Helen Mirren Talks About Alan Rickman’s Posthumous Role in Eye in the Sky

Helen Mirren was recently on The Graham Norton Show where she talked about her desire to appear in a Fast and Furious movie and her more recent film Eye in the Sky, which just recently received a wide release. In the film, Mirren plays a military intelligence officer leading a mission to capture a group of high-level terrorists. When it’s clear that there is more going on, the team has to make a decision on whether or not they’re willing endanger civilians with drone warfare in the name of public security. The film also features the late Alan Rickman as Lieutenant General Frank Benson.

The film will be one of two films Rickman appears posthumously, the other being Alice Through the Looking Glass, where he reprised his role as Absolem the Caterpillar. When Norton said that the film was a “brilliant, fitting final performance,” Mirren responded:

It is, I think it’s a movie he would be very proud of in the sense that he would appreciate what the film was about in the way in which it tells its story. It doesn’t take sides incidentally. It makes no moral decisions, it just throws up the moral question. But what I love about the film is that it’s Alan as I know Alan. You know, I mean he was a brilliant character actor and we see him in Harry Potter and Die Hard playing these extraordinary characters. That is Alan as he really is, you know, funny, urbane, intelligent, very human so it’s really great to see him up there.

The two actors don’t share any scenes the film something Mirren said she was “very, very upset about,” but they had worked together prior to Eye in the Sky. They first collaborated on the stage as Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra in a 1998 production at Britain’s National Theater and Mirren talks about her fond memories of Rickman as a “twinkly and kind and gossipy and generous” man in this Hollywood Reporter article.

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