Winning an Oscar is not easy and Emma Thompson is opening up about campaigning to win an Academy Award and how it made her “seriously ill.”
“Both times I had to do the Oscars, I got seriously ill,” Thompson said in an interview with Radio Times. “I found the pressure and glare of it too much. It’s astonishing. And then afterwards, you want to lie down in a dark room. You think, ‘Please don’t ask me any questions or make me talk about myself.’ I quickly developed a sort of allergy to that part of the job.”
Thompson has been nominated for the Academy Awards five times. She has earned two Oscars, the first one in 1993 for Howards End and her second one in 1996 for Sense and Sensibility.
In December 2022, actor James McAvoy said that campaigning for an Oscar “felt cheap” and refused to do so to land a nomination for his work on Atonement.
“I didn’t want to play that part. I’ll push the film, I’ll try and get bums on seats. But the campaign, I felt… I felt cheap,” he told British GQ.
McAvoy did not receive a nod for his acting but Atonement went on to score 7 nominations at the Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Supporting Actress for Saoirse Ronan. The Joe Wright-directed flick took an Oscar for Best Original Score.
Although McAvoy would not campaign for himself, he is more than happy to do it for his fellow co-stars which led Forest Whitaker to get a nod for his work on The Last King of Scotland.
“[With the Last King of Scotland campaign], it was made clear to me that I was doing it for the benefit of other people. And I was totally down with that,” he told the publication. “But by the time Atonement came along, I was 26 or 27, and I was just like, I can’t do it, I’m not doing it, I don’t wanna do it.”