“If somebody said I had to throw down to Jason Statham, come on, Jason, let’s duke this out!”
This challenge isn’t being issued by Vin Diesel or Dwayne Johnson. It’s coming from Hollywood’s newest, oldest action star: 94-year-old June Squibb.
The new comedy Thelma stars the Oscar-nominated actress as the titular grandma—the victim of a phone scam who vows to do whatever it takes to get her money back. It’s Squibb’s first outing as the lead of her own film, one she followed up with another toplining role in Scarlett Johansson’s upcoming directorial debut, Eleanor the Great. “I tell my agent, ‘If it’s not a lead and if my name is not the name of the film, I’m not doing it,’” cracks Squibb. Look at that: She’s already nailing the action star ego!
Sort of. When I come to meet Squibb at Los Angeles landmark Casa Vega, I find the actor and her assistant Kelly Sweeney patiently waiting outside the Mexican restaurant before it even opens. A regular, Squibb orders guac for the table (“Not too spicy,” she politely requests), then inspires everyone to join her in a round of pink lemonades, since she rightfully believes 11:30 a.m. is a little early for margaritas. “I couldn’t handle that. June could handle it better than me,” Thelma director, Josh Margolin, says after joining us for lunch. “I probably can,” Squibb agrees.
What can’t she do? A theater actress by trade, Squibb didn’t appear in her first film until she was 61 years old, landing a supporting role in Woody Allen’s 1990 rom-com, Alice. She immediately followed that with Scent of a Woman (starring Al Pacino) and Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence. Things went to another level when she found a champion in filmmaker Alexander Payne, who first cast Squibb as Jack Nicholson’s ill-fated wife, Helen, in 2002’s About Schmidt, and then in the real game-changer: as Bruce Dern’s brutally frank wife, Kate, in 2013’s Nebraska. The film nabbed six Oscar nominations, including a best-supporting-actress nod for Squibb’s scene-stealing turn. “I had done work, but nothing of that importance till then,” Squibb says. “All at once I was legitimate.” The best part of the Oscar recognition? “You don’t have to audition again!”
At 84, Squibb had officially arrived in Hollywood. And she’s made the most of her time since, racking up more credits in the last decade than the previous eight decades of her life. She’s done Girls, Glee, The Big Bang Theory, Shameless, Grey’s Anatomy, Palm Springs, and Toy Story 4, among many other films and series. “I don’t know what’s happening, but it’s good,” Squibb says of her belated popularity. “It’s like everybody is more interested in aging. I mean, everybody’s aging…. And the fact that we now have leading women that are 40, 50, 60, it’s wonderful. You simply did not see this before, and I guess I’m lucky that this is when I am working…. I’m reaping the goodwill of the aged.”
But despite the countless mother and grandmother roles that she’s recently piled up, none of them compared to Thelma. Margolin based the film on his relationship with his own 103-year-old grandmother, who shares the character’s name. “I couldn’t imagine anybody else; I was like, ‘It’s got to be June,’” the director says. Luckily, he got his wish after passing the script to Squibb through mutual friend Beanie Feldstein.
“My real grandma is tough and funny, and vulnerable but resilient…and especially as she got into her 90s and 100s, you can see those qualities starting to pit against each other in an interesting way. June is so incredibly good at carrying all those things inside of her in any given scene,” says Margolin. “The camera can just sit on her face and you’re getting so many little notes of feeling…. She felt like the heart for me from the start.”
The center of Thelma is the relationship between Thelma and Danny (Fred Hechinger), an endearing duo Hechinger describes as “best friends who happen to be grandmother and grandson.” (Yes, he has also joined our lunch table.) That close bond is what sends Thelma into a panic when a scammer tricks her into believing Danny has been arrested and needs $10,000. After the truth comes out, Thelma’s daughter (Parker Posey) and son-in-law (Clark Gregg) begin worrying that the widowed Thelma shouldn’t be living alone anymore. Feeling embarrassed and underestimated, Thelma decides to fight back. With the help of her old friend Ben (the late Richard Roundtree) and his high-powered scooter, she embarks on a mission to get vengeance on her scammers.
