Helen Mirren looks nothing like the reigning queen of England. With sharply sculpted features and a low cut top showing off her assets, she looks more like a femme fatale. “I have to make an effort with this one because I don't want people to think I actually look like the Queen,” she joked before sitting down to discuss the film.
In The Queen, Mirren does an impeccable Elizabeth II going through the public spectacle of Princess Diana’s death and funeral arrangements. She actually got to have tea with the queen to inform her performance.
“There is a twinkle to her and a relaxation about her that don't really see in her formal moments and her formal moments is what we mostly see,” said Mirren. “99.9% we see those formal moments and they're very familiar to us. That, to all of us is ‘the queen.’ But there is another queen woman Elizabeth Windsor, who is very easy and welcoming and sparkly and with the most lovely smile, and alert and not that sort of reserved and cool gravitas that she normally communicates. So I very much tried to bring that into it because the tragedy happened so fast in the film. I only really had a tiny space at the very beginning of the film and then a tiny space at the end of the film to bring that personality into it.”
The queen fell into public disfavor for her decision not to publicly acknowledge or mourn the death, and husband Prince Phillip (James Cromwell) expresses his disinterest in Diana even more politically incorrectly. Their marriage was also important for Mirren to get right.
“I did a lot of research about that and that relationship is fascinating. Elizabeth was about 16 when she fell in love with Phillip, and she was a young 16. She said, ‘That's the guy I want.’ Everyone in the palace and in her family disapproved of that match strongly. They didn't want her to marry him. He was a bit like Diana when he was young. He was a bit cool and trendy and hip and wild and would drive up to the palace in an open-top sports car. He was a dispossessed prince. He had no money at all. But she stuck to her guns so she did marry him and he was quite, I suspect, a macho kind of guy, quite testosterone driven, strong and opinionated and all of those things, and then she became queen and then he had to stay in second place.”
Being a rebellious Brit herself, playing this modern queen did warm Mirren up to the monarchy, but only slightly. “It did change my feelings, but not profoundly. I’m so ambivalent. I’d like to see a much more open Monarchy, myself. I used to think they were completely useless and we should get rid of them. I don’t necessarily feel that way anymore. I’m still ambivalent, I still loathe the British class system, and the Royal family are the apex of the British class system. It’s a system that I absolutely hate. But, the reality is, the last 40 years of life in Britain have eroded the British class system enormously. It isn’t what it was before the second World War, or even 10 years after the second World War. Things have really, really changed. And always in change, there are good elements in change, and there are bad elements in change. It’s always a dichotomy, isn’t it?”
The film ultimately shows Prime Minister Tony Blair convincing the queen to make a public display of mourning for the people of England, which quite possibly redeemed her titular political standing. But perhaps the queen was right not to make a spectacle out of a woman’s funeral.
“It all became about them. They appeared it was about her, but it wasn’t about her, it was about them. It was weird, I don’t know. I was really glad not to be there. And it was kind of a circus, like the carnival coming to town, and it was a carnival of death, and a sort of carnival of grief, but a carnival, none the less.”
Ultimately, whether the queen’s reaction was right or wrong is a matter of opinion, and based on many factors even the film can’t answer. “The relationship between the Queen and Diana is one that none of us really know. From the research I did, all I could find, really basically, told me that the Queen was very kind to Diana, and very supportive of her within her world. I think her attitude came from her own experience. You had to gut it out, you had to find a way of making it work, even if it was a nightmare. You had to make it work, and in the end you did. And I think in the early days of the collapse of that marriage, she thought they would work it out the way she had with her husband, and that they would get over it, and they would find a way to carry on together as friends, as partners, as members of the Royal family. Because if you’re a member of the Royal family, you are a monarch, you’re a member of the Royal family as much as you are a normal person. You have to be royal. You’re buying into that. If you don’t want that, don’t go there, don’t go into the family.”
The Queen opens in limited release this weekend.
http://www.cinemablend.com/new/Interview-Helen-Mirren-3569.html
