‘Tiring as hell, but great fun’: 94-year-old June Squibb finally has the role of a lifetime

June Squibb is having the time of her life. At 94, the actor has her first lead role in a film (the utterly delightful crime caper Thelma), and has another one lined up (Eleanor, the Great, directed by Scarlett Johansson). She was also the voice of Nostalgia in the billion-dollar box office hit Inside Out 2. This late-in-life career resurgence began when she scored her first Oscar nomination at the age of 84, for best supporting actress in Alexander Payne’s Nebraska.

The attention hasn’t gone to her head, has it?

“Oh, god, I hope not,” says Squibb, laughing. “No, I don’t think it has. God, I’ve lived through so many phases that one person could go through. I do think it’s fun. I mean, a lot of it is tiring as hell, but a lot of it is great fun.”

In Thelma, Squibb stars as 94-year-old Thelma Post, who is conned over the phone by a fake lawyer into thinking her grandson Danny is in jail after hitting a pregnant woman with his car. The only way to help, the lawyer says, is to send $10,000.

After posting the money, Thelma realises she has been tricked and decides to get her money back. What follows is a deliciously funny caper that taps into Mission: Impossible with a side of cross stitch and an assist from Shaft himself, Richard Roundtree.

Importantly, it also never treats its heroine as anything less than capable, nor does it look down on its older characters. And that’s because it’s based on a real-life woman: Thelma Post, the 104-year-old grandmother of the film’s writer-director Josh Margolin.

“That’s what was the exciting thing about it,” says Squibb. “Reading about a woman my age who is capable of going out and doing what she did, it gave me such a feeling of, ‘I can do this.’ You know, I could do this if I had to [chase down the money]. And, of course, I don’t know that I could, but you feel that when you read about her, she just has such a wonderful way about it. It’s not like, ‘Look at me’. It’s ‘Well, of course I can do this.’ That’s her whole take on it.”

Squibb is talking over Zoom from her home in Los Angeles, while on the other screen, in New York, is her 24-year-old co-star Fred Hechinger, who plays Thelma’s grandson Danny.

The pair are at opposite ends of their career. Squibb got her start as a 19-year-old tap dancer in Cleveland, before a 50-year career on the stages of New York. She only ventured into film and TV when she was in her 60s, and her droll delivery has seen her slot neatly into everything from Girls, The Office and Curb Your Enthusiasm to Payne’s films About Schmidt and Nebraska.

Hechinger, meanwhile, got his break as the moody son in the first season of The White Lotus, and will next be seen as the villain Emperor Caracalla in Ridley Scott’s highly anticipated Gladiator II (he jokes that if Caracalla had a grandmother like Thelma, he wouldn’t be “such a rough and tumble fella”). Despite those flashy titles, it’s Squibb he remains awed by.

“It’s similar to what we’re talking about with the character of Thelma, which has, I feel, a similarity to June, that when you set your mind to something, you both do it, no matter what,” says Hechinger. “Which is, I think, one of your great powers as an actress. If you read something and you want to do it, nothing gets in your way, you figure out how to bring that character to life no matter what.

“And I guess I learned a lot about the thought that goes into that, the preparation, the confidence and the practicality, the knowledge that when Monday comes and we’re filming that scene at 9am you’re gonna have to do it.”

Squibb is similarly effusive: “He’s one of my best friends. He knows how to be a good friend, and that’s not easy to come by because sometimes you like someone, but it just doesn’t work. It doesn’t make it. But with Fred, it made it, so that’s great to me. And he’s also a hell of an actor.”

The pair have a gorgeous on-screen chemistry, with Thelma and Danny bonding over wanting to prove their independence to Gail, Thelma’s daughter and Danny’s mum (played by a terrifically highly strung Parker Posey) and her husband Alan (Clark Gregg).

“With Thelma, his love is less suffocating,” says Hechinger. “It feels more full and less judgmental. She really trusts him. She trusts him to be great, but she also is OK when he’s a little bit messy because I think she has this longer view of him. She has a perspective on who he is that is very deep and that brings him confidence that he doesn’t always feel with his parents.”

