The Christmas movie schedule is typically chock full of cozy movies with fun activities like drinking hot chocolate and doing holiday-themed crafts. Sometimes, however, we get a movie with a little more depth over the holiday season, as happened with Netflix’s new schedule entry Goodbye June. The sweet film stars Helen Mirren and Kate Winslet (who also directed), but things could have gone very differently when Mirren admitted she didn’t “want to play” the part.
While many actresses in their eighties might read scripts of the Goodbye June variety all the time, Helen Mirren constantly defies expectations. From joining the Fast and Furious movies to her recent role in the Thursday Murder Club, the actress has found ways to find work for herself outside of playing elderly women struggling with death. So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised she wasn’t initially enamored with the role, as Kate Winslet revealed to CinemaBlend:
I really love directing her actually. She’s 80 years old now. She has seen everything. She’s done everything. She’s played every possible character, but we actually haven’t seen her as audiences being that broken down and fragile. And, she did say to me at the beginning, ‘I don’t really want to play this part, but I am going to do it for you because I want to support you. And I think your son’s script is wonderful.’ So, she was very committed. But, that’s Helen.
Goodbye June is Kate Winslet’s directorial debut, and comes from a script written by her son Joe Anders (whose father is director Sam Mendes). He wrote it at the age of 19, and was inspired by saying goodbye to his grandmother, and Winslet’s own mother. (Yes, Winslet recently weighed in on the nepo baby debate. )
Helen Mirren told the actress and newcomer director she wasn’t really keen on playing a dying woman, but was eager to support, and be part of the project. It’s a sweet look at the inner workings of how projects can come together when people are supportive of the other people in Hollywood they respect. Clearly, Winslet has only positive things to say about Mirren, as well.
She is a mensch. She’s like the backbone of Britain, this woman. She’s just extraordinary. And, actually what she comes with innately as a person is that sense of being a backbone for this family of people who were all falling apart. So I never felt any degree of trepidation around being able to get that out of her because she already possesses it.
In the new movie, Mirren plays June, and Winslet plays one of her daughters, Julia. The fictional siblings also consist of Andrea Riseborough’s Molly, Toni Collette’s Helen and Johnny Flynn’s Connor. Timothy Spall plays June’s husband and the adult kids’ father. They all come together over the holiday season when things take a turn for the worse.
During our conversation, Winslet said she felt it was important to “give her the space” to do her job. She wanted her to “try things and experiment.” In her words, there was a reason Mirren (hopefully) enjoyed the work, even if she wasn’t as enthusiastic about playing a dying lady on the screen.
What I did do for Helen Mirren was I provided her with a slightly different working environment to anything that she’s had before, because I knew I wouldn’t be able to offer her anything new. And it would’ve been foolish to try. I’m not gonna say something to her that she’s never heard before. She’s heard everything. And also I myself know, as an actress, if a director comes along and they think they’re gonna try something clever with you, you smell it out and you shut down and you are like, ‘OK, not helpful.’
It sounds like Winslet was well-paired director with Mirren, and as someone who has seen Goodbye June, I can say that the 80-year-old actress gives a really grounded and heartwarming performance even though, yes, it’s kind of off-putting to see her play this sort of role.
Mirren, who has been challenging norms in movies since the 1960s, has been honest about the “awful labels” she gets since getting older. It sounds like she received a lot of great direction from Winslet in her first directing credit. As Winslet also added:
Strangely, Helen, actually, she didn’t feel the need to over-talk. She didn’t want to talk about anything too much, which I totally understood. She just wanted to get there and react and just respond to what was right in front of her.
You can check out Goodbye June with a Netflix subscription starting on December 24 (so Christmas Eve).
