She likes how this turns out

EMMA THOMPSON is one of those rare artists who makes a living as both an actress and a writer. In fact, she’s the only person to win an Oscar in both fields, the acting Oscar for “Howards End,” a screenplay Oscar for “Sense and Sensibility.” So when her pal, producer Lindsay Doran, sent Thompson a script in which she could use her acting skill to play a cranky, self-destructive novelist searching for an ending to her new book, she pretty much had her hook, line and sinker.

“After I’d read the first five pages, I immediately called her and said, ‘I’ll do it,’ ” Thompson says, curled up on the couch in her hotel suite here after a long day spent promoting the film -- aptly titled “Stranger Than Fiction” -- at the Toronto Film Festival. “Only long after I said yes did Lindsay tell me the screenwriter had actually written the part for me.”

Penned by newcomer Zach Helm and directed by Marc Forster (“Finding Neverland”), the movie is a sly, refreshingly original comedy about a writer trying to kill off a character who is, as bad luck would have it, a real person. He is a solitary IRS agent named Harold Crick, played by Will Ferrell, who as he is brushing his teeth one morning begins to hear Thompson’s voice narrating his every action.

There are lots of other slyly funny characters in the film, including a caffeine-fueled English professor (Dustin Hoffman), whom Crick seeks out for literary advice, and a tattooed, tax-delinquent baker (Maggie Gyllenhaal) who spies a soft heart beneath Crick’s nerdy exterior. The result is a comedy that manages to feel both kooky and Kafkaesque as Crick struggles to wrest control of his life away from his creator before she kills him off.

Writers don’t always make for the most interesting people on screen, but Thompson manages to find a way to capture her character’s messy interior life with a few clever flourishes, aided by a rumpled wardrobe that never changes. “In the script, Zach describes her as a woman who looks like she’s been crumpled into a ball,” she explains. “So we decided that she would always wear the same clothes. After all, she’s practically in a state of clinical depression.”

Thompson added another touch that seems to perfectly illustrate how much her character lives in her own faraway world. When she finishes a cigarette, she takes out a tissue, spits into it and then uses it to snuff out the cigarette. Where on earth did that come from, I wondered.

Thompson says that Doran had told her of a friend who got in the habit of putting her cigarettes out in a tissue, then “secreting” them, as Thompson puts it, somewhere in her clothes. “I thought that was a fabulously strange habit,” she says, putting her bare feet up on a coffee table, revealing a set of toenails painted deep purple. “But I was worried that the first time I put the cigarette into the Kleenex I would burst into flames on the spot and become a human torch. So I came up with the spitting idea.”

She laughs. “There was just something about it that was so disgusting. Whenever I did it on set I got a big rise out of the crew, who thought it was especially vile.”

Thompson says she has entirely different writing habits from the novelist in the film. For starters, she doesn’t use a computer or a typewriter. “I just don’t like the look of a computer screen and I can’t really type, so I handwrite everything.”

I must have looked startled, because she quickly adds, “But I have really good handwriting, so when I’m doing a script I give the typist something that is quite neatly written.”

She spends a lot of time writing because, despite years of great performances in film, she rarely gets offered any meaty parts. Coming in a film that could be a commercial hit when it’s released later this fall, thanks to Ferrell’s marquee value and what promises to be a raft of good reviews, Thompson’s role may remind audiences of her deft touch as an actress. She says dryly that she hasn’t worked much lately, apart from the title role in “Nanny McPhee,” which she wrote for herself. “I get offered a lot of roles as the wife, which, as you can imagine, is often not the most interesting part in the picture.”

The great thing about interviewing Thompson is that she is the rare actor who talks in complete sentences, doesn’t litter her conversation with the word “like” and can even do an unerring impression of director Jim Sheridan’s Irish brogue, having worked with him years ago on “In the Name of the Father.” She says it was Sheridan who gave her the best screenwriting advice, telling her that the end of a script should have the pull of a magnet, drawing the reader or filmgoer ever more powerfully to its ultimate end.

“Stranger Than Fiction” has that tug, offering a moving illustration of a writer wrestling with both conscience and compromise. “For me, there is a sadness to the end of the story, not because it’s sad but because it’s so moving,” Thompson says quietly. “Perhaps it has to do with the power of compassion. Without giving anything away, there’s something so lonely about this writer’s final decision that feels very real, especially in our narcissist world where we’ve gotten so used to too much too soon.”

Thompson shakes her head. “I’ve never been a big fan of easy, happy endings. It’s like having milk chocolate. It’s too simple. I like dark, bitter chocolate. When I hear all that happily-ever-after business, I want to say, ‘Oh, bugger off!’ ”

The Big Picture is reporting from Toronto this week. To read more of our coverage, go to latimes.com/toronto.

patrick.goldstein@latimes.com