Emma Thompson Says Alan Rickman Was ‘So Happy’ to Finally Play Someone ‘Heroic and Nice’ in ‘Sense and Sensibility’

Emma Thompson was glad to help audiences see Alan Rickman in a different way.

Thompson, 66, opened up about some of her movies in a video for GQ. In it, she looked back at 1995’s Sense and Sensibility, which recently turned 30. In the movie, an adaptation of the Jane Austen novel of the same name, she starred as Elinor Dashwood, a level-headed young woman who tries to lead her family after her father’s death. Hugh Grant played her love interest Edward Ferrars and Kate Winslet played her sister Marianne. Rickman, who died in 2016 at the age of 69, played Colonel Brandon, who befriends the Dashwoods and falls for Marianne. Marianne’s other love interest, John Willoughby, was played by Greg Wise; he and Thompson met on the film and married in 2003. 

“It was a very happy film,” Thompson said in the video. “But in terms of the cast, we were so lucky because they were all, in a way, theater people.” She called Winslet, who was then 19, “untried,” adding, “I mean, she’d done Heavenly Creatures, but that was it.” She continued, “And she was heaven on earth and still is, you know, just completely normal person.”

As for Grant — who Thompson said she thinks she’s worked with more than any other actor — she said, “I kept on saying, ‘God, Hugh, you’re so grumpy. You’ve got the energy of a welk.’ And he would respond quite well to that. But actually, I think it was nice for him to do something like that at that point.” Sense and Sensibility came right after Grant, now 65, broke out in Four Weddings and a Funeral.

Then there was Rickman. Thompson said, “Alan Rickman, God rest him, he was so happy to be playing someone heroic and nice ‘cause he’d been he was so fed up with people wanting him to be the Sheriff of Nottingham.”

Rickman has received a BAFTA nomination for playing the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, released in 1991. His film debut came in 1988’s Die Hard, in which he played the now-iconic villain Hans Gruber. Thompson and Rickman (and Grant) later starred together in Love, Actually, where Rickman played a cheating husband to Thompson’s Joni Mitchell-loving character. Thompson and Rickman both also appeared in the Harry Potter films, where he famously played Professor Snape and she played Professor Trelawney. Rickman and Thompson remained close friends throughout his life. 

Of the Sense and Sensibility cast, Thompson said, “They just came on and were those people and it was as though they knew Austin personally, you know, she’d drawn from them rather the other way round. So it was a group of actors who understood one another, you know, and there were no egos to speak of. So there was no one to navigate. So we could just be.”

Thompson also reflected on director Ang Lee, who was making his English-language debut for the film. “He was just extraordinary,” she said. 

“On the first day when we were shooting, me and Hugh Grant were shooting something. At the end of it, we said, ‘Oh, actually, Ang, you know, can we do that again? Can we just walk we just want to walk this direction? Can we just try it a slightly different way?’ And he reacted very well and quietly,” she remembered.

She later “discovered” that a big deal that was because he told them that in Taiwan, “The director is God” and just moves around the actors. “They’re just pieces,” she remembered him saying. “He said it’s absolutely not collaborative. And actually, he loved it. He loved the collaboration.”

Thompson won an Oscar for her adapted screenplay, becoming the first (and still only) person to win Oscars for acting and writing. She and Winslet were also both nominated for their performances in the film. 

A new Sense and Sensibility adaptation is in the works from Netflix, starring Daisy Edgar-Jones.