The Hollywood star Emma Thompson opened up about turning 60 in a new interview, saying that it was “a watershed” moment that made her feel “free.”

“I think what I feel principally now is free,” Thompson, 62, told British Vogue.

“I am uncomfortable trying to look slim and fashionable because I am not, and now it’s allowed that I am not,” she added. “I fancy a bit of fun.”

Thompson went on to say that she doesn’t sweat the small stuff anymore, including death.

“I’m not really scared anymore,” she explained. “Well, I get scared … I feel like I could die at any time. Then COVID turned up. I’ve had pneumonia, so I thought I’d better be careful, but no one’s through the woods yet. Anyone could die of this thing. I feel interestingly impermanent. Which is odd given I’ve been a permanent fixture here for decades.”

Thompson has long been open about what it is like to age in Hollywood.

“The age thing is insane,” she told Vulture back in 2015. “It was ever thus. I remember saying years and years ago, when I was 35, that they’d have to exhume somebody to play my leading man. Nothing’s changed in that regard. If anything, it’s got worse.”

Thompson then recalled getting flack for her age difference with Hugh Grant, who played her love interest in their 1995 film Sense and Sensibility.

“I remember somebody saying to me that I was too old for Hugh Grant, who’s like a year younger than me,” she remembered at the time. “I said, ‘Do you want to go take a flying leap?'”

In her new interview, Thompson talked about the challenges that older women face.

“My passion for women’s rights has driven me all my life, and so, of course, I am bewildered when women of my age are insulted and threatened and fired because they haven’t said the right thing. I fear that kind of event,” she said. “So both feelings are true – trans rights are as incontrovertibly necessary and desirable as women’s rights. The space in which we discuss and put these rights into process must be made safe for everyone. I guess that’s the bottom line, or at least one of them. Onwards.”