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.