Helen Mirren is looking for gold, and Ryan Reynolds can help
Helen Mirren and Ryan Reynolds are on the art hunt
Dame Helen Mirren may be in a class all by herself — but she still pursues egalitarian roles. Last year, Mirren played a restaurateur in The Hundred-Foot Journey after returning as the droll English assassin in the 2013 sequel Red 2. A few years after winning the Oscar for her Elizabeth II portrayal in 2006’s The Queen, she played the madam of a Las Vegas brothel in Love Ranch. Her latest role is yet another departure, in a Mirren kind of way.
Woman in Gold finds Mirren playing the real-life Maria Altmann, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who, in the 1990s, takes the Austrian government to court to reclaim her family’s iconic painting of her aunt looted by the Nazis in the Second World War. Ryan Reynolds is Altmann’s lawyer, Randol Schoenberg, who risks his job to reclaim the valuable painting, Gustav Klimt’s “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I,” referred to as “The Lady in Gold.”
The film, directed by Simon Curtis, is a blend of a courtroom procedural and time-shifting narratives detailing Altmann’s struggles in 1990s Los Angeles and Vienna during the early Nazi occupation of Austria. Mirren “is an actress who will only do a part if it appeals to her,” says Curtis.
“There was a certain amount of wooing that went on in conversation. And later, she had some notes about the script and we worked on that. And as it turned out, her notes were very good, because they strengthened the script.”
With Mirren signed on, Curtis took a leap of faith by hiring Reynolds to play the determined yet decidedly against-type, nerd-like attorney, based on the actual lawyer who was a consultant on the movie. The casting risk paid off.
“Essentially, this film is about an odd couple in the modern world taking on the powers that be,” the director says. “That is the drive of the story. So the chemistry between Helen and Ryan is important because it brings a lot of laughter to their scenes. They worked well together because they admire each other.”