Park up the rig, Furiosa; ditch the rubber suit, Deadpool: there’s a new action hero in town. In Josh Margolin’s wildly entertaining Thelma, an elderly widow is duped out of $10,000 by a scammer masquerading as her grandson. Realising her error, she resolves to track him down, retrieve her cash and dispense some rough justice. If summer blockbusters are about the action, then Thelma has it all: guns, explosions and mobility scooter-based stunts.
When the 94-year-old actor June Squibb read the script, with its mischievous nods to Mission: Impossible, she knew she had to do it. She also knew she would do lots of the stunts herself. “I have more security in my physicality than a lot of people do, and I thought riding around on that scooter was going to be great fun,” she beams.
Squibb is talking via video call from her hotel in New York where she is doing some last-minute promotion before flying home to Los Angeles. The schedule has been gruelling, but she is bright-eyed and chipper. She says she is in excellent health, even though, “I should be doing pilates more than I am, because I’ve had such a crazy schedule. I was doing it for one hour a week with a trainer, and it makes a huge difference. I’m in good shape.”
Extraordinarily, Thelma is Squibb’s first ever starring role. Until now, she has been viewed as a character actor, someone you’re more likely to know by face (or by voice: she is Nostalgia in Inside Out 2) than by name. She has spent decades quietly propping up lead actors playing their wives, mothers and grandmothers in films such as Scent of a Woman, About Schmidt and Palm Springs. Has she spent her career coveting bigger roles? Squibb shakes her head: “Not ever. I was doing exactly the jobs I wanted to do. There was never that feeling with me.”
While Thelma is primarily a comedy, it is underpinned by a more serious theme: the way society treats its elderly. We see Thelma’s well-meaning family talking about her when she’s still in the room and pondering whether to move her into a home. Another scene, where Thelma has a fall and can’t get up, gave the actor pause: what if that happens to her? But she is happy to report that, in her 10th decade, she has had nothing but love and respect from her family and has retained her independence. She lives in an apartment complex in the San Fernando Valley; she used to be on the first floor but her son, Harry, persuaded her to switch to a ground-floor flat to avoid the problem of stairs. “And I have a wonderful assistant without whom I couldn’t keep working,” Squibb says. “I have two cats and I make sure that, first thing in the morning, they’re taken care of. And then I have most of the day to myself if I’m not filming. I have no trouble getting around, though I do get tired. Tiredness is real when you get to my age.”
Yet Squibb has rarely been in such demand. She credits her increased workload to a “greater interest in the ageing process. There’s more work for people my age than ever before. We now have leading ladies in their 50s and 60s, and we never had that before in film.” When Squibb was in her 30s, she was enraged to see women her age being phased out of showbusiness. “Oh God, I fought it my whole life,” she exclaims. “From the time I was a little girl and being told: ‘This is what a boy does, this is what a girl does’, I never understood it. When I was a young, good-looking actor in New York, I was constantly aware that people looked at me as an object.” She and her contemporaries had their coping mechanisms, “but I got mad too. When #MeToo happened, all of us in our 80s were amazed. We were, like, ‘Oh my God, we’ve lived this our whole lives.’”
Born in 1929, Squibb says she came out of the womb an actor: “It was always: ‘This is who I am.’ It never occurred to me I was anything else.” Her parents were baffled at first. “My father began to understand and appreciate it but I don’t think my mother ever did. I was on Broadway and they came to see me perform and she was still talking about my coming back to Vandalia [in Illinois].” Squibb learned her craft in the 1950s at the Cleveland Play House, where she met Jack Lee, who went on to become a leading musical director on Broadway. “He decided I had to sing. So, I began singing and I did all the comedienne roles in all the musicals. It became my career. My first 20 years in New York were all musicals.”Then came a gear-change after she met her second husband, Charles Kataksakis, an acting coach. Kataksakis thought she had it in her to play more serious roles (he and Squibb were together for 40 years until his death in 1999). “He was a brilliant teacher and he’s the reason I’m sitting here doing what I am today,” she says. That must have been an interesting dynamic, being given acting notes by her husband. “Oh, for sure,” she laughs. “I would be in class crying and saying, ‘I can’t do this’. I was older than most of the other students and they thought it was the funniest thing they’d ever seen. It was a conglomeration of feelings, I’ll tell you that.”
Squibb was 61 when she made the move from stage to screen. It was the beginning of the 90s and New York “was all at once having a lot of films being shot here. And I saw friends were doing them, and so I went to my agent and said, ‘I think I should be doing this too.’ The next week I was auditioning for Woody Allen.” That film was Alice, a romcom starring Mia Farrow in which Squibb played a maid. The casting director, Ellen Lewis, took an instant shine to Squibb and set her up for a meeting with Martin Brest, who cast her in his new Al Pacino vehicle, Scent of a Woman. Lewis also recommended her to Martin Scorsese, who gave her another maid role in The Age of Innocence: “So all at once I had three films and I became in people’s minds a film actor.”
After that came roles in TV shows including Law & Order, ER, Curb Your Enthusiasm and House. But Squibb’s fortunes really changed when she began working with the director Alexander Payne. Having cast her as Jack Nicholson’s longsuffering wife in the 2002 comedy About Schmidt, a film that “gave me a legitimacy in the film industry”, Payne brought her on board for 2013’s Nebraska, in which she played the abrasive and unfiltered Kate, wife of Bruce Dern’s delusional Woody. The role earned her an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress.
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Since then, Squibb hasn’t had to audition, “which is marvellous. You’re sometimes asked to meet a director or a star that wants to work with you. But mostly I just get scripts and I make the decision based on that.” Age has not dampened her ambition. “Each role is to me an opportunity to get better, to learn something. Each one is an adventure. Though I don’t feel I have to prove myself any more – I’ve grown out of that.”
Squibb just wrapped another film, playing the lead in Eleanor the Great, about a 90-year-old who moves back to New York after decades in Florida. It is the directorial debut of Scarlett Johansson, who Squibb describes as “so bright, so smart”. Being No 1 on the call sheet, she says, means “going into it with a feeling of responsibility that you don’t have with a supporting role. I always felt what I did was important. But as the lead you’re kind of responsible for the whole film.”
Asked if there will come a time when she considers retirement, Squibb grins and says, “I do keep wondering: ‘Well, gosh, how much longer will I keep doing this?’ I have no answer for that. I love to read, so I could see myself having that time. And if I’m shooting a film, that’s, like, seven, eight weeks out of my life where I don’t have time to do anything else. So, I’m not saying I don’t want to retire, but people keep asking me to do things and so I do them.”
Thelma is in cinemas on 19 July.