Mirren shows her spooky side
Helen Mirren shows her spooky side as she stars in horror flick ‘Winchester’, out tomorrow, based on the haunting real-life heir to the Winchester rifle fortune
On a bright Los Angeles morning a few days after the Golden Globes (held on January 7), Helen Mirren — dressed impeccably in black while discussing her latest film, the haunted-house tale Winchester — arrived at an unexpected concern: the fate of all those poor Stormtroopers in the Star Wars movies. “I saw [The Force Awakens] and I thought they made a terrible mistake because they took the Stormtrooper’s hat off,” the Oscar-winning star of
The Queen and British national treasure said, feigning shock.
“There was this lovely young actor [John Boyega] — which means one of the Stormtroopers is a human being. And if he’s a human, they’re all human. And you have been indiscriminately killing Stormtroopers for the last [six] Star Wars movies without any consideration to their humanity!”
Themes of violence, death and how those in the world of the living come to terms with their role in it all run throughout the otherwise titillating frights of
Winchester, a supernatural horror film based on the real widowed heir to the Winchester rifle fortune.
Opening tomorrow in the UAE, the CBS Films/Lionsgate release is directed by Peter Spierig and Michael Spierig, whose cult-favourite genre work includes Daybreakers and Predestination. A cult figure of her own among haunted-house enthusiasts, Sarah Winchester spent 38 years and millions of dollars building her famously bizarre Victorian mansion in San Jose at the turn of the 20th century. Urban legend says she was guided in her blueprints by spirits who spoke to her from the beyond.
As Winchester, who lost her husband and young child at an early age, Mirren spends the film in black widow’s lace. It’s an intriguing turn for a grand dame of stage and screen — and also perfectly fitting given the ways Mirren has sought to defy expectations over a five-decade career.
Few moviegoers would expect to see Mirren possessed by malevolent ghosts in a mainstream PG-13 horror movie. Costar Jason Clarke, who plays a (fictional) doctor hired by the Winchester board to declare Sarah Winchester unfit to hold her shares in the company, certainly didn’t.
“But,” he said, “I was happy to be there to see it. There’s this sense of exploration and play in how she plays a scene and a character and the choices that she makes. There’s nothing scared about Helen Mirren, and you see that in the way she goes about her life.”
That confidence wasn’t always so rock-solid, Mirren revealed.
In her 20s, she visited a psychic in the hopes of learning about her future. He instructed her to write down everything he