Actor Emma Thompson has revealed the surprise phone call she received from Donald Trump, which she jokes could have changed the course of history.
The British actor said Trump phoned her in 1998 to ask her out on a date, on the same day her divorce from actor/filmmaker Kenneth Branagh was finalised.
Speaking at the Locarno film festival in Switzerland, Thompson told the audience she was in her trailer on the filmset of Primary Colours, a roman a clef co-starring John Travolta as a fictionalised Bill Clinton, when the phone rang.
“I was in my trailer one day while we were making that movie, and the phone rang, and it was Donald Trump,” said Thompson, star of such films as Love Actually, Sense and Sensibility and Harry Potter.
“I didn’t know the number of the phone. No one had rung me on it before, and I said, ‘Hello.’
‘Hi, this is Donald Trump here’, and I thought it was a joke. And then I said, ‘How can I help you?’, thinking maybe he needed directions.
“Then he said: ‘I’d love you to come and stay at one of my beautiful places. Maybe we could have dinner’.
“I said: ‘Well, that’s very sweet. Thank you so much. I’ll get back to you’.”
Trump had announced his separation from his second wife, Marla Maples, the previous year and Thompson had just finalised her divorce from Branagh.
“I realised my divorce decree had come through that day,” she said. “I bet he’s got people looking for a nice divorcee to take out on his arm.
“And he found the number in my trailer. I mean, that’s stalking,” she said.
Thompson, a lifelong Labour supporter in Britain, joked about what could have been if she had taken up Trump’s offer.
“I could have gone on a date with Donald Trump, and then I would have a story to tell,” she said.
“I could have changed the course of American history.”
Thompson publicly backed Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 and 2019, and then switched her vote to the Woman’s Equality Party for London’s City Hall elections in 2016.
In 2000, she kicked off donations to Activate Collective, a support fund aimed at helping women from all backgrounds enter politics.
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