Helen Mirren’s ongoing obsession with the technology Kurt Cobain never saw
Dame Helen Mirren is known for many things. Shakespeare, playing the Queen, appearing in a Kendrick Lamar music video, shutting down sexist interviewers – you name it, her CV has it. The Oscar winner is also known for having several quirky obsessions, such as gardening and six-inch heels.
Of all her preoccupations, however, none are quite as strange or consistent as her fixation on Kurt Cobain and all the technology he will never get to see. Improbable, you say? Absolutely. But it’s become such a repetitive source of conversation for the star that it’s impossible to ignore.
First, it was computers. Speaking to Oprah all the way back in 2014, Mirren revealed how she maintains such a positive outlook on ageing. “You have to,” she said. “You either die young or get old. There’s no other way. I didn’t want to die young. Look at Kurt Cobain – he hardly even saw a computer! The digital stuff that’s going on is so exciting. I’m just so curious about what happens next.”
Then, it was the internet. In 2015, Cosmopolitan quoted the star reiterating her stance on ageing, swapping computers for the World Wide Web. “You either die young or you die old,” she said breezily. “There’s nothing in between and I’m glad I didn’t die young. I was thinking about Kurt Cobain the other day and he died without knowing the internet, and I’m totally blown away by that. The internet is a huge movement in the history of humanity – it’s maybe even more important than the creation of the printing press. If the price I have to pay to see the future is getting older then so be it!”
In 2016, Mirren said much the same to the Daily Mail when asked, yet again, about ageing. “It’s all about accepting who you are and acknowledging that this is what happens — either you die young or you get old,” she said, “And I don’t want to die young! I’m far too curious about life and what human beings are going to be doing in the next 20 years.
“If I’d died at 27, the age that Kurt Cobain died in 1994, I’d never have even known there was an internet! Incredible things are happening all the time and I can’t wait to see what comes next.”
By 2024, Mirren’s latest technological fascination, and thus, her preoccupation with what Cobain missed, had turned to GPS. In an interview on Brave New World, a podcast from The Standard, the actor said, “I always say, it’s so sad that Kurt Cobain died when he did, because he never got to see GPS. It’s the most wonderful thing, my little blue spot walking down the street. I just find it completely magical and unbelievable.”
However, her enthusiasm for technology as a whole and, therefore, her pity for Cobain had become more muted. No longer was she rhapsodising about the exciting advancements of “the digital stuff”. Instead, she expressed relief that she grew up at a time when none of it existed.
“I feel so grateful that I lived in a world without technology for quite some time,” she said. “I knew a world without technology in a deep and full sense… Human connection was a very different thing back then.”
The evolution of Mirren’s comments on the Nirvana frontman are, in many ways, an insight into the evolution of technology itself. First, there were the computers – a miraculous development. Then, there was the excitement of the internet, a utopian virtual world where everything was just a click away. But these days, the rapid advancements are as unsettling as they are exciting, and a lot of us yearn for a world in which human connection wasn’t mediated through a screen.
If Kurt Cobain were alive, chances are, he’d be railing against dating apps and artificial intelligence in the same way he railed against consumer culture and conformism, and it seems that Mirren may be coming around to that as well. The next time she mentions him – regarding AI or genetically modified babies, no doubt – it’s highly possible that she’ll say something along the lines of “I always say, it’s a silver lining that Kurt Cobain never had to deal with this dumpster fire.”
Perhaps you’re wondering, like everyone else, why the Nirvana frontrunner is Mirren’s one and only touchstone for people who lived before modern technology. Every single famous person who died before 1994 would have sufficed. Oscar Wilde. Janis Joplin. Aristotle. But all of that is beside the point. The more pertinent question is – can we please stop asking Dame Helen Mirren about ageing already?
