The new film "Saving Mr. Banks" is earning acclaim for its warts-and-all depiction of the infamously fractured relationship between Walt Disney and "Mary Poppins" scribe P.L. Travers, but some reviewers have pointed to the fact that the film glosses over Travers' alleged bisexuality.
Emma Thompson, who nabbed a Golden Globe nomination for her portrayal of Travers, acknowledged this point in a new interview with The Advocate's Brandon Voss, calling the "Poppins" author "a real soul searcher."
"You can’t fit everything about a person’s life into two hours," Thompson said of the movie. Pointing to Travers' close (and possibly intimate) relationship with close friend Madge Burnand, she added, "'Saving Mr. Banks' is about a woman’s creative, artistic life. It’s a relief, quite frankly, because when is a movie about a woman not about her love life?"
Calling her gay fanbase "a source of great pride and happiness," Thompson, 54, said she would certainly be open to playing a lesbian character on the big screen. As it turns out, she even has another Academy Award winner in mind for her love interest.
"Well, I met Sandy Bullock at an awards thing a couple years ago, and she said to me, 'If I were gay, you’d be the one,'" she recalled. "I said, 'I’m there!'"
Read Thompson's full interview with The Advocate here.
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