Helen Mirren Hits The Road
Half a century into an illustrious career, with its queens and detectives and other kaleidoscopic women, one thing still eluded Helen Mirren.
“I’ve always wanted to be in an Italian movie,” she said recently, recalling her lack of fascination with the American films she saw growing up in Essex, England. “What alerted to me the potential of film as an art form was Italian film.”
So when the director Paolo Virzì asked her to star in “The Leisure Seeker” — his version of an American road-trip movie, opening Friday, March 9 — Ms. Mirren climbed into a recreational vehicle with Donald Sutherland in the driver’s seat and an Italian crew in the back, and set off in the sweltering Georgia heat.
Ms. Mirren and Mr. Sutherland play Ella and John Spencer, a long-married couple who defy their adult children by absconding in August 2016, during the early days of the presidential campaign, for one last journey in their decrepit R.V. Destination: Key West, Fla., where John, a retired English professor whose failing mind clings hard to beloved literary quotations, can visit the home of Ernest Hemingway.
Read the interview at The New York Times.
