{"id":623945,"date":"2026-09-14T02:00:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-14T02:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/623945\/"},"modified":"2026-09-14T02:00:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T02:00:12","slug":"helen-mirren-says-patricia-highsmith-is-her-most-difficult-real-role","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/623945\/","title":{"rendered":"Helen Mirren Says Patricia Highsmith Is Her ‘Most Difficult\u2019 Real Role"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tHelen Mirren<\/a> has played a long list of real people, but her role as writer Patricia Highsmith in A Talent For Murder may have been her most challenging yet.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Oscar winner told The Hollywood Reporter on Sunday that portraying The Talented Mr. Ripley author in Anton Corbijn\u2019s upcoming thriller was particularly \u201cdifficult\u201d because of their distinct dissimilarities.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI would say Patricia might be one of them, honestly, because she is so different from how I am,\u201d said at The Hollywood Reporter\u2019s Studio at 1 Hotel during TIFF<\/a>, presented by sponsor Canada Goose. \u201cI could sort of identify with Her Majesty, the Queen, to a certain extent. [Prime Minister of Israel] Golda Meir \u2014 on the realm of sort of difficulty, I would say Queen, Golda, [and] Patricia Highsmith probably [is] the most difficult because of the way she\u2019s portrayed in the film. I suspect the way she, maybe, was at the end of her life. She was very, very abrasive, very reclusive, [and] you know, basically, very fucked up.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tMirren is no stranger to real-life performances, having previously played a long list of icons including Queen Elizabeth II in The Queen, Maria Altmann in Woman in Gold, Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra, Golda Meir in Golda, Ayn Rand in the Showtime TV film The Passion of Ayn Rand, Queen Elizabeth I in the HBO miniseries Elizabeth I, defense attorney Linda Kenney Baden in Phil Spector, Catherine the Great in the HBO miniseries Catherine the Great and Alfred Hitchcock\u2019s wife Alma Reville in Hitchcock.<\/p>\n

\n\tMirren previously told THR<\/a> that playing real people is a higher level of responsibility than portraying fictional characters, but the essence of storytelling remains the same.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cOf course it\u2019s different [playing a real person],\u201d Mirren said in 2015, \u201cbecause you have a responsibility to look like them and sound like them and maybe walk like them and use your hands like them, but the essential journey is exactly the same, really, as with a fictional character, which is a journey of imagination and the journey of telling the story.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tDirected by Corbijn, A Talent for Murder follows a young man (Alden Ehrenreich) who is sent to Switzerland by Highsmith\u2019s New York publisher in an effort to convince her to write one more Ripley novel. The film, which was adapted by Joanna Murray-Smith from her 2014 play Switzerland, also stars Olivia Cooke and Juliet Stevenson.<\/p>\n

\n\tA Talent for Murder is scheduled to be released in theaters on Oct. 23.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Helen Mirren has played a long list of real people, but her role as writer Patricia Highsmith in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":623946,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[321,93,49651,61,60,233943,1998],"class_list":["post-623945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-helen-mirren","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-tiff-2026","tag-toronto-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=623945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623945\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/623946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=623945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=623945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=623945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}