In “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” on Hulu, a retired school teacher arranges to meet a sex worker at hotel in the hopes of making up for decades of being in a physically unfulfilling marriage. Widowed now for two years, she looks to be in her 60s. Her gentleman caller for hire looks to be in his 20s. “May I kiss you on the cheek?” he asks, a courtly gesture that seems tonally in sync with the brown skirt suit she’s wearing when she opens the door, looking as if she were off to a business meeting post-assignation. She’s not — she’s just a bundle of nerves, repression and pent-up desire.
More of a drama flecked with humor than outright sex comedy, “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” is a two-hander — forgive me if that sounds like a double entendre considering the subject matter, really it’s not! — starring the consistently wonderful Emma Thompson as Nancy Stokes (not her real name) and the smooth as silk Daryl McCormack as Leo Grande (not his real name, either). Their mutual use of pseudonyms preserves their privacy, but there’s a metaphorical subtext, as well: Over a period of subsequent meetings, the mask provided by those fake names drops away to reveal more than either originally intended.
Sex with her husband, Nancy explains early on, was rote and orgasm-free. She knows she’s been missing out. She’s very inexperienced. And now she’s grimly determined to change that. But dropping her proper British exterior just enough to let Leo do his thing — “letting go of the thing inside that judges you,” as she puts it — proves to be a challenge. Nancy has all kinds of retrograde ideas about sex and gender, and he’s not afraid to politely push back them. “You’re conflicted,” he tells her. “Conflicted is interesting.”
