Helen Mirren may have established her international movie footing with her Academy Award-winning role in The Queen. But the 66-year-old actress is forging a new movie path of late: butt-kicker in the spy world.
Mirren was part of last year’s surprise spy hit Red, playing a retired agent who gamely returns to the field. Next up, Mirren plays a spy being pulled back into the nasty business in the far-darker drama The Debt, opening Wednesday.
“I am going spy a little bit,” Mirren says when asked about it. “It’s kind of interesting.”
It’s a role generally populated by young men in action movies. But in Mirren’s mind, that’s inaccurate. “The role of women has always been undervalued in the spy world, always undermined in terms of recognition,” she says. “Unfairly so. It’s a world that needs women.”
For her part, Mirren wasn’t so sure she could take her first spy challenge, the action-comedy Red. Her Modern Maturity spy cohorts, led by action supremo Bruce Willis, were far more accustomed to the terrain.
“It certainly wasn’t anything I was used to,” she says. “Put me in an Elizabethan costume and give me a big, long speech — I can handle that. But one-liners with Bruce Willis, the master of one-liners? I was very nervous.”
Rather than ask his advice, Mirren simply observed the man she took to calling “my beloved leader.”
“All I had to do was watch him,” she says. “You have to be very, very laid-back when you give the line.”
She also managed to show off her universally admired figure in stunning spy dresses and handled marksman duties with coolness. But she insists that her character, Victoria, never killed anyone, even in the film’s skirmishes.
“She has no blood on her hands,” Mirren says. “My character never actually shoots anyone. She got to hold the guns and look cool. I loved it.”
Red definitely killed at the box office: The movie took in a surprise $90 million.
The Debt features a gritty return of the collaboration between Mirren and Prime Suspect director John Madden. He says he needed all his film’s actors to perform their often-intricate fight scenes because “the audience smells a rat” if stunt performers are brought in.
Thus, it’s Mirren impressively roughing up co-star Tom Wilkinson, and Mirren struggling in the film’s climatic battle scene — a draining, realistic bout that took two exhausting days to film.
Though Mirren downplays her action prowess, she does acknowledge learning Russian for the role — a skill that will come in handy for any future spy roles. “Actually, Russians who have seen it say the accent is great,” she says. “I’m thrilled.”
Mirren is now shooting a 2012 Phil Spector biopic alongside Al Pacino for HBO (she plays Spector’s defense attorney Linda Kenney Baden during the first Lana Clarkson trial), but there’s always the chance of returning to the spy world. Should that happen, Madden has a couple of words of advice to her foes.
“She throws a very good punch. Don’t get on the wrong side of that,” he says. “And a six-pack stomach.”
