Mission Impossible? 94-Year-Old Star Channels Tom Cruise in ‘Thelma’ 

(L-R) June Squibb and Clark Gregg attends the "Thelma" Premiere during the 2024 Sundance Film Festival at The Ray Theatre on January 18, 2024 in Park City, Utah. (Getty Images/AFP)
(L-R) June Squibb and Clark Gregg attends the "Thelma" Premiere during the 2024 Sundance Film Festival at The Ray Theatre on January 18, 2024 in Park City, Utah. (Getty Images/AFP)
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Mission Impossible? 94-Year-Old Star Channels Tom Cruise in ‘Thelma’ 

(L-R) June Squibb and Clark Gregg attends the "Thelma" Premiere during the 2024 Sundance Film Festival at The Ray Theatre on January 18, 2024 in Park City, Utah. (Getty Images/AFP)
(L-R) June Squibb and Clark Gregg attends the "Thelma" Premiere during the 2024 Sundance Film Festival at The Ray Theatre on January 18, 2024 in Park City, Utah. (Getty Images/AFP)

Packed full of nail-biting chases, hi-tech gadgets and an armed standoff, "Thelma" could be the next "Mission: Impossible" movie -- except its star, June Squibb, is 94.

In the film, Squibb's hero takes matters into her own hands after she is swindled into sending $10,000 to a scammer, racing across Los Angeles on a souped-up mobility scooter with a dusty old gun, determined to confront the villain.

Remarkably, the action-comedy, which premiered at the Sundance festival on Thursday, is the first leading film role for the veteran stage actor, who earned an Oscar nomination for "Nebraska" a decade ago.

So how does it feel to become Hollywood's hottest new action star in her twilight years?

"It feels great! I love it! Me and Tom (Cruise)!" Squibb told AFP.

Indeed, the film is littered with references to Tom Cruise, whose films her character Thelma enjoys watching with her grandson.

It plays with tropes from the "Mission: Impossible" films, such as a top-secret mission briefing delivered through a hearing aid. Cruise himself signed off on the use of footage from his movies.

"I said 'Is he letting us do this?' And they said 'Sure, they like it!'" recalled Squibb.

Squibb also took more personal inspiration from the Hollywood A-lister -- including his famous insistence on doing many of his own stunts.

"They told me 'Slow down June, don't go so fast!'" she said, of a chase sequence on her mobility scooter which required a collision.

"I thought 'this is silly,' and I just rammed right into him and then took off down the hall. And they got that all on camera."

'Real danger'

The movie's colorful premise and stars -- including the late Richard Roundtree, and Malcolm McDowell -- have it already tipped as one of the "buzziest" titles at this year's Sundance festival, which champions independent filmmaking.

But it has a personal and poignant message for its director Josh Margolin, who named the film after his own grandmother Thelma, now 103.

She was tricked by a scammer into believing he had been in a car crash and needed bail money.

Thankfully, the real Thelma did not part with any money before his family rumbled the scheme, but the incident got Margolin thinking about what would have happened if she had sought justice -- "something that I would not put past her!"

"Watching Tom Cruise jump out of a plane is just as scary as watching my grandma jump onto a bed," he said.

"It's smaller, but for her at this moment in her life, and where she's at, that presents real danger, and is nerve-wracking to watch.

"So I wanted to shrink those tropes down to explore her strength, her tenacity, her determination."

The movie also examines how society often underestimates the elderly, and how as a grandson Margolin may "feel the urge to over-protect" out of love, even when his grandmother "is more capable than I give her credit for."

'I don't get lonely'

While the stubbornly independent fictional Thelma enjoys living alone and is determined to keep doing so, her silver-haired partner-in-crime Ben (played by Roundtree in his final role) has embraced the support of his care home.

It is a debate that Squibb can relate to.

"I'm always pleased when I'm involved in something that makes a statement about age," she said.

"I'm alone, and I don't get lonely. I really don't. I'm sort of, 'oh boy, I can just sit by myself and do what I want!'" she added.

Squibb also continues to work, with upcoming projects including an "American Horror Stories" series, and a film directed by Scarlett Johansson called "Eleanor, Invisible."

After decades in which Hollywood was famously reluctant to give roles to even middle-aged actresses, Squibb believes that is finally changing.

"And I thank God for it!" she said, expressing hope that her own film will find a distributor at Sundance and eventually end up in theaters and on streaming.

Could there even be another Oscar nomination in store at last?

"Well, that would be lovely," she said. "It was fun."



Ari Aster Made a Movie About Polarized America. ‘Eddington’ Has Been Polarizing

Pedro Pascal, from left, director Ari Aster and Joaquin Phoenix pose for photographers at the photo call for the film "Eddington" at the 78th international film festival, Cannes, southern France, Saturday, May 17, 2025. (AP)
Pedro Pascal, from left, director Ari Aster and Joaquin Phoenix pose for photographers at the photo call for the film "Eddington" at the 78th international film festival, Cannes, southern France, Saturday, May 17, 2025. (AP)
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Ari Aster Made a Movie About Polarized America. ‘Eddington’ Has Been Polarizing

Pedro Pascal, from left, director Ari Aster and Joaquin Phoenix pose for photographers at the photo call for the film "Eddington" at the 78th international film festival, Cannes, southern France, Saturday, May 17, 2025. (AP)
Pedro Pascal, from left, director Ari Aster and Joaquin Phoenix pose for photographers at the photo call for the film "Eddington" at the 78th international film festival, Cannes, southern France, Saturday, May 17, 2025. (AP)

A Post-it note sat near Ari Aster while he wrote “Eddington”: “Remember the phones.”

