Leisure suits Mirren
Oscar-winning actress plays retiree seeking big adventure on the road
Helen Mirren has been married twice to Donald Sutherland on screen. The first was in the 1990 biopic Bethune: The Making of a Hero, with Sutherland as Canadian physician Norman Bethune. They’re back together in The Leisure Seeker, playing a retired couple on one last trip in their rickety RV, much to their kids’ dismay.
Mirren says the road-trip genre has long skewed young. “The reality of who’s out there in their RVs is mostly retired people, because they’ve got the time and maybe the income to do it,” she says. “And Americans are wonderful travellers. They love to travel! They love to pack up and move. They don’t think anything of driving six or seven or eight hours.”
Sutherland, 10 years her senior, was already a movie star in 1990, though she’s since caught up, as it were, with an Oscar win for The Queen in 2006, and three more nominations. (Sutherland, never nominated, received an honorary Oscar this year.)
“He comes with that amazing body of work and experience,” Mirren says of her co-star.
“He’s worked with incredible directors. Which can be rather intimidating. But in fact he carries with him a great vulnerability and great generosity. And we just got on great ... I think it’s because of him, because he makes me laugh.”
She has less kind words to say about the 1975 Winnebago Indian that is their ride in the movie. “The brakes were really bad. The gears were really bad. It wouldn’t go up hills at all, and going downhill was scary because the brakes weren’t working. It was quite a hair-raising experience. And we spent hours in that Winnebago.”
The Leisure Seeker is the English-language debut of Paolo Virzì. An Italian director with British and Canadian co-stars made for an interesting counterpoint to the movie’s setting. It was filmed in the summer of 2016, and often plays out against the backdrop of rallies for then-presidential-hopeful Donald Trump.
Mirren, speaking at the Toronto International Film Festival last autumn, was surprised at how that had turned out.
“Maybe this was going to be just an interesting blip on the landscape of American politics,” she remembers thinking. “Or as it turned out to be ... a profound sea change in American politics. I think Paolo saw it as a sort of curiosity, as an outsider. … Nowhere else in the world do you see that — politics as a sort of sports event.”
It’s encapsulated in a scene in the film in which Sutherland’s character, suffering from dementia, gets caught up in the excitement of a Trump rally. Mirren reminds him that he’s a lifelong Democrat. “Don’t you remember how mad you got when I said I was going to vote for Reagan?” She plucks the Trump/Pence pin from his jacket and throws it on the ground — a move Bethune’s wife would probably understand. Not to mention Sutherland’s real wife, given his support of Barack Obama in 2008.