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Helen Mirren has won two Emmy® Awards (for "The Passion of Ayn Rand" and "Prime Suspect 4: Scent of Darkness"); a Golden Globe® Award for "Losing Chase"; and three BAFTA Awards for her starring role in the series "Prime Suspect. " She spoke with HBO Online from her home in Los Angeles.
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Helen Mirren as Elizabeth I. |
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HBO:
You've created an incredibly diverse body of
work over the years.
Helen Mirren:
Well, I think that I've always had many
different audiences. I mean, I have audiences
who see my theater work and they're
completely unaware of the fact that I've done
an extremely successful television series, for
example, or any of my work in the cinema.
And then I have people who've only ever seen
my work in the cinema and are completely
unaware of any work that I've done in the
theatre or on television.
Some people are aware of the whole spectrum.
I've done for example experimental theater in
Africa and in America and in Paris, so my
work is spread over quite a large arena, and
very few people are aware of the all the
different arenas.
HBO:
Tell us about Elizabeth I and how you came to
the project. You worked with the writer Nigel
Williams from the start?
Helen Mirren:
Yes, I did. It's obviously a magnificent role,
and I knew that Nigel was a really, really good
writer. So I said yes without reading the
script. I felt she had a very interesting and
complicated private life, but it played out
against such an extraordinarily political life
and international life on a very grand stage.
So I thought we needed to include that side of
her life. The fact is she was maneuvering her
private life around her public life, and her
public life was the most important part of her
life, and she consistently sacrificed her private
life to her public life. And Nigel just did the
most brilliant job of combining the public and
the private so beautifully in the script.
HBO:
She's so emotionally dynamic in terms of
her being explosive in one moment and tender
and vulnerable in the next.
Helen Mirren:
Yes, that was very much the Elizabeth I
wanted to portray, and it was one that I felt-
reading all the contemporary accounts of her
and doing all the research I did on her-that
was very much her personality. She was very
feminine, very vulnerable, kind of slightly silly
sometimes, but at the same time, incredibly
intellectual and very, very emotional. I mean
she would fly off the handle very quickly.
She loved with great passion, great
commitment. And she hated with equal
passion and commitment. She was an
incredibly explosive character. But I never
wanted to play this sort of cold, controlling,
sort of slightly mean-spirited sort of granite-
like character, because she really wasn't like
that.
HBO:
It seems like there aren't many stories where
one can explore a woman in power, and in
particular, an older woman in power.
Helen Mirren:
Well, of course Elizabeth was in power from
the age of twenty-five onwards, and real
power. Real power. She had the nay or yeah
power, beyond the power of a Bush or any
contemporary, because it was not a
democratic power. This is before there was a
real parliament in place in England. Democracy hadn't
really kicked in. And it's very hard to get your
head around what that must've meant to the
person in power and to the people around the
person in power. But yes, there are very few
women in history like her, and that's why it's
such an incredible gift to be handed this as a
role.
People always say, Oh, it's so terrible, they're
aren't enough roles for women, you know?
And I've always said work on getting good
roles for women in real life, and then the roles
for women in drama will follow.
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Helen Mirren as Elizabeth I. |
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HBO:
The two movies were researched
thoroughly in terms of historical detail and
period accuracy. What are your thoughts on
working in the period rather than modernizing
the story as other versions of Elizabeth have
done.
Helen Mirren:
I find that historical detail is so much more
interesting than anything we can invent
nowadays. I mean, they lived life on such an
extreme level. My only sadness was that we
couldn't get more historical detail into it,
because you could really start investigating
the extraordinary nature of their lives. For us
the historical detail was very important. We
come from a country that wants to pay
attention in general to those things, and if
there are a couple of things that we got
deliberately wrong historically that was a very
deliberate, and very thought about and
argued over issue.
Like the issue of Elizabeth meeting Mary
Queen of Scots which it's ninety-nine point
nine percent she didn't. If she did, she did it
in incredibly secrecy, which is what we sort of
intimate. But it's very unlikely that she ever
met Mary Queen of Scots face to face. But
they had a very protracted correspondence
with each other. So, to dramatize that Nigel
felt that you had to actually see it. But
everything else, the historical detail is pretty
accurate.
HBO:
It seems like there's three sides to Elizabeth:
the private moments with Lester and Essex, the semi-public
where she's meeting with her privy council
and the icon Elizabeth, where
she's almost a symbol of England.
Helen Mirren:
Well, that's an incredibly accurate description.
You know the set was extraordinary, and it
was built almost exactly on the pattern of
Whitehall Palace. And actually when you go to
any of those palaces that are still existent,
you see this strange configuration of rooms,
and you go, How on earth did people live like
this? This is very weird. You have a whole
series of rooms off a corridor, one after
another after another, going further and
further into the inner sanctum. And usually
the last room along there is the bedroom.
