One of the best exchanges in Helen Mirren’s new film, an enjoyably faithful adaptation of Richard Osman’s zillion-selling cozy crime caper The Thursday Murder Club, has fun with one of her least favorite words. Leaving their deluxe retirement home to do some sleuthing nearby, the former nurse Joyce (Celia Imrie) cheerfully suggests to the former spy Elizabeth (Mirren) that they are “bright-eyed, feisty old lady detectives” like the ones you get on Sunday night TV. Elizabeth, dressed for the occasion in a gilet and headscarf to give her a teasing resemblance to Mirren’s Oscar-winning title role in The Queen, snaps back with regal froideur: “Never use the words ‘bright-eyed feisty old ladies’ in my presence again.”
Sitting in a suite in Claridge’s to promote her film, Mirren is dressed in a stylishly simple white shirt. She’s good humored; you might even (cautiously) say bright-eyed. But her reaction to hearing the f-word quoted back to her is scarcely less absolute than her forthright character’s.
“Oh, I loathe the word ‘feisty’,” she says, “absolutely loathe. I always have. I hated it as a middle-aged woman. People would say: ‘Oh, she’s very feisty.’ Nobody calls men feisty, you know?” Mirren turned 80 in July. Yet although this former stage Cleopatra will go on to insist that age can very much wither her, as it will wither all of us in the end, her workload is notably unwithered. She has never been busier.
“It is a bit of a car crash that five things have come along one after the other,” she concedes. “But it was the back-up from Covid — had that not happened they would have been more stretched out.” Still, this year she has starred with Harrison Ford in the second series of 1923, the big-budget prequel to the Paramount+ series Yellowstone. She has played a Lady Macbeth-like Irish matriarch in the London gangland series MobLand alongside her Thursday Murder Club co-star Pierce Brosnan as her husband. They start filming the second series in October, so it’s a good job she still has a home in east London as well as the one in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, that she shares with her husband, the American film director Taylor Hackford.
She was a fan of The Thursday Murder Club long before she was asked to be in the film, which is in cinemas now and moves to Netflix on Thursday. “They’re like the Harry Potter films were for children: word-of-mouth successes. Girlfriends recommended the first one [published in 2020]. And it was so original, so drenched in charm: this eccentric British character thing mixed with murder mystery, set in a retirement home where people are in full possession of the faculties they had in their professional lives but want to use their brilliance again.”
In a recent interview alongside her co-star Brosnan she insisted that the new James Bond must be a man. “You can’t have a woman. James Bond has to be James Bond, otherwise it becomes something else,” she said. However, she concedes there is something of James Bond’s M about Elizabeth, the commanding, shapeshifting ex-MI6 woman she plays.
“It goes back to when Stella Rimington was revealed to be the head honcho at MI5 [which prompted the casting of Judi Dench as M in the Bond films]. That was an exciting moment for me as a woman, to realize that was possible. And it was around Prime Suspect too, and the success of that series, it was partly because there were women like Rimington, there were professors in universities, there were heads of departments in hospitals, there were lawyers who had fought their way through a misogynistic system in the Sixties or Seventies. And their story was being told through [Mirren’s character] Jane Tennison, and it was an explosion of saying, yes, at last, someone is recognizing where we are.”
How much has her industry changed since then? “Oh, completely different on every level. Not just misogyny but racism, homophobia. It’s been an incredible transformation in the past 20 years.”
The film makes old age look mighty appealing, it has to be said. Genially imposing Elizabeth runs a “murder club” investigating unsolved old cases in the jigsaw room of a stately pile that houses other pensioned-off high achievers such as the union chief Ron (Brosnan) and the psychiatrist Ibrahim (Ben Kingsley). Their retirement home, Coopers Chase, offers clubs, activities, good food and companionship. And the flat within it that Elizabeth shares with her dementia-affected husband, Stephen (Jonathan Pryce), is handsome and spacious.
Mirren laughs. “You know it’s not a docudrama. A residential home like that would be eye-wateringly expensive, but I love the beauty of it and the idea that life can continue to be beautiful.”
Is turning 80 what she expected? “You know, my mum said something very wise to me many years ago. She said: ‘Never be afraid of getting older. An amazing thing happens. When you’re 18 the thought of being 35 is horrific. And you get to 35 and it’s actually a lot better than being 18. And when you’re 35 the thought of being 55 … Then you hit 55 and you realize there are great things about being 55. Your life has moved on, you lose certain stuff but you gain other stuff.’ That’s certainly the case for me.”
Her father, Basil, who anglicized his name from Vasily after moving to England from Russia — he changed the family name from Mironoff to Mirren after his three children were born — died when he was 67. “He wasn’t young, but I would have loved to have had him around longer.” Her English mother, Kathleen, lived to 87. “So she had a very long life. She was very active, absolutely living life normally until almost the very end.
“As you travel through life you realize death is absolutely part of life. And it’s always tragic and it can happen when you’re young.” Her younger brother, Peter, died in 2002, aged 54, of skin cancer. Her stepson, Rio Hackford, died of cancer in 2022, aged 51. “You can lose friends to terrible accidents. You can lose friends to self-inflicted things. You can lose friends to dysfunctions or diseases.”
She is dubious of fighting the inevitable. “The tech bros think their billions are somehow going to hold back time. They haven’t learnt my mum’s lesson. It’s a natural wave of life that has been going on for billions of years and it’s beautiful to be part of that wave. It’s what humanity is all about in the end. So it’s important not to wimp out. You’re not going to be 30 when you’re 50. You’re just not.”
