Marc Malkin Senior Film Awards, Events & Lifestyle EditorWhen Daryl McCormack told his mom he landed a starring role in Searchlight Pictures’ “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” he wasn’t sure what to tell her about first: the character he was playing or who his co-star was. “I think I said, ‘I’m playing a sex worker,’ the 29-year-old Irish actor recalls. “And she said, ‘Oh?’ But then I said, ‘But it’s with Emma Thompson — you know, ‘Love Actually.’”In the Sophie Hyde-directed “Leo Grande,” which bows on Hulu on June 17, Thompson plays Nancy, a widowed schoolteacher who hires a sex worker named Leo (McCormack) to help her achieve her first orgasm.To prepare for the drama’s most intimate sex scenes, a private rehearsal was arranged, with Hyde, Thompson and McCormack sitting in a circle and discussing their bodies and sexuality while also slowly taking off pieces of their clothing. “I remember at one point the three of us standing butt naked in the room, and Emma just went, ‘I feel we’re all being held by something bigger here.

It really feels like we are meant to somehow tell this story,’” McCormack recalls. “And what felt so significant was that we, the three of us, had to go on a journey with regards to our bodies, with regards to our sexuality, with regards to all of that, within ourselves and do some justice to this film.” McCormack, who plays Isaiah Jesus on “Peaky Blinders,” is working on pickup shots for Sharon Horgan’s upcoming untitled Apple TV+ series before heading to Germany to shoot “The Tutor” opposite Julie Delpy and Richard E.

Grant.“I said to my therapist many months ago that I really want to grow in terms of my career and person and responsibility.

Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack Shed Their Clothes — and an Intimacy Coordinator — for Sex Worker Story ‘Good Luck to You, Leo Grande’

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