Emma Thompson<\/a> plays a woman grieving her recently deceased husband by ice-fishing in the snow-clad mountains and isolated lakes of Minnesota, when she comes across a kidnapped girl and tries to save her. <\/p>\nGreer plays the kidnapper, an irascible monster known as \u201cPurple Lady\u201d because of the purple jacket she wears, with even more of a vicious streak than her unsure husband, but whose urgency and addiction to fentanyl lollipops suggests her motivations may be complicated.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Greer plays her with a compassion that never gives way to sentimentality, and an expression that dances between bloody single-mindedness and exhaustion. As in many of her roles, she\u2019s the co-star not the star, but it\u2019s an intense and brilliant performance, especially impressive opposite Thompson, who is at her megastar best here, with a perfect Fargo-esque accent.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIn so many movies, we see this beautiful, vulnerable side of the bad guy, right?\u201d says Greer. \u201cWith Purple Lady, we\u2019re not getting to see her at her most vulnerable; we\u2019re seeing her at her worst. But that doesn\u2019t mean she doesn\u2019t have that other side.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
The shoot was long: sunrise to sundown over a month in freezing Finland. \u201cI actually have no memory of being cold. They gave us this weird little heat box between shoots, and then the shoots themselves were very active. I remember things being very wet and slippery though.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
![\"Greer's](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/SEI_266803088.jpg\")
Greer\u2019s role as a kidnapper in \u2018The Dead of Winter\u2019 is a long way from her early romcom roles <\/p>\n
She was \u201cnervous and excited\u201d to work with Thompson. \u201cI think she\u2019s probably the greatest actor I could ever\u2026 I mean she was like, she is like, Number One, and you don\u2019t know what to expect. You think maybe to be that good you just have to stay in character all the time. But luckily Emma didn\u2019t. She was very much Emma in between takes. And the moment I got to the hotel in Finland she was like\u201d \u2013 Greer puts on a British accent \u2013 \u201c\u2018Oh hello, come for dinner with us,\u2019 and we were off to the races.\u201d<\/p>\n
Greer practised her own Minnesotan drawl with her mother-in-law who is from there, but she is herself originally from Michigan, which is not so far away. \u201cMinnesota-lite\u201d, as she calls it.\u00a0 She grew up in Detroit, with two very Catholic parents. Her mum had previously been a nun but was kicked out of the convent for \u201cwild behaviour\u201d. \u201cI mean, wild in the context of a convent. Female friendships were an issue. She became very close with some of the women she met in the convent, women by the way she\u2019s still friends with to this day, but the Mother Superior felt [this] was taking away her devotion to God.\u201d<\/p>\n
Greer was a very shy child. \u201cI had a few friends who I felt very safe with \u2013 we\u2019d read in the corner of class \u2013 but I wasn\u2019t super comfortable in bigger situations. I didn\u2019t really want to be the centre of attention.\u201d When she started ballet, she enjoyed being in front of people and \u201cnot having to work out what to say\u201d, and then it was a hop, skip and a pirouette to acting.\u00a0<\/p>\n
At senior school, she fell in with the theatre crowd and found that making jokes was a good way to get invited to parties. \u201cI learnt at a young age that [\u2026] if you can\u2019t be pretty or popular, you can be funny and people will probably want you around.\u201d\u00a0 Greer also persuaded her parents to let her quit Catholic mass on Sundays and go to the presbyterian church instead (\u201cthe boys were cute\u201d), somewhere her parents actually followed her years later. <\/p>\n
\u201cThere were a lot of rules [in the Catholic church]. I remember being confused about why I had to talk to God through this other person.\u201d Is she religious now? \u201cI don\u2019t want to be like \u2018I\u2019m spiritual but not religious.\u2019 I\u2019ve always hated it when people say that. But yeah, also at my age now, I understand it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
![\"Greer](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/PM_14647555.jpg\")
Greer (right) with Orlando Bloom and Susan Sarandon in the 2005 film \u2018Elizabethtown\u2019 (Photo: Neal Presten)<\/p>\n
After high school, Greer went to The Theatre School at DePaul University, and after graduation moved to LA, where years of bad auditions and rejections eventually led to her feature film debut in the 1998 horror movie Stricken. She has returned to horror several times, in the 2018 Halloween remake alongside Jamie Lee Curtis, and in the 2013 remake of Stephen King\u2019s Carrie alongside Chlo\u00eb Grace Moretz. (She appears in another King film this year, The Long Walk.)\u00a0<\/p>\n