Not everything about being 80 thrills her. “The hardest part is the condescension. It really annoys me. If my husband and I are holding hands, someone might say, ‘Oh, look. How sweet.’ It’s like, excuse my language, ‘F*** off.’ There’s something very condescending about some people’s attitudes and I think they think they are being kind and generous. But they’re not. They’re being insulting.”
Although the film leans into the book’s quaintness, Mirren wouldn’t have wanted to do it if it were only escapism. Buried in there are observations about mental and physical decline, and grief. “Yes, it’s a comedic, light-hearted, eccentric murder mystery, but it has an undercurrent of truth.” Even so, they had a hoot making it, which she knows doesn’t necessarily make for a great finished product. “Very often it’s the opposite. The movie gets lost in the enjoyment of making it. But I hope that’s not the case here.”
She has said she is happy not working. One of the upsides of the pandemic was spending every evening for six months with Hackford, the first time that had happened since they met while making the film White Nights in 1985. So what gets her out of bed in the morning? “Something I haven’t done before. And who I am working with. Also sometimes where the work is.”
Apart from 1923, which was filmed in Montana, her recent tranche of work has mostly happened in and around London. “I had been really missing Britain because I spent a lot of time in America in the past ten years. So shooting in England in the summertime was very appealing.” She doesn’t have children, but she has family here. “So that pulls my heart back here.”
We talk about what it is like to live in the US in a second Donald Trump term. She has spoken about voting Democrat after becoming an American citizen in 2017. “I’ve always looked at America as an outsider, as a foreigner, thinking, when you say you are an American, what do you mean? As a European it’s hard to get your head around it.
“Wherever you go the temperature is different. The only time I understood what it was to be an American was 9/11 and I was in New York about to open a play called The Dance of Death [by August Strindberg], of all things, with Ian McKellen. And when that happened — and it’s awful that it took something as devastating and catastrophic as 9/11 — but that was when I understood what it meant to be American — the way Americans of every culture came together in sympathy and understanding and mourning.”
Mirren began her career as a stage star in the Seventies and moved on to big-screen fame in films such as Excalibur, The Long Good Friday and The Mosquito Coast (with Ford) in the Eighties. Yet it was playing the detective Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect from 1991 to 2006 that cemented her fame in Britain. She can’t claim to understand our fascination with stories of death and murder, but it’s one she shares. “I absolutely love true crime documentaries. And it’s no surprise that we are all mesmerized by serial killers — the thought that someone can take energy and pleasure from ending lives is an extraordinary thing.”
Is this the same woman who once thought that doing anything other than Shakespeare was slumming it? Does she feel she has changed over the decades? Does she feel her co-stars have? She knew Kingsley from their RSC days. “We were both very serious about our desires to be major, serious classical actors. We knew what kind of actors we had to be. And then we find ourselves in The Thursday Murder Club,” she says, laughing. “But Ben brings the same intensity and seriousness to The Thursday Murder Club as he did to playing Ariel in The Tempest. So I like to think I haven’t changed much either.”
Many things have changed in the industry in recent years, though — not least who gets represented on screen and who has the right to play them. Is that something that affects Mirren’s choices of role? Two years ago she got some flak for playing the former prime minister of Israel Golda Meir in the film Golda. “The director [Guy Nattiv] is Israeli. I had played a Jewish character in another film, Woman in Gold, so I was worried that perhaps he thought I was Jewish, but he said: ‘I know you’re not Jewish and it’s completely immaterial as far as I’m concerned.’”
So she would make the same choice today. “Absolutely. I mean, I wouldn’t play a Syrian, unless they are a very blonde Syrian. It’s a good question, though, and it’s not a question I don’t think should be asked. But I don’t think I would have done Golda had it not been an Israeli director. I’m half Russian and I’ve never been asked to do Chekhov, which is really annoying.” Then she corrects herself. “Oh, that’s not true, I played Nina in The Seagull [in the West End in 1975]. But I would have loved to have done The Cherry Orchard.” An ambition plenty of theatre producers would no doubt be happy to help her to achieve, but will she return to the stage?
It’s a decade since the Broadway run of her last play, Peter Morgan’s The Audience, in which she also starred in 2013 in London. She had been due to star opposite Mark Strong in Robert Icke’s version of Oedipus in the West End in 2020, but the pandemic intervened. When the show finally arrived last year it was with Lesley Manville in the role. Still, although she suffers from stage fright, she feels there is another play in her. “I’d love to [do another one], but it’s so tough. I’d like to do something really small, somewhere like the Bush [in west London]. Something radical in a small theater.”
She has two more films waiting to come out. She stars with Kate Winslet in the latter’s directorial debut, Goodbye June, a family drama written by Winslet’s son, Joe Anders. (“Kate was absolutely remarkable,” she says. “I knew she had it in her, but she was so capable and knowledgeable.”) And she plays Patricia Highsmith, the American author of The Talented Mr Ripley, in the Dutch director Anton Corbijn’s thriller Switzerland.
She would happily do more Thursday Murder Club films if this one goes down well. (There are three further books in the series and another will be published next month.) In a later Thursday Murder Club adventure, the topic of assisted dying comes up. It’s something she has strong views on: “I absolutely believe in assisted dying,” she says. So would that be part of the draw of returning to Coopers Chase … the chance to not just have a hoot, but to stare the inevitable in the face as she does it?
“I think it absolutely can address those things and I think it does. It does deal with end-of-life issues. Losing friends is what happens as you get older and I hope if we do another one we get to continue down that road.”
Dominic Maxwell is a commissioning editor and writer at The Times of London
