If you ask Helen Mirren if she’d be a good real-life crime solver, her answer would be an unequivocal yes. And it’s all because of NBC‘s Dateline. “Like millions of other women, I’m sort of mesmerized and fascinated by Dateline. These extraordinary moments when ordinary people become demonic.” And now she’s putting this well-honed eye for crime to good use in her new Netflix film The Thursday Murder Club, the film adaptation of Richard Osman’s beloved book series.
“I was as rabid as anyone else. I absolutely loved the books,” Mirren tells Newsweek about the series. “It’s extraordinary when you think of all the murder mystery books that have been written, to find a new way of looking at an old tradition, an old trope, and to reinvent it. It’s very clever. That’s what Richard Osman did. Partly by placing it in a retirement home was a sort of a genius idea.”
Mirren plays Elizabeth, the leader of the club who is determined to solve an old crime that has haunted her and her friend Penny, whose dementia prevents her from investigating. So Elizabeth—assisted by three other residents of the Coopers Chase retirement village , Ron (Pierce Brosnan), Ibrahim (Ben Kingsley) and Joyce (Celia Imrie)—must solve multiple connected mysteries and save their community before it’s too late.
“I totally identified [her] as being my role if it was ever to be a movie,” Mirren says of Elizabeth. “I could identify it immediately really as being the role that I would inhabit.” She says she understood, “Elizabeth and her sort of know-it-all-ness and at the same time knowing nothing really about human beings and true feelings, except of course she’s dealing with her husband [Stephen, who has dementia, played by Jonathan Pryce] and she understands true feelings through that and her friend who’s dying. Very British, stiff upper lip.”
In fact, Mirren says “it’s so British,” she’s genuinely surprised the story is as popular as it is across the pond.
“I’m surprised that Americans get it because it’s very understated, very British, very below the radar. He [Richard Osman] created a new form of a very old tradition.”
But she’s glad it’s as popular as it is, particularly because of the respectful portrayal of people of a certain age, a demographic often overlooked by Hollywood.
“It’s so hard to recognize when you’re a young person looking at an older person that this person has lived the life that you have lived,” she says. “They’ve fallen in love, they’ve had sex, they’ve got drunk, they have been bad, they’ve been good, they’ve been confused, they’ve been emotional, they’ve been achieving, and they are continuing to be. It doesn’t actually stop.”
And thankfully for all of us, Mirren, who won the Academy Award for Best Actress for The Queen in 2006, isn’t stopping anytime soon herself. With multiple other books in Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series, the chance for additional films is a real possibility, something that Mirren is very open to.
“We loved doing it,” Mirren says of her and her castmates. “We’d love to do another one.”
The Thursday Murder Club is in select theaters and is now streaming on Netflix.
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