Essentially, that scooter is to Squibb what a 10-second car is to Vin Diesel in Fast & Furious. “All of the stuff on the scooter was great fun, and they didn’t think I could do that,” Squibb says. “I’m physical, I danced for years, so I’m used to using my body. But nobody thought I could do the scooter, and I ended up doing everything but the wheelie.” Hechinger, who stars in the upcoming action-heavy films Kraven the Hunter and Gladiator 2, wasn’t surprised to see Squibb push her limits. “They had their first scooter rehearsal tryout. I came probably an hour after you had just finished, and you had the brightest look on your face,” he says. “In that moment, I could tell that you were going to do all your own stunts.”
Squibb’s assistant, Kelly Sweeney, says the biggest challenge on Thelma was keeping up with Squibb. “Throughout the movie, we’d be like, ‘Slow down, June!’” Margolin concurs: “Most of the notes were, ‘June, make it look a little bit harder.’” Which isn’t to say she nailed everything immediately. “I’d never used a full computer, so I didn’t know what the mouse was for,” she says. “Everybody kept saying, ‘Don’t shake it so much, June….’ I’m really good on the phone and iPad!”
Back in January, Squibb went to her first-ever Sundance FIlm Festival, an experience she wasn’t quite prepared for. “I mean, all the people, and all of them converging on us—it was scary, almost,” she says. “I thought Nebraska was pretty hot, but I think this is hotter.” Margolin can’t resist jumping in: “If you thought Nebraska was hot, Thelma is hotter. Interpret that however you want.”
Squibb is fanning the flames with saucy showings at events like a recent Thelma Q&A in Seattle. “My agent kept saying, if they ask me what I want to do next, I should say ‘porn.’ And I said, ‘I can’t do that,’” Squibb says. “Well, in Seattle, I don’t know what happened, but I said it! The whole place just went ape.”
It’s clear throughout lunch that Squibb, Margolin and Hechinger have formed their own familial bond. But another beloved member of their Thelma family is no longer with them. Just days after watching the film from home last October, Roundtree died at the age of 81. “He loved this restaurant,” Hechinger says with a bittersweet smile. Squibb fondly remembers her 93rd birthday, when the Thelma cast and crew surprised her by wearing replicas of her shirts from Hubie Halloween and white wigs. Roundtree wasn’t working that day, but that didn’t stop him from showing up, wig and all. “He brought me two dozen red roses,” Squibb says. “He was so great…. He told us that he never went to wrap parties because he couldn’t say goodbye to everybody.”
Squibb’s busy June includes serving as the voice of Nostalgia in Inside Out 2. She’ll then be seen in Johansson’s Eleanor the Great, a drama about a 90-year-old Florida woman who strikes up an unlikely friendship with a college student in New York City. “It was a really interesting, hard script,” Squibb says. “[Johansson] is such a good director, so smart…. She used her experience and knowledge, which is so wonderful to an actor. She never said, ‘This is how you should do this.’ She knew better than that. But she would say something she could remember doing that was the equivalent of it, and she would talk about that.”
Further Eleanor promotion will have to wait. Once Thelma is out in the world, Squibb is headed to Hawaii for a well-deserved vacation. Hechinger knows the destination well, having filmed season one of White Lotus there. Coincidentally, Squibb and Hechinger’s Thelma costar Parker Posey is currently filming the third season of the HBO hit in Thailand. If she were to follow in Hechinger and Posey’s footsteps, Squibb says she’d want to visit a White Lotus in Singapore.
At this stage, she doesn’t exactly have a career bucket list—besides appearing on her beloved procedural FBI, at least. But Squibb does say that she’s always drawn to the opportunity to do something completely new. “I was offered a role on the new American Horror Story. And I read the thing, and it was only one day shooting, three small scenes, and I said, ‘It’s a vampire, I’ve never played a vampire,’” Squibb says with glee. “Well, I go, and it turns out it’s a leprechaun that drinks blood—but that was good enough!”
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