Does it take a certain mindset to be an action star? “I think it does,” says Thelma’s June Squibb, with a steady deadpan gaze. “And I have it.”
The 94-year-old actress is not kidding: In Thelma, we see the titular badass take on many classic action movie tropes, including car chases, computer hacking, and even an explosion or two. Okay, the car chase is actually a scooter chase, and Thelma might not run as fast as Tom Cruise. But in the action comedy directed by Josh Margolin, a grandmother’s quest for revenge gets the full Mission: Impossible treatment, and its star was more than up to the task.
According to Squibb, being an on-screen daredevil like the greats of cinema means being “physically ready to do things that you wouldn’t be normally you wouldn’t be asked to do. I’ve used my body always — I danced for years, and I still swim and I’m doing Pilates now. I’ve never not used it. But [making Thelma] still called for things that I hadn’t really done before, on film or anywhere.”
Squibb’s journey to this moment is remarkable: Beginning her career as a theater actor, she made her first film appearance in 1990 at the age of 61, and played a series of supporting roles over the following decades in movies and TV shows including In & Out, About Schmidt, Far From Heaven, and Girls. She received an Oscar nomination for her work in 2013’s Nebraska — but Thelma is her first real starring role.
In the film, a phone scam tricks Thelma into sending $10,000 in cash to an unnamed post office box. While the police are useless and Thelma’s daughter (Parker Posey) and son-in-law (Clark Gregg) start to doubt if Thelma should continue to live alone, Thelma’s determined to get her money back, with a little help from her hapless twenty-something grandson, played by Fred Hechinger (the Fear Street trilogy).
Hechinger, sitting beside Squibb for our interview, is a bit in awe of his co-star, especially when it came to the more physically intense sequences. When production began, he says, “You didn’t know how much you were going to do for your own stunts, and then progressively every week you did more and more. It was a total snowball.”