After the romcom golden era drew to a close, her parts varied more and meatier roles came along. She has been in multiple blockbuster franchises: Jurassic World, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Ant-Man, Guardians of the Galaxy, as well as so many popular sitcoms it\u2019s hard to keep count: Arrested Development, Two and a Half Men, The Big Bang Theory. Does she have a favourite?\u00a0<\/p>\n
Tactfully, she answers that her favourite roles are \u201cwomen my age, who really do something\u201d, an answer that nicely relates to The Dead of Winter, of course. But middle-aged women are something Greer does care a lot about.\u00a0A few years back, she co-founded Wile, a naturopathic supplement business for perimenopausal women (she has since sold the business). \u201cIt was a time in my life when I was being told that I should go on antidepressants. I had insomnia, night sweats, I was getting in a bad mood and having a harder time getting out of it. I was talking to doctors and not being taken seriously.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
I wonder if Hollywood is at all accommodating of perimenopause at a time when more women are talking openly about it. \u201cIt\u2019s getting better.\u201d She pauses, thinks, turns serious. \u201cWell, there\u2019s a lot of talk about how accommodating they are, and then\u2026 they\u2019re not. I don\u2019t feel like Hollywood is in general accommodating to anything that is not\u2026 financially lucrative right now. And, erm, I think that there is still a lot of fear about ageing in the business.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
In 2011, Greer married Dean E Johnsen, an executive producer on the talk show Real Time with Bill Maher, and became stepmother to his two children from his previous marriage. \u201cWe did talk about [having our kids] for the first couple of years.\u201d she says. \u201cBut ultimately I decided not to. My step-kids are really awesome and I went from like, nothing, to a very full life of parenting and activities.\u201d (The children were nine and 12 when Greer and Johnsen married and spent equal amounts of time between households).\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI was working too, and I just thought, \u2018Maybe I\u2019m good.\u2019\u201d The blended family are so close that for her 50th birthday, Greer, her husband and the children got matching tattoos of record players while on holiday in Dublin.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Greer hopes that things have changed a bit since she wrote her book about always being the bridesmaid, never the bride, professionally speaking. \u201cIn 2014, I felt like I flew under the radar about 100 per cent; now it\u2019s more like 50 per cent.\u201d But she has retained, she adds, a very thick skin \u2013 so much so that when she, a lifelong bookworm, and a friend recently wrote a novel and had it rejected by publishers, she was OK. \u201cLook, people always talk like rejection only happens to creatives, but putting yourself out there for anything is hard. Even if you\u2019re, like, an accountant, and you present something to your boss and they\u2019re like, \u2018Nope, that\u2019s not what we\u2019re doing\u2019 \u2013 that\u2019s hard!\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
A knack for finding unlikely parallels between accountancy and celebrity is one of those things that makes Greer immensely fun company. She can certainly do those meatier roles, but if there ever is a great romcom revival, I\u2019d happily see her as the best friend again. Or ideally, this time, the star.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Dead of Winter is in cinemas from 26 September<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Judy Greer isn\u2019t the best friend you think she is. \u201cPeople see me and they\u2019re like, \u2018God, you\u2019re…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":163204,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[49,48,36874,84561,84,2977,3079,393,394],"class_list":{"0":"post-163203","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mental-health","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-emma-thompson","11":"tag-film-interviews","12":"tag-health","13":"tag-interviews","14":"tag-marvel-cinematic-universe","15":"tag-mental-health","16":"tag-mentalhealth"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163203"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163203\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/163204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Greer](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/SEI_266512798.jpg\")
Greer (right) with Jennifer Garner in \u201913 Going on 30\u2032 in 2004 (Photo: Columbia Tri-Star) <\/p>\n