Emma Thompson’s daughter was ‘very excited’ for them to star in film together

Dame Emma Thompson’s daughter Gaia Wise has said she was “very excited” for them to star alongside one another in new action thriller The Dead Of Winter.

The young actress is also daughter to actor Greg Wise, who married Dame Emma in 2003, several years after they met during filming for the 1995 period drama Sense And Sensibility.

In the new film, directed by Brian Kirk and shot in Finland, Gaia plays a younger version of Dame Emma’s character Barb, a woman, travelling alone through snowbound northern Minnesota who accidentally interrupts the kidnapping of a teenage girl.

Reflecting on what it was like to work together, Gaia told the PA news agency at the film’s UK premiere: “I was just very excited. I think I was also excited that we could be together for this amount of time, because I stayed in Finland the whole time we were filming.

“Because I was on call, it was like, if the weather didn’t quite permit a scene they might call us in to do something, so it was always up in the air.

“But I just wanted to be there, not just to support her, but to be there for the whole thing, because I just wanted to sort of see it and see our character as well.

“Professionally, just watching somebody who I’ve learned so much from do something quite alien was amazing and made me go, ‘Okay. So this is possible’.”

Dame Emma said she was “shocked” by how “violently cold” it was while filming for the movie, written by Nicholas Jacobson-Larson and Dalton Leeb, in Finland.

She told PA: “It always starts with a script, this brilliant script by these two Minnesotan writers, who based the story on all the women that they know in Minnesota.

“These incredibly tough, resilient, imaginative, resourceful, funny, witty women that they grew up with.

“So it’s a sort of new kind of hero. It’s a female hero who’s not some sort of special ops person, who has special skills.

“She’s just doing what she does, as it were, as a matter of course. She doesn’t feel heroic. She’s just doing what’s necessary.”

She added: “I took a month to assimilate really, acclimatise to Finland because when I arrived it was -29 degrees. So it was really violently cold.”

The Dead Of Winter will be released on September 26.