How 94-year-old June Squibb became the breakout movie star of the summer

One of the Hollywood box office stars of the summer is a 94-year-old veteran of stage and screen in her very first starring role. In “Thelma,” June Squibb plays the victim of an online scam who decides to take matters into her own hands. Squibb sat down with Jeffrey Brown to talk about aging on screen and in life. It’s part of our arts and culture series, CANVAS.

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Geoff Bennett: One of the Hollywood box office stars of the summer is a 94-year-old Actress, a veteran of stage and screen, but now in her very first starring role.

June Squibb talks to our Jeffrey Brown about aging on screen and in life for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Actor: Grandma.

June Squibb, Actress: Danny? You sound so strange.

Actor: I’m in jail.

June Squibb: Oh, my God.

Jeffrey Brown: In the movie “Thelma,” 94-year-old June Squibb plays 93-year-old Thelma Post, victim of an online scam that targets older people, who decides to take matters into her own hands.

June Squibb: I’m going to get it back. I need a ride.

Jeffrey Brown: When Squibb first read the script, she says, it was a no-brainer to take it on.

June Squibb: It had this wonderful woman in her 90s who was ready to gung-ho all over L.A. to get her money back. And I just felt, oh, God, such grit, such determination, and showing age.

Actress: And how did you think this was real?

Actor: Mom, you thought it was real too.

Actress: Well, she was very convincing.

Jeffrey Brown: The film, written and directed by Josh Margolin, is based on his real-life grandmother, who just turned 104.

We see Thelma, having lost her husband with family, especially her somewhat lost but loving grandson, and other aging friends, most of all, Ben, played by Richard Roundtree, best known as detective John Shaft in the 1970s film series.

Richard Roundtree, Actor: Why are we stopping at Mona’s?

June Squibb: To get a gun.

Richard Roundtree: Do you even know how to use it?

June Squibb: How hard can it be? Idiots use them all the time.

Jeffrey Brown: The two take off across Los Angeles on the trail of the scammers. And the film gleefully riffs on Tom Cruise-like “Mission: Impossible” chase scenes, but now on a rather slow-moving motorized Scooter.

Squibb insisted on doing some of her own stunts, including driving the Scooter.

June Squibb: I live in a complex, an apartment complex, and there’s a road around it, and the stunt coordinator, the director, the producers were all here with me on this scooter riding around this oval.

And he — the stunt coordinator, was running beside me. They were scared to death I was going to kill myself. But I got pretty good on it. The stunt coordinator kept saying: “June, you can stop it on a dime.”

So that became my sort of mantra, “Stop on a Dime” Squibb.

Jeffrey Brown: “Stop on a Dime” June Squibb is having quite a summer. She’s also the voice of Nostalgia in the animated film, “Inside Out 2,” a massive box office hit, the year’s biggest so far.

June Squibb: Is this when we all finally came up to headquarters?

Actress: Nostalgia.

Actress: That was like 30 seconds ago, Nostalgia.

June Squibb: Yes, those were the days.

Jeffrey Brown: She spent decades in a wide variety of stage roles on and off Broadway. Her move to the screen came late, and then always in smaller supporting roles, such as “Scent of a Woman” with Al Pacino.

She played Lena Dunham’s grandmother in the HBO series “Girls.”

June Squibb: Someday, you will look at him, hating him with every fiber of your being. It will pass.

Jeffrey Brown: Her best-known role to date came in the film “Nebraska” in 2013, as the wife of an increasingly delusional man played by Bruce Dern, which gained her an Oscar nomination for best supporting Actress.

June Squibb: These boys grow up staring at the rear ends of cows and pigs.

Look at that? Who created that? Who thought it up? A plug for a car. Electricity goes through, makes it run.

Jeffrey Brown: “Thelma,” in fact, is her first starring role.

Does that surprise you to even think about that, to contemplate that?

June Squibb: It surprises me that it’s become such a point of interest to people, because it’s not a point of interest to me, basically. I always choose what I’m going to do. There are certain reasons why I want to do certain films. It’s material for me. It’s not leading role, supporting role, all those words. It’s what the woman is as I’m reading it.

Richard Roundtree: We are old, diminished. The least we can do is take care of each other.

Jeffrey Brown: Playing this woman, Squibb says, felt deeply personal. For all the comedy, this is also a film about aging and family ties and strains, about lost loved ones, about loneliness and holding onto purpose.

Squibb and her second husband were together for 30 years before his death in 1999.

June Squibb: I recognized immediately some of the things that Thelma was feeling and going through, and I have already been through some of them. So, no, it became personal. It became very personal.

Jeffrey Brown: What do you see with the movies generally? Do the movies get aging right, do you think?

June Squibb: I think we’re doing it more and more. The studios, the people that make decisions are seeing that people are interested in aging.

Jeffrey Brown: But, on the other hand, we always hear that older people can become invisible in our culture.

June Squibb: Well, I think they do. I think that it’s easy to have a grandmother, an aunt or somebody in the family, and, as they get older, I think that they’re less listened to, they’re less important, perhaps.

What they think is less important. But I think that that might be changing too. I mean, we are breaking all the rules with this film. And that’s what it’s all about, is, if you can break rules, then — and make money at it, I mean, we are — we’re doing beautifully at the box office.

Jeffrey Brown: You have said that you felt in the past that you constantly had to prove yourself, and you no longer feel that anymore.

June Squibb: Well, the audition process that we all went through in our younger years, it’s very difficult. And it’s — you’re constantly being said, prove to me, prove to me that you should do this role.

I think that, as we get older, we drop a lot of that. We don’t really — well, for one thing, I really care little what anybody thinks anymore. So, I have that sort of security within me that what I’m thinking, what I’m — what my wishes are and what my wants are, are enough.

Jeffrey Brown: One poignant coda, after filming ended, co-star Richard Roundtree died of pancreatic cancer at age 81.

As for June Squibb, she’s already wrapped filming her second starring role in “Eleanor the Great,” the upcoming directorial debut by Scarlett Johansson.

No sense of retiring or stopping?

June Squibb: God knows I have slowed down, you know, but I have no idea. If somebody comes to me with something and it looks like I can do it and I want to do it, I will do it.

Jeffrey Brown: June Squibb is Thelma in theaters and streaming this summer.

For the PBS “News Hour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown.

June Squibb: What?

Richard Roundtree: I didn’t say anything.

June Squibb: Oh.