‘We’ve got our Trunchbull’: how Darth Vader inspired Emma Thompson’s headmistress character in Netflix’s Matilda the Musical
- British actress plays the terrifying Trunchbull in Netflix version of the Broadway show, and needed 3 hours of hair, make-up and costume work to film each day
- ‘When Trunchbull comes on set, everybody’s pulse has to quicken’ as if she were a female Darth Vader, the director told himself, and Thompson didn’t disappoint
In Roald Dahl’s 1988 children’s novel Matilda, Agatha Trunchbull is the formidable headmistress of Crunchem Hall elementary school, where she swings a “naughty” student by her pigtails and forces another to devour an entire chocolate cake.
Thompson disappears into the role of the tyrannical Trunchbull in Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical on Netflix (which begins streaming on Christmas Day), a film adaptation of the 2013 Tony-winning Broadway show directed by Matthew Warchus. She recalls her first time seeing herself in full make-up and costume.
“It was quite shocking,” Thompson says. “But my main concern was that it would work for Matthew and the team.
“They had had 12 years of brilliant Trunchbulls [on Broadway and in the West End] – the first one of whom I’d seen and admired so much, I’d written him a fan letter: Bertie Carvel. He’s very tall and muscular, and I thought, ‘Gosh, that’s a big ask. How am I going to live up to that?’”
