Emma Thompson stars in Netflix’s new film “Matilda,” based mostly on the musical of the identical title which, in flip, is predicated upon Roald Dahl’s 1988 novel. In the movie, Thompson stars as Miss Agatha Trunchbull, the devious, horrible headmistress of Matilda’s college who brazenly hates the youngsters she’s in cost of. Miss Trunchbull has a number of songs in the present, which could go away viewers questioning if Thompson did her personal singing for the half. Yes, Thompson is de facto singing in “Matilda.”
Thompson and the remainder of the forged had been really live-singing on set, she stated throughout a Dec. 7 interview on “The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon.” During her look, the host performed a clip of her singing “The Smell of Rebellion,” throughout which she climbs a big construction. She defined, “That last note, my legs were shaking because I was on top of that 80 foot structure with really nothing but a small wire holding me to the thing and I thought, ‘Please don’t.’ But there’s nothing you can do. You just hit the note and go for it.” She additionally sings the tune “The Hammer” in the movie.
Thompson’s musical chops really run very deep. Way again in 1985, her huge break got here when she starred in the 1985 West End revival of the musical “Me and My Girl.” And again in 2017, she performed Mrs. Potts in the live-action “Beauty and the Beast.” Thompson-as-Potts sings a number of occasions in the movie, together with performing the title tune.
Director Matthew Warchus informed the LA Times on Dec. 14 about casting Thompson, “We needed somebody who was a great dramatic and comedic actress and could also sing. But we also needed someone who could convey that, at the core of all of Trunchbull’s exaggerations, is a crushingly low self-esteem.”
“Trunchbull was clearly a big, tall child who was very aggressive, and she was just horribly treated when she was little,” Thompson stated in a TheaterMania interview on Dec. 9. “So, it’s not children she hates; it’s her own vulnerability. It’s her own child within. As soon as I got hold of that idea, it was so much easier.” She known as herself a “softy” and defined that entering into the position was positively a “challenge.” “She’s quite a big character to pull off and I really didn’t know whether I was gonna be able to do it,” she added.
The different hardest half, she stated, was that the youngsters weren’t in any respect terrified of her. “Apart from anything else for them, I represent Nanny McPhee, so they just all ran towards me going ‘Nanny McPhee! Nanny McPhee!'” she informed TheaterMania, referencing the 2005 kids’s movie. “And Matthew Warchus kept saying, ‘Could you please stop hugging the children? They’re supposed to be frightened of you.’ It didn’t work. But it didn’t have to work, because children are the most wonderful actors. They didn’t need to be really frightened of me, because they were perfectly capable of acting it. So we were safe.”
“Matilda” is in restricted theaters now and begins streaming on Netflix on Dec. 25.
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