Olivia Colman has an Oscar, two Emmys and a boatload of BAFTAs, but she visibly recoils when asked about her acting process.
“All of it sounds pretentious,” Colman admits during a recent Zoom interview. “Whenever you talk about how you do it or how you don’t do it, or whatever, it sounds unbearable. I just like doing it, and ideally I’d like to do it with no one watching ever. But I know that’s not possible.”
But Colman understands what kind of environment results in her best work. It should be loose and collaborative, with no stuffiness. That’s exactly what she got on the set of “Jimpa,” a low-budget family drama in which she stars as a filmmaker who takes her nonbinary teenager (Aud Mason-Hyde) to Amsterdam to visit her aging father (John Lithgow), a prominent gay academic. Sophie Hyde, the film’s writer and director, shared Colman’s ethos.
“I had just done a job where I really didn’t see eye to eye with the director, which is quite unusual for me, and it made me go, I don’t want to do this,” Colman says, without specifying the film in question. “And, and then my agent said, ‘I think you’ll really love Sophie. You’ll love the way Sophie works.’”
After a get-to-know-you meeting on Zoom, Colman signed on and says “Jimpa” helped restore her faith in her art.
“I was given freedom,” Colman says. “It was such a creative process. It’s the antithesis of what I had just done, where I was sort of used like a wall prop, and was told ‘chin up a bit, chin down a bit.’ You know, that’s not acting. It’s not the work I enjoy. And Sophie was the absolute opposite of that.”
For Hyde, whose work includes “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” making “Jimpa” allowed her to process her own family life. Not only did it draw on her own experiences with her parents, but Colman’s child is played by Hyde’s kid.
“I think all my movies are very personal; they’re just a little bit more opaque about it,” Hyde says “This is explicit. I have named the film after my own father, and I have a character that’s a filmmaker in it, and she has a nonbinary teenager, and that non binary teenager is played by my own nonbinary teenager, Aud. So it’s just deeply upfront in its connection to me. But I wanted to look at the relationship between my parents and the stories that I’ve told about them, so I could question whether those stories are the whole truth.”
“Jimpa” premiered at 2025’s Sundance Film Festival, an event that coincided with President Trump’s inauguration. It’s big-hearted story about the LGBTQ+ community arrived just as a new American president was espousing anti-trans rhetoric from the Oval Office. Despite strong reviews and a starry cast, it took a long time for “Jimpa” to find distribution. Kino Lorber, a scrappy indie studio, eventually bought the picture and released it in theaters this month.
“It has been a challenge,” Hyde says. “Do I think it’s political? Yeah, I think we watched the film industry slide away from diversity and play fairly it safe in certain ways. I think queer stories don’t get much airtime. I think stories by and about women don’t get much airtime. We found out last year that there was a lot of pushing queer stories to the side.”
Colman hopes that “Jimpa,” which finds Lithgow and Mason-Hyde’s characters debating their views on gender and sexuality, can encourage people to be more open and accepting.
“There’s an awful lot of mistrust and hatred about things that there is no need to be hateful about,” Colman says. “I love the fact that this film is about learning how to listen to each other without throwing the toys out the crib. I don’t understand how you can get so upset about it when someone is different…It would be great if films about queer stories were mainstream. It would be wonderful. I don’t know why it’s not, but I think people are too nervous.”
Hyde thinks that Hollywood’s anxiety is misplaced and that there’s a growing market for queer stories like “Jimpa.”
“We lost so many queer characters from the TV screens,” Hyde says. “We didn’t see many queer stories told publicly. We certainly saw fewer queer directors working. And then up pops ‘Heated Rivalry’ out of nowhere, a tiny Canadian gay streaming romance and everyone just loves it. Clearly, we are craving these stories.”