servant who was raped by an employer and had a child out of wedlock. That dramatic family history is the soil from which Thompson's career grew.
