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Emma Thompson is Magic, Wants to Make Magic with Sandra Bullock

Lez be real, it’s difficult not to be in total lesbians with Emma Thompson. I don’t need Meryl Streep to sing her “Ode to Emma” or rehearse Emma’s “rabid feminist” ways for me to love her. No. I don’t need her cinematic snogging partner to tell me what I already know, that “Emma is a beautiful artist, she’s a writer, she’s a thinker, she’s a living, acting, conscience, [and that she] considers, carefully, what the fuck she is putting into the culture.”

In her Jesus Year (33) she won a Best Actress Oscar for Howard’s End; she added a second Oscar for screenwriting Sense and Sensibility not long after. I love this Beatrice, this Professor Trelawney, this Australian bisexual with a bad perm-and true love lasts a lifetime.

And while it’s easy to be in lesbians with Emma , she is clearly in lesbians with us, from her guest role on Ellen back in 1996 to her forthcoming project about a lesbian Aussie, she’s always supported our team. In her recent interview with The Advocate she spoke candidly about her LGBT-oriented career in reflection of her latest role playing P.L. Travers‘s in Disney’s Saving Mr. Banks. Here are some highlights:

She was at one time set to star in the cinematic adaptation of the seminal butch narrative of self-loathing, The Well of Loneliness:

I always have, perhaps because I’ve always felt like an outsider. I believe that actors and anyone in the arts should be outsiders, so that we can say whatever we want and hold a mirror up, as Shakespeare says, to what’s really going on in the world. We shouldn’t be within the pale of polite society. It’s a disaster that actors have become so respectable.

For some reason she changed her lesbian love ideal from Michelle Pfeiffer (who she wanted to play opposite her if The Well was ever made, calling Pfeiffer “fantastically attractive” in a 1995 interview with The Advocate) to Sandy Bullock. WHY IN GOD’S NAME WOULD YOU DO THIS, EMMA?

After full-on snogging Meryl Streep in Angels in America, where do you go from there? We practically had sex, for God’s sake. [Laughs] Oh, there are so many beautiful women… Well, I met Sandy Bullock at an awards thing a couple years ago, and she said to me, “If I were gay, you’d be the one.” I said, “I’m there!”

Want more Emma? Read the full Advocate interview, here, and check out her interview yesterday over at NPR, here. You can also watch this clip of Michelle Pfeiffer singing “Cool Rider” and imagine her straddling Emma Thompson’s face instead of a ladder.

You’re welcome.

Yeah, that was a long time ago, and it’s kind of gone away. But I am writing a screenplay, set in London, about a lesbian who was born in Darwin, Australia. It’s about suicide, really. I had a great time recently in Australia doing research on the character; I spent a fantastic day and evening with a group of lesbians who all had different experiences growing up in Australia, which, when they were young women, was not a pleasant place to be gay.

Another queer Aussie, in addition to Travers? Sign me up for WINNING.

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She feels intimately connected to the LGBT community as an artist:

I always have, perhaps because I’ve always felt like an outsider. I believe that actors and anyone in the arts should be outsiders, so that we can say whatever we want and hold a mirror up, as Shakespeare says, to what’s really going on in the world. We shouldn’t be within the pale of polite society. It’s a disaster that actors have become so respectable.

For some reason she changed her lesbian love ideal from Michelle Pfeiffer (who she wanted to play opposite her if The Well was ever made, calling Pfeiffer “fantastically attractive” in a 1995 interview with The Advocate) to Sandy Bullock. WHY IN GOD’S NAME WOULD YOU DO THIS, EMMA?

After full-on snogging Meryl Streep in Angels in America, where do you go from there? We practically had sex, for God’s sake. [Laughs] Oh, there are so many beautiful women… Well, I met Sandy Bullock at an awards thing a couple years ago, and she said to me, “If I were gay, you’d be the one.” I said, “I’m there!”

Want more Emma? Read the full Advocate interview, here, and check out her interview yesterday over at NPR, here. You can also watch this clip of Michelle Pfeiffer singing “Cool Rider” and imagine her straddling Emma Thompson’s face instead of a ladder.

You’re welcome.

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