october-2010

THE QUEEN: MIRAMAX; RED: SUMMIT; THE TEMPEST: MELINDA SUE GORDON/TEMPEST PRODUCTIONS, LLC
ing—as a welcome opportunity to trade ambition for pleasure, and
to finally relinquish the judgment that propels her. “When you’re
driving yourself, you’re hyper-self-critical—or I always have been,
anyway. And you’re constantly feeling inadequate,” she says. “[But
then] you get to let go of all of that angst and say, ‘You know what?
Just enjoy it. It’s fine.’ If you fail, failure is just a part of life. You can
let go of those dark, painful things. I still find it quite hard, but I’m
kind of stumbling towards that, I hope.”
Mirren does admit she had a few reservations about the
physicality of the role in Red—“Mary-Louise and I both said, ‘We
don’t run. We do lots of other stuff, but we don’t run’”—but she
was wildly impressed by the technical prowess of the crew, who
managed to transform a comic into a cinematic extravaganza. “It’s
fantastic to do these kinds of special effects movies, and to witness
the sophisticated level of expertise involved,” she says. “The technical
work is a high art, done by extraordinarily talented people
who make it look effortless. But I think the danger, sometimes, is
that in all that attention to beautiful detail, the story can get lost.
I think it’s really important to maintain the simple, old-fashioned
virtues of storytelling in the midst of all that.”
Based on the DC Comics graphic novel series by Warren
Ellis and Cully Hamner, the role of agent-turned-contract-killer
Victoria is a bit of a digression for Mirren, but certainly not an
unprecedented one. Over the last four decades, she’s worked
steadily in a variety of creative mediums. Her role as Detective
Chief Inspector Jane Tennison in the British police procedural
Prime Suspect—which ran on ITV for seven seasons in the 1990s
and early 2000s, and was named one of the greatest television
shows of all time by Time magazine—won her three consecutive
BAFTA TV awards. The same role got her two Emmys (she has
another two, for the TV movie The Passion of Ayn Rand and the
miniseries Elizabeth I). And off-screen, she’s performed in dozens
of plays, from authors as distinct as Shakespeare and Tennessee
Williams, in London and beyond.
COVER STORY
CLASS ACT (left to right) Inkheart; State of Play; The Last Station; The Queen; Red; The Tempest
Certainly it’s hard to get this deep into a 40-plus-year career
without embracing a range of genres, and Mirren celebrates each
change of pace. “You know, life is made of variety. That’s what
keeps us going, that’s what keeps our interest up in our work,” she
says. “It was great to have something that was very, very different
from the last three or four films I’ve done.”
Accordingly, Mirren has acted alongside a wide range of
performers, from the up-and-coming comedic actor Russell Brand
to the legendary Peter O’Toole, and she says a large part of the
allure of Red was its superstar cast. “There wasn’t anyone that I
wasn’t secretly terribly impressed by. My husband and I are very
big fans of Weeds, and I think if I were to lose my husband to
anyone, it would be to Mary-Louise,” she jokes. “She’s an incredibly
sexy woman, and, of course, extremely talented as well.”
Mirren says she’s drawn to performers who, like her, exude
boldness in the face of fear, and cites Lady Gaga as an example of
bravado done especially well. “I love her as a performance artist;
I love the work she has made of fashion, of personality,” she says.
“She’s turned herself into an art object. It’s the theatricality that I
respond to. You think everything has been done that can possibly
be done, and then someone comes along and does something new,
and it’s really exciting.”
With two more films coming out this winter—a Julie Taymordirected
adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, in which
Mirren plays Prospera, a tweak on the male role of Prospero, and
The Debt, a thriller about Nazi war criminals—Mirren isn’t slowing
down just yet. She continues to look at her craft as a journey, a
skill that’s realized rather than taught. “There are people who can
[act] and people who can’t, and training has nothing to do with it,”
she says. “Experience counts for a lot more. It’s about learning to
understand yourself and how to use your fear and insecurity.”
Of course, Mirren’s insecurities only make her more
remarkable, and at least from the outside, they look an awful lot
like grace.
OCTOBER 2010 GO MAGAZINE
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