The Sheep Detectives, Emma Thompson Interview

I play a woman called Lydia Harbottle who is, um, the lawyer to George Hardy the shepherd played by Hugh Jackman, um, and I come at a crucial moment in the plot, um, to deliver news about the will that he has left behind. She sort of is a shark in disguise, but she's also very just; she's not a bad person. I mean, she's very much, you know, in service to a plot or a... which is the story which is really about the sheep being brilliant. 

One of the greatest things about working on this is to work with Craig Mazin's script because he's such a wonderful writer, and it's fantastic to go from somebody who can write such dark and deep things as Chernobyl and then, you know, turn his hand to something that is also incredibly deep but which has humor and humanity and profundity, and it, you know, examines as well this very close link between humans and animals, or human animals and other animals. We have the most extraordinarily brilliant cast; of course the great Nick, Nicholas Braun, um, who's playing Officer Tim Derry, um, who's the the little town's only police officer, a very diffident young man who hasn't quite grown into himself and who actually finds his mojo right at the end of the movie, which is it which he's just we've just done two days with him and he's played it just wonderfully. We have the great Molly Gordon, um, from Booksmart and Theater Camp, who's just the most fantastic, um, actor and writer, so she's got that extra kind of quality. 

We're sort of inserted into the story in and out; it's not this film is not about us, it's about, you know, Hugh and it's about the sheep solving this, so we're kind of, um, we're flavors that are kind of being braided into this beautiful story. I get a lot of information from, for instance, the costume and, um, our wonderful costume designer Rosa's created these extraordinarily beautiful tailored, um, and incredibly, um, cut suits; it's sort of architecture, really, more than clothing, and, um, they're in very bright colors, so whilst they're power suits, they're also in very friendly colors. So, um, that gave me the notion that perhaps Lydia was the sort of person who was very powerful but was also determined not to come across as too, um, too strong. 

We are also very lucky to have the the extraordinary Kyle Balda, who's of course responsible for those brilliant Despicable Me movies, um, and this is amazingly his first live-action movie, and he's just being—I mean, you wouldn't know it, you absolutely wouldn't know it. He's delightful, he knows what to do, what to say; he's just been a delight to work with, really a delight, and a lovely man with a great sense of exactly what he wants and so, so calm.