Squibb understands how kids change their view of their parents and their abilities because she’s seen it in her life.

“My son, I know I do things because I think, well, it will calm him down, you know, he won’t be upset, he won’t have to worry about this,” says Squibb. “I have one friend who has a daughter and … we say that there was a point in our life when the kids took over. They became the parents, and we became the children, and it’s true.”

Did her son know she was doing her own stunts?

“I didn’t tell him,” says Squibb, laughing. “But he’s seen the film, so he knows. He loved it.”

Squibb insisted on doing her own stunts, training for months on a scooter in the parking lot of her apartment complex. She even milks great drama out of something as simple as rolling over a bed, while Hechinger gets his Mission: Impossible moment in a car scene.

“When I read about it [the bed roll], I felt, ‘I know what he wants, I know what he’s talking about,’” says Squibb. “I didn’t know if I could do it, and they certainly didn’t think I could do it. And I said, ‘Well, let me try.’ And I did it perfectly. And they were like, ‘Oh my god!’”

Adds Hechinger: “Our lives are action movies, and even if it’s not that we are blowing up the Death Star each time, the things, which might seem little, are quite enormous because we’re living them, and we’re surrounded by people we care about, and we want to make sure that those people are safe.

“But it’s messy and it can be difficult and challenging and [there can be] all these seemingly smaller things that are actually, in our experience, so big. You know, I’ll be late to catch the train, and I’ll be sweating as much as you are when you’re watching a Jason Statham movie.”

The film’s writer and director Josh Margolin didn’t have to look far to find the drama in Thelma: it was his grandmother’s everyday life.

“The movie’s kind of written out of a debate I have with myself about wanting her to be safe, wanting her to be OK, but also accepting the fact that obviously there’s times she does need help,” says Margolin over Zoom from LA. “But there are other times where I have to trust that she also is more capable than I might give her credit for.

“So it was born out of almost where I could see myself in both of those perspectives, to try to be like, ‘OK, you have to sit in this room and you can’t do anything because it’s risky’ versus. ‘Hey, I can’t totally control that’. It’s nerve-racking for me sometimes, knowing she’s out and about, but also knowing that, OK, that’s life, and she’s been living it longer than I have.”

It was for this reason Margolin was careful to not “punch down” when writing Thelma, to not make fun of the older characters and their abilities. An early scene sees Danny gently guiding Thelma around using the computer. It could have so easily made Thelma the punchline – old person can’t use technology blah blah – but instead, it’s filled with care.

“That was so important to me, tonally, to have fun with the premise and enjoy the absurdity of her kind of pushing it to these lengths, but also never to feel like we’re punching down or poking fun,” says Margolin. “Because I think the second you do that, you lose the thing [heart]. It’s a movie that is in awe of her, even if it’s funny and it’s absurd.

“There’s things happening that are making you go, ‘Oh, Jesus’ but I never wanted it to feel mean spirited because it is an ode to her.”

Margolin had already been filming his grandma for years before he started on Thelma (she is in the film’s end credits) and he says she is thrilled with the attention.

“She really loved it, which was a huge relief to me, and really, really sweet,” says Margolin. “I think it’s both really exciting and a little surreal for her, just because it’s a lot of things from her real life on the screen and out in the world, which is not something she ever thought would happen.

“She spent so much of her life near the business … or [as] the plus one, so I think there’s something strange and interesting where she now is the subject of something. I think she was like, ‘Huh’, but she also is really excited about it and has loved following along with it.”

And since so much of the movie is styled after Mission: Impossible, does Margolin have plans for sequels? Thelma: Dead Reckoning or some such?

“I’ll have to talk to June about it,” says Margolin. “But I think it’s not off the table.”

Since Margolin says he hasn’t asked Squibb about a sequel, I do. Is she up for it?

“My only answer is, it’s going to have to be pretty fast if we’re going to talk about all of those films,” says Squibb, laughing. “Gosh, yes, I think we should do Thelma Two. There you go. I’ve said it.”

Thelma is released in cinemas on September 5.

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