HELEN MIRREN
The 74-year-old Oscar-winning actress stars in thriller The Good Liar, about a widow taken in by a charming grifter (Ian McKellen). Here, she opens up about beauty, manservants and the art of lying.
This movie takes multiple twists and turns. What about it hooked you? It was a combination of my co-star Ian McKellen and, of course, the director, Bill Condon. It’s a very interesting script, a wonderful twisty thriller that I thought would be fun to do. It’s nice to do a film about old people that’s not about Alzheimer’s or cancer, if you know what I mean. [Laughs]
You and Ian McKellen have starred together on Broadway, but this is your first film together, which is surprising. It is kind of surprising. I missed the whole Lord of the Rings thing, so it’s great to be in a real chunky, proper movie together.
The con-man movie is such an enduring genre. Why do you think people love to watch swindlers? Because we can all be taken in, as so many of us are so often. Nowadays, with internet scams and fake news, almost everybody who has internet access is the victim of one scam or another. With the development of technology, it’s becoming more and more terrifying how we can have the wool pulled over our eyes.
Do you think being an actor makes a person better at lying?
So many times you see guys on television sobbing and saying, “Please bring my wife back to me, I just want to know she’s all right”, when they know they murdered her a week ago. And yet they are utterly convincing, and they are not actors. They’re not Sir Ian McKellen. [Laughs] Actors, on the contrary, I think would find it very difficult to do that. In the process of acting, actors are always trying to find the truth.
You’re a L’Oréal Paris spokesperson and have talked about not liking the term anti-ageing. Why is it important to you to speak out about beauty? I think it’s terrible, the idea that we all have to look the same way. I find it very depressing, the thought of millions of girls wanting to have exactly the same lips as somebody else. So I think it’s important to promote diversity in looks and shapes and sizes and all the rest of it, and stop excluding people. I think that’s happening, incidentally, and I really applaud it.
You recently arrived at the premiere for your TV show Catherine the Great carried in a sedan chair. Do you frequently travel by manservant? I’ve never been carried by a manservant ever in my life. [Laughs] But I loved every minute. Earlier that day I’d been in a car trying to get from one end of [London’s] Regent Street to the other, and it took me a whole hour, whereas a sedan chair would’ve got me there much quicker. It could be the future of city travel.