Go past the hut at the entrance to an apartment complex off a busy street in the San Fernando Valley section of Los Angeles. Turn left at the Aloha Room and go past the little nook with a red waterfall and a sign that reads “VOLCANO MAUNA LOA FALLS.” Don’t worry about the black panther statue. (It’s the beast, not the Marvel character.) Cross a little stream that signs call the Kauai River, look for the door on the left and you’ll find the modest kitchen table that served as Ground Zero for the movie “Thelma.”
First, though, June Squibb will have to invite you in, because the table is at the entrance to her kitchen, next to a formidable glassed-in bookcase that sports an impressive collection of carefully placed volumes dominated by mysteries and thrillers written by Scandinavian authors. It’s here, in this pleasantly kitschy midcentury complex, that Squibb first met with “Thelma” director Josh Margolin when he offered her the role of an elderly woman who is swindled by a phone scammer and sets out to get a little revenge.
It’s here where Margolin brought her costar Richard Roundtree over for lunch before the ’70s blaxploitation star (he was Shaft!) gave his final performance as a mild-mannered friend of Thelma’s. It’s here where she and Fred Hechinger, who plays her grandson, met for what was supposed to be a rehearsal but instead became a lively discussion that she said has never stopped.
And it’s where she first drove the scooter she uses in “Thelma,” with the stunt coordinator running alongside her, scared that she was going to kill herself.
“I could just sit here and they brought everybody to me,” said Squibb as she sat near a sliding glass door, on the other side of which an orange cat slept away the afternoon. (Her other cat, a gray and white one, was “probably hiding in the closet,” she said.) It was two days after her 95th birthday, but Squibb was sharp as a tack and in high spirits as her delightful performance in “Thelma”continued to stir up awards talk 10 months after it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. It’s her first leading role in a film career that didn’t begin until she was 61, a Broadway veteran but a film neophyte until Woody Allen cast her in “Alice” in 1990.
In other words, June Squibb launched her film career at an age when most actresses were considered to have aged out of the business by an ageist and sexist industry. “I never felt that women of that age couldn’t get parts, because that was me — that’s who I was at the time,” she said with a shrug and a smile.
“People laugh and say, ‘Well, you broke the rule on that one.’ All I knew was that all at once in New York, we were having a big influx of filming. I knew theater people who were working on these films, and so I thought, I could be doing this.
“I went to my agent and said, ‘This is happening, and I think I should be doing some of it.’ A week later, I had an audition for ‘Alice,’ and I got it. And from then on, I did stage once in a while, but most of the time, I did film. I did ‘Alice’ and then ‘Scent of a Woman’ and ‘The Age of Innocence,’ one right after the other.”
Alexander Payne’s “About Schmidt,” in which she played Jack Nicholson’s wife, was key to raising her profile in Los Angeles, so in the early 2000s, she moved west, into the apartment complex where she still lives. (She did make a concession to her age three or four years ago when her son persuaded her to move from the second floor to the first.)
Most of the parts were small but the work was steady, and occasionally she landed a standout role in a high-profile project, most notably when Payne gave her another chance to play a star’s wife, this time Bruce Dern, in “Nebraska.”
“I’ve done leading roles on stage, and it’s fun,” she said. “If the role’s fun, it’s fun. But other than that, to me it’s the same. But I will say, you get more time on camera with a leading role. You get to say things three times where you say them once in a supporting role.’’
Her first leading role came haphazardly, courtesy of her friendship with Beanie Feldstein, with whom she appeared in the 2021 film “The Humans.” “Beanie is a friend of Josh Margolin and his family,” she said. “They were talking about Josh’s new script, and she said, ‘Who do you want for the lead?’ He said, “Well, I’d like June Squibb, but I don’t know how to get a script to her.’ She said, ‘I’ll get a script to her!’
“So she texted me and said, ‘I’m sending you a script,’ and I texted, ‘OK.’ It was ridiculous. It didn’t even go through my agent — it was just Beanie saying, ‘Here. You wanna read this?’”
The role of a feisty woman who needs help with the internet but is hell on wheels when you put her on a scooter was an ideal one for Squibb. “When I read the script, I thought, Oh, I can’t wait,” she said. “I thought, This scooter’s gonna be such fun.”
A pause. “Well, it was fun, but they first didn’t want me to drive it. They said, ‘We’ll shoot you sitting on it, and then you’ll get off, and the stunt lady will take over and drive it and do everything.’ And I thought, That’s silly. I should be able to drive it.” In the end, the filmmakers relented and let Squibb do her own scooter stunts — though neither Margolin, the stunt coordinator nor Roundtree were expecting her to ram her scooter into his as hard as she could in one scene.
“They told me drive up to him and stop, and then get off and they’d get a stunt lady to do it. And I thought, Hell, I can do this. That was my attitude toward the scooters, the bed rolls, the stairs, everything. I really ended up doing most of my own stunts.”
And now, with one of 2024’s most undeniably crowd-pleasing comedies under her belt, she’s basking in the kind of glow she hasn’t felt before. “I’ve done good films and I’ve done bad films,” she said, “but I’ve never done something where the overall feeling from people who see the film was what it is for this one. It really is kind of amazing.”
She’s already booked her next gig — and it’s her second lead role, in a film that marks the directorial debut of Scarlett Johansson. “It’s called ‘Eleanor the Great,’ and I play Eleanor,” Squibb said, laughing. “After ‘Thelma’ and ‘Eleanor the Great,’ I’m gonna tell my agent, ‘Only leads, and only if the film has my name on it.’”’
This story first appeared in the SAG Preview/Documentaries/International issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
