I’ll start with a confession: In general, I despise doing celebrity interviews. Why? Most celebrities don’t like doing them, as they’d rather be acting (or doing almost anything else), but promotion is unfortunately a necessary part of their work. So I’ve always felt like an uninvited guest in their presence, no matter how friendly or patient they are.
However. When I was recently offered the chance to interview Dame Helen Mirren in celebration of the 20th anniversary of L’Oréal Paris’ Women of Worth campaign, how could I resist the opportunity to speak with one of the most brilliant actors of our age? Also, her age, which is 80. Eighty!
It’s difficult to come up with another actor who has been more prolific—and not only prolific, but celebrated. Mirren has won a counting game of awards—among them, one Oscar, four BAFTAs, three Golden Globes, five Emmys, and one Tony—the list reads like a compendium of all the awards one could possibly be considered for. She’s the only performer to have achieved both the American Triple Crown of acting (an Oscar, Emmy, and Tony) and the British Triple Crown (both the British Academy Film and TV awards and the Laurence Olivier Award).
You might think a person who’d achieved that kind of acclamation would be happy to take a breath, slow down the pace a bit, maybe enjoy a few moments of reflection. Not the person of Helen Mirren. She’s currently gracing the TV screen in 1923, Mobland, and The Thursday Murder Club. And she’s in the upcoming Kate Winslet-directed movie Goodbye June, as well as another in which she plays the novelist Patricia Highsmith.
The hour of our interview kept being put off and put off, from three o’clock to four to five, to six. I assumed this was because Mirren was working (when is she not working, I wondered), which made me feel increasingly concerned about taking up her time. So when our Zoom call finally began in the early evening, I opened by telling her, “I’m going to try to make this as quick and easy as possible.” I’m afraid my tone was more threatening mob boss than reporter (“We can do this the easy way, Dame Helen, or we can do it the hard way…”) Mirren was, naturally, poised and lovely and as gracious as you might imagine she would be.