Emma Thompson jokingly scolded fellow actor Stanley Tucci for missing their opportunity for a romance after confessing he used to have a big crush on her.
The British acting icon only recently learned that her Beauty and the Beast co-star had lusted after her more than two decades ago, and she playfully wonders what could have been had Stanley made a move years ago.
"He never told me back in the day, I might not have been married!" she exclaimed on breakfast show Good Morning America. "Something could have come of it! It's no good telling people 25 years after the fact! That's just a waste of opportunity!"
"I was appalled," Emma continued, in mock shock. "I said, 'Why didn't you say? I'm married with children now, it's too late!'"
Emma, 59, was previously married to Kenneth Branagh for six years until 1995, while in 2003, she went on to wed Greg Wise, the father of her daughter Gaia and adopted son Tindyebwa.
Tucci, 57, has also been married twice - first to Kate Tucci, who died of breast cancer in 2009, and now to literary agent Felicity Blunt, who he met through her actress sister Emily - his co-star in The Devil Wears Prada.
Stanley and Emma have since had the chance to play husband and wife onscreen in tense drama The Children Act, in which they portray a couple struggling with marital issues under the pressure of her job as a High Court judge.
The film, based on the Ian McEwan book of the same name, includes a segment in which Stanley's character proposes the pair embrace an open marriage in a bid to get his wife to pay more attention to him.
The scenes sparked an interesting conversation between the actors and their director Richard Eyre about intimacy in marriage.
"We had a long conversation about that actually...," she recalled. "How long do you not have sex for 'til he gets to the point where he goes, 'OK, I'm just gonna have sex with somebody else,' and everybody had different ideas about that.
"Some people said, 'Well, you know, 10 minutes...!' and other people say six months, 11 months... It was very interesting... because everyone's got a different idea. How do we manage our long-term relationships, not only emotionally but also sexually, and we don't really talk about it. We live in that romantic, well, you've got married, happily ever after, but actually, marriage is the beginning of the journey."
The Children Act is released in the U.S. next week (ends14Sep18).
