The movie Helen Mirren only made as a favour: “I don’t really want to be doing this”
Helen Mirren has inhabited all sorts of characters across her lengthy career, making a name for herself playing one person in particular.
She’s portrayed Queen Elizabeth II on a number of occasions, most notably in Steven Frears’ bluntly titled The Queen, and she’s played gangsters, socialites, monsters, housewives, ancient witches, and more, but sometimes, there were roles that required a little bit of convincing.
In 2025, the screen legend joined the cast of the Netflix film Goodbye June from first-time director Kate Winslet, centring on an elderly woman, Mirren, whose health takes a nosedive over the Christmas period, while her four children, played by Winslet, Andrea Riseborough, Toni Colette, and Johnny Flynn, must come together to find some peace during a grave time.
The movie got decent reviews, and Mirren was praised for her performance, but it very nearly didn’t happen, with Winslet revealing, while speaking to Entertainment Weekly, that the Oscar-winning star was hesitant to accept the part of a dying woman, such that, if the film had been directed by anybody else, she wouldn’t have done it.
“She did say quite early on, ‘I don’t really want to be doing this at all, but I’m doing it for you, and I’m doing it to support you’,” she said, “I felt so grateful, but also, I didn’t want to be putting her through something.”
According to Winslet, Dame Helen had previously upheld strict rules about playing with any sort of debilitating illness, and here, her character, the eponymous June, spends most of the runtime in a hospital bed dying of cancer.
As she explained, Mirren had to come up with a number of techniques to protect herself against the psychological impact of playing a character facing the end of their life: “The way that she kind of managed herself, really, was that she didn’t actually wanna talk about anything until we got there on the day. So she would get there, she would be prepared, but then she would just say to me, ‘I don’t like it today’.”
The fact of the matter is that Mirren is no spring chicken, having celebrated her 80th birthday in 2025, so the idea of death is an unfortunate reality. She has always played characters who are full of life and vitality, even as she’s gotten older, which seems to be a choice inspired by a philosophy of ‘you’re only as young as you feel’. Given her history and the stage of life she is currently in, you can understand why it must have been so daunting to spend so much time plugged into a fake life support machine.
The most incredible thing about the veteran actor’s decision is that she doesn’t even know Winslet that well, as prior to Goodbye June, the pair had only worked together once before, on the 2016 fantasy drama Collateral Beauty. This is also the same woman who once said “Fuck Netflix” agreeing to star in a film backed by the streaming giant, so maybe she just really enjoyed that topless scene in Titanic.
