Do Your Own Stunts: Thelma star June Squibb’s six tips for leading a long, healthy, kickass life

June Squibb scoots along in Thelma.
June Squibb scoots along in Thelma.

As June Squibb shares her life in film—from her love of Gene Kelly and Akira Kurosawa, to being directed by Martin Scorsese, to taking the wheel in the new action-comedy Thelma—Mia Lee Vicino takes notes.

I don’t know another word to use to explain that feeling, but I want reality. I don’t want it to be a joke, I don’t want it to be more serious than it really is—I want the reality of what the script is saying.

—⁠June Squibb

At 94 years old, June Squibb is just getting started. Josh Margolin’s new action-comedy Thelma offers her first leading film role in a decades-long career, one that includes—but is certainly not limited to—working with Philip Seymour Hoffman in Scent of a Woman, Debbie Reynolds in In & Out and Martin Scorsese on The Age of Innocence. It wasn’t until 2013 that Squibb finally started receiving her flowers: in Nebraska, she memorably acted alongside Bruce Dern as his foul-mouthed wife Kate, and her reward was an Academy Award nomination for Best ing Actress. Kate and the eponymous Thelma, she tells me, are the two characters she’s most proud of inhabiting. 

“Now, we had no idea what would happen with it or that we would go on to all the awards, but it was a very special film, and we knew this while making it,” Squibb recalls about Nebraska in our filmography-spanning interview, which you can watch up top. The senior actress also shares memories from the sets of all of the movies listed above (including doing her own stunts for Thelma) and some words of wisdom for leading a long, healthy, kickass life.

Cool grandparents (Richard Roundtree and Squibb) don’t feel the heat.
Cool grandparents (Richard Roundtree and Squibb) don’t feel the heat.

1. Marry a man who’ll take you to an Akira Kurosawa retrospective. 

Squibb has been entrenched in show business from the beginning. Her mother played piano for silent movies, and she would go to the theater every Sunday to watch Westerns and serials (her favorites being Tex Ritter). Around the time she got her break on Broadway in the original 1959 production of Gypsy, Squibb married acting teacher Charles Kakatsakis. 

“He was a big fan of the Akira Kurosawa films,” she says. “After we got married, we were living in New York and he started talking about a retrospective at a theater near us in the Village. I had never seen a Kurosawa film. He couldn’t believe [it]. He dragged me over there. We saw every one of them; we just went night after night… Seven Samurai is still my favorite film in the whole world.”

2. Go to the pub with your young co-stars.

Squibb didn’t begin her film acting career until the ’90s, with the Oscar-winning Scent of a Woman (also known as the movie where Al Pacino goes, “HOO-AH!”) being her second ever big-screen performance. She shared her scene with another newbie: Philip Seymour Hoffman, in his first major motion picture.

According to Squibb, the role “was very big for [Hoffman], and it was Chris [O’Donnell]’s first film, too.” She tells me about how they all lived at a motel in upstate New York during production, since they were filming at Emma Willard School in Troy.  

“They kidded me all the time; they were always trying to get me to come into the bar with them,” Squibb reminisces. “I was a big Knicks fan, so they would allow me to sit and watch the Knicks game while they had a drink at the bar, too. They were cute as could be. I with Philip, he was like a bear cub or something. I went home and I told my husband, I said, ‘That kid’s going to be big.’ And I was right.”

3. Do your own stunts.

In Thelma, there’s an early moment in which the titular grandmother and her grandson Daniel (Fred Hechinger) watch a Mission: Impossible movie together. Daniel explains to her how Tom Cruise miraculously did his own stunts, a meta-nod to the fact that Squibb did her own, too.

“I read the script and my first thing was, ‘Oh boy, riding that scooter!’ I couldn’t wait. I thought that would be great fun. Then they brought the scooter and I tried it, and it was harder than I thought,” she re. “You’d stop it and then it would sort of buck with you a little bit. I think they were all very nervous about this, but I just felt I could do it… I think that they, little by little, began to realize that I could do more than they ever dreamt I could do.”

Roundtree and Squibb out-stunting Tom Cruise.
Roundtree and Squibb out-stunting Tom Cruise.

4. Appreciate musical theater.

“I loved all of the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers films,” Squibb gushes. “We used to think it was so funny, the joke about how she’s so much better than him because she’s dancing backwards… and in heels!”

She’s also a certified Gene Kelly fan, citing Singin’ in the Rain and Summer Stock as some of her all-time favorite musicals. “I think Gene Kelly is a genius,” Squibb affirms. “And I think that Donald O’Connor was a genius of his own, that wonderful face of his, and he was a hell of a dancer. In Singin’ in the Rain, he went up the wall! [And] Jean Hagen was very, very funny. I mean, that’s a funny character that she gave us.” 

Squibb got to work with Singin’ in the Rain’s leading lady Debbie Reynolds on the Frank Oz comedy In & Out in 1997. “We were doing a scene in a church and there were a lot of extras, and [Reynolds] got very nervous,” she re. “She thought the extras were bored. So she turned around and did her act for them in between shots. She told stories and she sang a little bit. She did the whole thing for them. She was so worried about those dear people [getting] bored up there.”

5. Nobody is insignificant.

The third entry in Squibb’s filmography is The Age of Innocence, directed by none other than Letterboxd member Martin Scorsese. As an avid irer of regular Scorsese muse Robert De Niro (“He’s the one person now that I would love to work with,” she its), collaborating with the iconoclast director was a dream come true.

“I had a very small role in it, but we were working in a big, huge mansion outside of New York,” she says. “I was doing a small thing, but I came on, did my lines and there was a painting behind it. He was not happy with the painting, so he said, ‘We’re going to do this again in the studio with a different painting.’ So we stopped shooting my scene, we went into a studio and by golly, he directed me! I thought it would be his assistant. That impressed me so much… I think every actor meant a lot to him, too.”

Thelma’s grandson (Fred Hechinger) teaches her how to use a computer, just in time for #LetterboxdFriday.
Thelma’s grandson (Fred Hechinger) teaches her how to use a computer, just in time for #LetterboxdFriday.

6. Insist on authenticity.

Over the years, Squibb has developed a reputation for playing kindly matriarchs with unexpected bite, from Hannah Horvath’s cheese sandwich-eating Grandma Flo on HBO’s Girls to Hubie’s overprotective mom in Hubie Halloween. That tangible singularity and subversion of cliché is something that Squibb searches for in every project she takes on. “I look for a script that I feel, once I get into it, that I can be real,” she tells me. “I don’t know another word to use to explain that feeling, but I want reality. I don’t want it to be a joke, I don’t want it to be more serious than it really is—I want the reality of what the script is saying.”

For her, the reality is that “audiences are obviously interested” in stories about older people. “I think Nebraska proved that, and certainly Thelma is proving that,” Squibb continues. “I was just shocked and amazed at Sundance, at the reaction, at the love that we got from the audience… We were in festivals with audiences of 2,000 and they were yelling at it and it was wonderful. There is a huge audience for reality, for the real story of a human being and the fact that your age doesn’t bother people; they want to see this. Age is something that people are very interested in right now.”

Watch the full interview—featuring an anecdote about being long-time neighbors with beloved character actress Margo Martindale—here.


Thelma’ is now playing in theaters in the US and Canada, courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

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