Multi-award-winning actress Emma Thompson, who stars in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, joins Scottish actress and filmmaker Karen Gillan, who takes on the lead in Dual, for the virtual Sundance Film Festival Cinema Café series. 

There’s a common thread between the two disparate films about socially awkward women who pay for unusual services. Thompson plays Nancy, a woman whose life turns around when she meets up with a sex worker. Gillan’s Sarah is a woman with an incurable disease who clones herself in order that she can exist after death. 

Thompson, the recipient of two Golden Globes (Best Actress for Howard’s End, in 1992, and Best Adapted Screenplay for Sense and Sensibility, in 1995) has played many romantic heroines – some luckier in love than others – in such movies as Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Love, Actually, and the ultimate tale of unspoken love, The Remains of the Day. 

Her current film, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, has been described as a romance, although Thompson disagrees. “This is not a love story but it’s a story about intimacy. I think of Nancy as someone who has led a very restricted life, has ticked all the boxes, and got into all the shapes that women are required to get into in order to pass as people who can be acceptable in society. And one of the things that’s not very acceptable about women is that they should have appetites of any kind. So, it’s very easy for her to have been repressed.  But then she chooses suddenly to unleash herself, unzip herself. So the romance, if anything, is with herself.”

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, directed by Sophie Hyde (The Hunting), is the story of a retired widow who seeks romance and excitement after a dull marriage.  She hires a sex worker, Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack), in the hopes of rediscovering her dormant sexuality.

“Nancy takes her life into her hands. It’s very courageous because what she’s doing is contrary to everything she’s been brought up with, and indeed to her own moral structure,” says Thompson. “She’s really sort of breaking out of something. And I found that completely irresistible.

“In many cultures, female pleasure is not important. If you think about sex workers, it’s generally speaking, men buying sex for their pleasure. Women were not supposed to have pleasure during sex. Why a Virgin Mary?” she asks, rhetorically. “You can’t have the idea that the Mother of God could have ever enjoyed sex. And from that grew this terrible myth about virginity being the most important thing,” she sighs.

Gillan is best known in the sci-fi and action worlds for roles in Doctor Who (2010 – 2013), Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017), Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019), and Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017) and Jumanji: The Next Level (2019). Evidently, she has stayed in her lane in her upcoming movie, Dual. “I do enjoy different genres and in a weird way, the genre can be irrelevant because ultimately I’m just looking for a good story, whether that’s on earth or in space.”  

Like Nancy, Gillan’s Sarah is a repressed character whose life abruptly changes direction.

“Yes. She’s a woman who I don’t think enjoys living her own life. She just kind of trundles through, and then she gets this diagnosis and has a whole new perspective on her life. And then she has a clone made of herself, and it weirdly forces her to confront herself, where she’s like, ‘Do I want to live? Is this what I want? Do I want to fight this clone in a duel to the death to take my own life back?’ So that was a really interesting journey.”

Dual was written by and directed by Riley Stearns (Faults, The Art of Self Defense) and also stars Aaron Paul, Beulah Koale, and Theo James. 

The actresses weigh in on the controversial subject of cloning. Gillan says, “If I thought I was about to die, yes, I would get a clone to ease my parents and my dog.” She nods. “Yeah, I would do it.” Thompson has other ideas. “I remember Nancy Mitford (English novelist and journalist) said many, many years ago, ‘Americans think death is optional,’” she laughs. “And there’s a certain truth in the way in which we’re all headed towards. How do we avoid it? Let’s just avoid it. Let’s not do it at all, because it’s such an unpleasant thing to have to face. The fact that we live in generations of developed countries where people just don’t want to die is a form of narcissism, I think.” She looks at Gillan. “I don’t think you should, Karen. And besides, the dog is going to know. He’s going to bloody go, ‘This is not her!’”