Lea Thompson on Date Night with Her Daughters: 'It's Like Playing Dress-Up!'

Lea Thompson loves date night with her daughters!

“Oh it’s so much fun! It’s like playing dress-up,” the 56-year-old actress said at the Max Mara, Vanity Fair and Women In Film soirée honoring her daughter Zoey Deutch with a Face of the Future award in Los Angeles on Monday night. “We all get dressed up.”

The threesome not only celebrated Zoey’s award, but were also looking forward to the premiere of The Year of Despicable Men — the film written by Thompson’s other daughter Madelyn Deutch and is directed by Thompson and stars Zoey — on Friday at the L.A. film festival.

“This is my first feature that I made from the ground up,” Thompson said. “I inspired Maddie to write the script and, you know, independent features are so difficult to make, so we all rolled up our sleeves. There was no glamour involved at all and we made this movie, so it’s a really fun project.”

Madelyn was able to draw from her own life’s lessons to write the film. “The movie is about a girl name Izzy, she gets out of college and she doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life” the actress and writer explains. “She dates five guys over the course of a year. It’s a total disaster and it couldn’t go worse.”

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As a mom, Thompson says it wasn’t easy to watch Madelyn go through that, but she was always there for her girls during those tough times. “It’s hard to watch them suffer, but they have to suffer,” she said. “There’s nothing I can do. But that’s what’s so fun about the movie and about our life, because when there’s ups and downs we’re here for each other.”

Thompson is sharing one piece of advice that she considers the holy grail when it comes to dating: “Don’t put out on the first date,” the actress says jokingly. (When asked if that was a lesson she learned from experience, she adds, “Oh yeah.”)

Thompson, who is best known for her role as Lorraine Baines in the Back to the Future trilogy, looked stunning in a Max Mara dress with sheer sleeves and a black clutch. Her secret to looking young? “Well you know, there’s two things,” she says. “I don’t party and smoke but I do swear. At a certain point I went ‘there’s one thing I can do, live a very healthy life,’ to help myself look better. At a certain age you can’t go on fumes like that.”

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Her workout routine seems just as simple. “I have to walk, then do yoga and then I have my own little routine that I do at home. This thing called the seven-minute scientific workout,” she said. “It’s weird, but it’s seven minutes and just the idea that it’s seven minutes. I can do anything for seven minutes. It’s not that hard, so I force myself to do my seven minute workout.”

And as for her favorite curse word? “I think sh—,” she joked. “You can actually get away with a few of them on network [TV] now.”