It could have been the greatest love story since Love, Actually. Actress Emma Thompson recently recounted—during a guest appearance on Norwegian talk show Skavlan—that she once received an unprompted phone call from Donald Trump, asking her on a date. (Admittedly pretty tame, as far as unasked-for “romantic” gestures from our current president are counted.) According to the story, Thompson was in her trailer on the set of the 1998 political drama Primary Colors, when her phone suddenly rang. “So I lift up the phone—‘Hi, it’s Donald Trump here.’”
Trump—who’d recently started the process of divorcing from his second wife, Marla Maples—was apparently calling to offer Thompson a hotel room. “‘Yeah, I just wondered if I could offer you some accommodation in one of my Trump Towers. They’re really comfortable.’” Apparently he thought that he and the then-recently divorced actress—who he’d never met—“would get along very well—maybe have dinner sometime.” Thompson politely declined the offer, although she now says she wishes she had. “Think of the stories!” she laughed, although it turns out that most of the stories about Donald Trump being alone with a woman he’s attracted to aren’t actually much fun to think about at all.
Of course, the weirdest part of all this is who Thompson was playing at the time, an observation that potentially casts the entire 2016 election in a very different light.