Helen Mirren has played a long list of real people, but her role as writer Patricia Highsmith in A Talent For Murder may have been her most challenging yet.
The Oscar winner told The Hollywood Reporter on Sunday that portraying The Talented Mr. Ripley author in Anton Corbijn’s upcoming thriller was particularly “difficult” because of their distinct dissimilarities.
“I would say Patricia might be one of them, honestly, because she is so different from how I am,” said at The Hollywood Reporter’s Studio at 1 Hotel during TIFF, presented by sponsor Canada Goose. “I could sort of identify with Her Majesty, the Queen, to a certain extent. [Prime Minister of Israel] Golda Meir — on the realm of sort of difficulty, I would say Queen, Golda, [and] Patricia Highsmith probably [is] the most difficult because of the way she’s portrayed in the film. I suspect the way she, maybe, was at the end of her life. She was very, very abrasive, very reclusive, [and] you know, basically, very fucked up.”
Mirren is no stranger to real-life performances, having previously played a long list of icons including Queen Elizabeth II in The Queen, Maria Altmann in Woman in Gold, Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra, Golda Meir in Golda, Ayn Rand in the Showtime TV film The Passion of Ayn Rand, Queen Elizabeth I in the HBO miniseries Elizabeth I, defense attorney Linda Kenney Baden in Phil Spector, Catherine the Great in the HBO miniseries Catherine the Great and Alfred Hitchcock’s wife Alma Reville in Hitchcock.
Mirren previously told THR that playing real people is a higher level of responsibility than portraying fictional characters, but the essence of storytelling remains the same.
“Of course it’s different [playing a real person],” Mirren said in 2015, “because you have a responsibility to look like them and sound like them and maybe walk like them and use your hands like them, but the essential journey is exactly the same, really, as with a fictional character, which is a journey of imagination and the journey of telling the story.”
Directed by Corbijn, A Talent for Murder follows a young man (Alden Ehrenreich) who is sent to Switzerland by Highsmith’s New York publisher in an effort to convince her to write one more Ripley novel. The film, which was adapted by Joanna Murray-Smith from her 2014 play Switzerland, also stars Olivia Cooke and Juliet Stevenson.
A Talent for Murder is scheduled to be released in theaters on Oct. 23.
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