When Oscar-winning actress Emma Thompson joined a group of protesters near a proposed fracking site earlier this week, the farmer who leases the English land apparently didn’t take kindly to their presence.
Emma Thompson at the protest (Image source: YouTube)
Emma Thompson at the protest (Image source: YouTube)
As Thompson and her sister Sophie took part in a satirical “bake-off” under a tent to highlight cuisine created with renewable energy for a Greenpeace video, the farmer added his own flavor to the ingredients.
Manure.
Image source: YouTube
Image source: YouTube
Several videos caught the farmer driving a truck in circles around the small encampment Wednesday, spraying liquid manure toward the protesters.
Image source: YouTube
Image source: YouTube
Thompson was under the tent the entire time and wasn’t hit, but the BBC said others with her indeed were in the line of fire.
“Well, it’s a very powerful message, isn’t it? Whoof!” Thompson told the BBC later, waving her hands toward her nose. “And I was doing me frosting at the time, and I just said, ‘Keep calm and carry on frosting. That’s what I did.’”
Image source: YouTube
Image source: YouTube
Protesters have been banned from the area since a 2014 court injunction, the Guardian reported. And others besides the farmer weren’t happy that Thompson and company violated it.
“There are a lot of jobs at stake potentially,” Lee Petts of the North West Energy Taskforce told the BBC. “And that may not mean much to Emma Thompson, as one of the world’s most highly paid actors, or to Greenpeace, but it means a lot to local people that want jobs in place.”
Here’s the Greenpeace video showing Thompson and her sister’s reactions to the farmer spraying the manure: