When you think about actors who do their own stunts, Tom Cruise is usually the first name that comes to mind. Well, add 94-year-old June Squibb to the list. The nonagenarian’s action chops are on full display in Thelma, a new buddy comedy making its Sundance debut this week.
Written and directed by Josh Margolin as a love letter to his actual grandma, Thelma centers around a recently widowed elderly woman who gets bilked out of $10,000 by scammers. So she does what any senior citizen would do: Get revenge.
“Tom Cruise jumping out of a plane is as dangerous as my grandma getting onto a bed,” Margolin told Variety. “I wanted to treat Thelma’s mission with the sincerity and stakes that you would Ethan Hunt globe-trotting to track down the bad guy.”
Those stakes involved filming action sequences with Squibb, who was adamant about not using a double:
In one scene, Squibb hijacks an electric scooter and has a vehicular showdown in a retirement home with Ben, played by the late Richard Roundtree in his final screen performance. The two zoom into each other and crash, as Squibb plows Roundtree’s scooter out of the way.
“They weren’t expecting me to do the scooter work,” Squibb says. “They were so worried about me, they thought I was going to kill myself. They said, ‘Just tap his scooter,’ and I thought, ‘Oh, hell,’ and I just cowed into him.”
Despite her 94-year-old age, Squibb never thinks of herself as old, but she’ll play the elderly woman in need of help just to be nice.
“[People] want to take care of you, which is lovely, and sometimes I just let them take care of me,” Squibb said. “But other times you think, ‘I can do this and I’m fine.’ They want to lend an arm or a hand. So you do it — you take an arm, you take a hand. But I am still independent and able to live a life of my own.”
That life apparently includes the cold, hard rush of doing your own stunts. To quote Dakota Johnson, who’s been bitten by a similar bug: “Watch out, Tom Cruise.”
(Via Variety)