Emma Thompson loves to keep us on our toes. Over the course of her career, she’s run the gamut from sensible (Sense and Sensibility; Good Luck to You, Leo Grande) to silly (the Harry Potter series, The Meyerowitz Stories) and everything in between. But her latest role is yet another subversion. In Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical, she takes on her most unsavory character yet: the cruel headmistress, Miss Trunchbull. “I have played unpleasant people before,” she tells Netflix. “But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve had an opportunity to branch out into evil, which I’ve enjoyed very, very much.”
How very, very wicked.
Thompson, a two-time Oscar winner and five-time nominee, says that she considered previous Trunchbull interpretations before putting her own unique spin on the iconic bully. “I was really scared because Bertie Carvel, who originated the part in the musical, was such a brilliant actor, and he’s big and tall,” says Thompson, who also shows off her singing chops in the new film. “So I thought, ‘Oh, I don’t know how I’m going to follow that.’ It was such a challenge, and I suppose that’s what drew me to it — the challenge of it.”
That challenge required an extensive physical transformation: an extension of her chin, a brightening of her blood vessels, and a tight and severe cinch of her hair. Every day, she would arrive on set at 5 a.m., where she was greeted by a team of six people who labored for two hours applying her prosthetics and getting her fully into costume.
But an even bigger challenge was getting into the mindset of a sadist. “I thought, ‘Well, the only way that she could have ended up being that cruel is if she’d been very cruelly treated as a very young person,’” Thompson says. “So I went and created that and based her on the childhood of Edith Sitwell, [who was] an early-20th-century poet.” (During her life, Sitwell spoke movingly of being mistreated by her parents.)
Despite the layered backstory that she created for the character, Thompson admits that Miss Trunchbull isn’t the kind of teacher she would ever want to have. In fact, she says that she would probably handle things similarly to how Matilda does in the movie. “If I’d seen a teacher mistreating a child, I would’ve spoken up, because I did,” she says. “At primary school, if children were bullying other children, I would generally step in because I just couldn’t bear it. I can’t bear cruelty of any kind.” Unless, of course, it’s part of her job description.
