Daryl McCormack

Good Luck To You, Leo Grande review

Emma Thompson''s new film shifts the focus from standard Hollywood sex scenes that focus on young people and only one way of getting intimate.

Good Luck To You, Leo Grande review

While you might need the help of somebody else to get to that place, freedom is a decision that ultimately comes from within.

Good Luck To You, Leo Grande review

A chamber piece set in the bedchamber depicts an older woman in search of sexual pleasure.

Good Luck To You, Leo Grande review

Emma Thompson dramedy is a refreshing bedroom romp.

The films showing sex workers in a new light

New films like Good Luck To You, Leo Grande are challenging cinematic tropes about sex workers. It's a refreshing change.

Good Luck To You, Leo Grande review

Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack star in this feel-good sex comedy, in which a middle-aged woman solicits a sex worker. Katy Brand writes and Sophie Hyde directs.

Good Luck To You, Leo Grande review

Truthfully, the film is almost not a film at all, but a stage two-hander director Sophie Hyde works hard to give big-screen zing.

In a twist on the usual May-December romantic fiction trope, Good Luck To You, Leo Grande casts Emma Thompson as a retired religious education teacher who hires a sex worker to explore her never awakened sexual desires. Her gigolo of choice is about as far as it's possible to get from the sleazy, damaged hustler familiar from Jon Voight's turn in Midnight Cowboy though. In a modern age where high-end sex workers sell an experience via an app (and expect a modicum of understanding and respect from their clients), Thompso''s character, the pseudonymous Nancy, first meets the titular Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack) in a smart hotel room, where she babbles nervously about his impressive vocabulary and her own sexual deficiencies while he calmly talks to her like a therapist trying to work through why she's never been able to achieve an orgasm.

It's all very civilised and director Sophie Hyde, working from a script by British TV comedian and writer Katy Brand, shoots it like a British romantic comedy, with some of the attendant stiltedness those films have. But as the characters get more intimate, so too does the film, with McCormack and, especially, Thompson cutting through the film's more mechanical execution to deliver rounded portraits of people yearning for human connection in a judgmental world.

Good Luck To You, Leo Grande review

Deftly handled direction from Sophie Hyde and a thoroughly impressive dual performance from Emma Thompson 
and Daryl McCormack enlivens an electric script, tackling taboo sexual subjects with wit, flair and welcome realism.

Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack interview

Dame Emma Thompson wants to talk about sex. It's all because of her new film Good Luck To You, Leo Grande. In it she plays a widow in search of sexual fulfilment. Relative newcomer Daryl McCormack plays the sex worker she hires to help her in her quest. The BBC's Alex Stanger went to meet them.