“I want to but I can’t”: the dream role Helen Mirren knows she’ll never be given
Sometimes, an actor has been at the top of their game for so long that seeing their name on a poster is like a kind of stamp of quality, a bit like the ‘Her Majesty’s Government’ used to be on Cadbury’s chocolate before they made it all bubbly and taste weird.
Helen Mirren is an example of one of those actors, where you can try it with almost any film, and someone will go ‘Oh, Helen Mirren’s in it, that’s probably decent’.
And what’s most impressive is that not even some of the best actors of all time can manage that. Pacino and De Niro (especially De Niro) seem to be happy to put their name to any old straight-to-streaming garbage, whereas Mirren’s hit rate is incredibly high. In the 2020s, she’s also shown she can do TV better than most other people as well, starring in Guy Ritchie’s Mob Land on one side of the Atlantic, and Taylor Sheridan’s 1923 on the other.
In between, the Oscar winner has continued to make big movies too, with a role as Queenie in ‘the franchise that used to be about driving but now seems to be about spaceships or something’ Fast X in 2023, plus a foray into the world of superheroes with DC Comics’ Shazam: Fury of the Gods the same year.
Mirren has been consistently booking roles since the late 1960s and has, if anything, increased her profile every decade since, causing huge controversy in 1979 with the X-rated Malcolm McDowell excuse for an orgy that was Caligula, and then again with 1989’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, which got the broadsheets all hot under the collar and prompted much clutching of pearls from old women in the Church of England in between sips of tea and digestive biscuits.
The actor is certainly not afraid to upset a few people if it’s for a role she believes in, and she’s pretty much covered almost every kind of genre you could think of after nigh-on 60 years in the business. So what’s left? Well, as she told IndieLondon some years back, it’s Shakespeare that holds some interest, as a long-term member of the RSC, and especially one role that has proved pivotal for some of the great male talents like Richard Burton and Laurence Olivier.
She said, “It’s tough because there are not many roles. I don’t particularly want to do [Hamlet’s mother] Gertrude. I want to play Hamlet, but I can’t play Hamlet. I mean, Gertrude is a nice role. But… the world of Gertrude’s thought is not very interesting; the world of [Hamlet’s potential wife] Ophelia’s though is not very interesting at all.”
Although she is tempted by another of ‘The Bard’s’ best works, as she added, “The world of Lady Macbeth’s though is interesting because it’s so fucked up, but it’s not poetically inspiring. You don’t get to say speeches like some of the speeches I got to say as [The Tempest’s] Prospero.”
2010’s The Tempest saw her play Prospero as a gender-swapped character alongside Ben Whishaw and Russell Brand (shudder), but despite Disney shoving a large amount of money at it, it was a monumental flop and made less than half a million dollars at the box office against a budget of more than $20million. It did somehow manage to salvage an Oscar nomination from the mess, however, but it was for ‘Best Costume Design’.