And you see that in Russian, you see it in
Italy, you see it in all these sort of medieval
palaces. And so there was that sense of the
inner, inner sanctum, and as you go further
and further and further away from the
bedroom, the rooms become more and more
public.
The other thing to understand is that they
were constantly surrounded by people. They
were never, ever, ever alone. Ever. Night
time, day time, there was always someone
around them. Privacy was sort of unheard of.
So their emotional lives were played out
against a sense of constant attendants.
HBO:
You've really managed to humanize her. Was that something you were going after from the start?
Helen Mirren:
I wanted to pull the audience into Elizabeth,
not have them sitting on the outside watching
it like a beautiful pageant. I wanted to pull
them into the visceral experience of being in
there with her. It seemed to me that she was an
amazingly sort of human person. Of course
she branded herself brilliantly and was able to
be an icon, but like everybody else you know,
she was also fallible and foolish and
vulnerable. Certainly vulnerable to falling in
love.
HBO:
What are your thoughts about her sex life?
The big question.
Helen Mirren:
The big question. Did she or didn't she?
HBO:
Did she or didn't she.
Helen Mirren:
Well, no one will ever know. Logically, it
seems to me highly unlikely that she would
ever have jeopardized her body or her political
position. It was very dangerous physically for
women to get pregnant. She loved her
position as a monarch more than she loved
anything, and she loved a lot of things. She
loved riding, she loved men, she loved
dancing, she loved blood sports. She loved
reading, she loved music. She was a great
lover, but she loved power more than
anything. More than all of those things put
together.
And her position on the throne was very
tenuous. She came to the throne a bastard.
There were constant attacks on her from
within England and from without England, on
her claim to the throne. So I think if she'd
found herself pregnant with an illegitimate
child, it would've been an absolute disaster.
She could've easily been deposed. And so I
don't think she would've ever jeopardized her
position like that.
She knew that her body as a woman was also
a political body. It was something to be
bought and sold politically. That's why she
was always flirting with foreign princes. She
was supposed to be a virgin, and she used it
as a political pawn to keep her enemies at
bay. So the practical side of my brain doesn't
think that she would ever have jeopardized
that. But having said that, I suspect she did
everything else. She probably had sex in the
Clintonian sense. I did not have sex with that
woman. You know? I wouldn't be surprised if
she got up to a lot of those kinds of sexual
games.
HBO:
Ah, the "Clintonian" sense...
Helen Mirren:
Yes.
HBO:
Kind of like people who say, Oh, I just
Lewinskied.
Helen Mirren:
I just Lewinskied. Oh [LAUGHTER] they are
terrible.
HBO:
Have you heard that one?
Helen Mirren:
Poor Monica. No, I haven't heard that one.
HBO:
Let's talk a bit about the costumes. They say there
were thousands of dresses discovered after
Elizabeth's death.
Helen Mirren:
Yes, she had over two thousand dresses. I
mean covered in jewels and gold thread and
whatever. She adored clothes. People would
give her wigs as presents. I thought that was
interesting. She wore wigs not towards the
end of her life because she probably had to,
but also they wore wigs the way people might
wear hats or jewelry. It was an extra
accouterment in your outfit. So yes, she loved
interesting and wonderful pieces of clothing.
And when you see the portraits, you see this
sort of extraordinary surreal nature of her
outfits. They were very excessive. Even for the
day, they were thought of as excessive.
HBO:
In some of the really over-the-top gowns, it's
almost like she's no longer herself. She's become a symbol.
Helen Mirren:
Well, they were very into wearing symbols, all
kinds of complicated symbols. You'd wear
favors of someone that you wanted to say, you
know, tip a wink to in court, you're in my
favor. I mean, all sort of strange animals
mean different things. When she was flirting
with the idea of marrying the Duke of Anjou,
and this is true, and I had them make me
one...she walked around with a veil with a
fleur de lys printed all over it, kind of the way
people wear sports shirts nowadays. But the
symbolism of what they were wearing was
very important.
HBO:
Why do you think this story still speaks to
audiences?
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Signature of Elizabeth I. |
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Helen Mirren:
She's just such an extraordinary character. I
mean, just the phrase, "Virgin Queen" is
already a sort of fascinating idea, isn't it? And
especially a virgin queen who then carries on
left right and center these extraordinary
relationships with all kinds of men.
And the Elizabethan Age in the history of
Great Britain is one of the great
golden eras, and Elizabeth was very much a
part of that. She was only a part of it because
a lot of other things were happening around
the world that gave that age its aura and its
power. But she was the person in power, and
she was a queen.
And then queens are always fascinating
characters, especially queens who equip
themselves extremely well. That don't fall
prey to their circumstances or to men. It's
much harder for a woman to do that than a
man. Much harder. She's earned our respect
over the many generations that have come
after her. As each generation looks back they
look back with incredible respect that
has never been diminished or undercut. On
the contrary, each time a historian relooks at
Elizabeth, they come away even more amazed
at what she did and what she achieved.
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