“Eddington” may be set during the pandemic, but the onset of COVID-19 isn't its inciting incident. Outside the fictional New Mexico town, a data center is being built. Inside Eddington, its residents — their brains increasingly addled by the internet, social media, smartphones and whatever is ominously emanating from that data center — are growing increasingly detached from one another, and from each other’s sense of reality.

“We’re living in such a weird time and we forget how weird it is,” Aster says. “Things have been weird ever since we were able to carry the internet on our person. Ever since we began living in the internet, things have gotten weirder and weirder.”

“It’s important to keep reminding ourselves: This is weird.”

Moviegoers have grown accustomed to expecting a lack of normalcy in Aster's movies. His first three films — “Hereditary,” “Midsommar,” “Beau Is Afraid” — have vividly charted strange new pathways of dread and deep-rooted anxiety. Those fixations make Aster, a master of nightmare and farce, uniquely suited to capturing the current American moment.

“Eddington,” which A24 releases in theaters Friday, may be the most prominent American movie yet to explicitly wrestle with social and political division in the US. In a showdown between Joaquin Phoenix’s bumbling right-wing sheriff and Pedro Pascal’s elitist liberal mayor, arguments over mask mandates, Black Lives Matter protests and elections spiral into a demented Western fever dream.

At a time when our movie screens are filled with escapism and nostalgia, “Eddington” dares to diagnose something frightfully contemporary. Aster, in a recent interview at an East Village coffee shop he frequents, said he couldn’t imagine avoiding it. “To not be talking about it is insane,” he said.

“I’m desperate for work that’s wrestling with this moment because I don’t know where we are. I’ve never been here before,” says Aster. “I have projects that I’ve been planning for a long time. They make less sense to me right now. I don’t know why I would make those right now.”

Predictably polarizing

“Eddington,” appropriately enough, has been divisive. Since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, Aster’s film has had one of the most polarizing receptions of the year among critics. Even in Cannes, Aster seemed to grasp its mixed response. “I don’t know what you think,” he told the crowd.

Some critics have suggested Aster's film is too satirical of the left. “Despite a pose of satirical neutrality, he mainly seems to want to score points off mask-wearers, young progressives, anti-racists and other targets beloved of reactionaries,” wrote The New Yorker’s Justin Chang. For The New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote: “Aster knows how to grab your attention, but if he thinks he’s saying something about America, the joke is on him.”

Aster was expecting a divisive reaction. But he disputes some of the discourse around “Eddington.”

“I heard one person say it was harder on the left than the right, and I think that’s pretty disingenuous,” he says. “In the film, one side is kind of annoying and frustrating and hypocritical, and the other side is killing people and destroying lives.”

For Aster, satirizing the left doesn’t mean he doesn’t share their beliefs. “If there’s no self-reflection,” he says, “how are we ever going to get out of this?”

Capturing ‘what was in the air’

Aster began writing “Eddington” in June 2020. He set it in New Mexico, where his family moved when he was 10. Aster wanted to try to capture the disconnect that didn’t start with the pandemic but then reached a surreal crescendo. He styled “Eddington” as a Western with smartphones in place of guns — though there are definitely guns, too.

“The dread I was living with suddenly intensified. And to be honest, I’ve been living with that level of dread ever since,” Aster says. “I just wanted to see if I could capture what was in the air.”

Scripts that dive headlong into politics are far from regular in today’s corporate Hollywood. Most studios would be unlikely to distribute a film like “Eddington,” though A24, the indie powerhouse, has stood behind Aster even after 2023's $35 million-budgeted “Beau Is Afraid” struggled at the box office. A24 has shown a willingness to engage with political discord, backing last year’s speculative war drama, “Civil War.”

And Aster's screenplay resonated with Phoenix, who had starred in “Beau Is Afraid,” and with Pascal. In Cannes, Pascal noted that “it’s very scary to participate in a movie that speaks to issues like this.” For Phoenix, “Eddington” offered clarity and empathy for the pandemic experience.

“We were all terrified and we didn’t fully understand it. And instead of reaching out to each other in those moments, we kind of became antagonistic toward each other and self-righteous and certain of our position,” Phoenix earlier told The AP. “And in some ways it’s so obvious: Well, that’s not going to be helpful.”

‘A time of total obscenity’

Since Aster made “Eddington” — it was shot in 2024 — the second administration of President Donald Trump has ushered in a new political reality that Aster acknowledges would have reshaped his film.

“I would have made the movie more obscene,” he says. “And I would have made it angrier. I think the film is angry. But I think we’re living in a time of total obscenity, beyond anything I’ve seen.”

“Eddington” is designed to be argued over. Even those who find its first half well-observed may recoil at the violent absurdism of its second half. The movie, Aster says, pivots midway and, itself, becomes paranoid and gripped by differing world views. You can almost feel Aster struggling to bring any coherence to his, and our, modern-day Western.

But whatever you make of “Eddington,” you might grant it’s vitally important that we have more films like it — movies that don’t tiptoe around today in period-film metaphor or avoid it like the plague. Aster, at least, doesn’t sound finished with what he started.

“I’m feeling very heartbroken about where we are, and totally lost, so I’m looking for ways to go into those feelings but also to challenge them. What can be done?” Aster says. “Because this is a movie about people who are unreachable to each other and completely siloed off, or fortressed off, a question that kept coming to me was: What would an olive branch look like? How do we find a way to reengage with each other?”