Why Helen Mirren 'didn't like' playing a dying woman in "Goodbye June" — and why she said yes to director Kate Winslet Gerrad HallDecember 30, 2025 at 2:41 AM 0 She's died a handful of times before in movies — stabbed to death in Caligula, shot in the head in Shadowboxer, strangled in Excalibur — but Helen Mirren "didn't like" how her character was going to meet her end, director Kate Winslet tells Entertainment Weekly, in Goodbye June.
- - Why Helen Mirren 'didn't like' playing a dying woman in "Goodbye June" — and why she said yes to director Kate Winslet
Gerrad HallDecember 30, 2025 at 2:41 AM
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She's died a handful of times before in movies — stabbed to death in Caligula, shot in the head in Shadowboxer, strangled in Excalibur — but Helen Mirren "didn't like" how her character was going to meet her end, director Kate Winslet tells Entertainment Weekly, in Goodbye June.
"She did say quite early on, 'I don't really want to be doing this at all, but I'm doing it for you and I'm doing it to support you,'" Winslet, making her feature directorial debut with the movie in which she also stars as one of Mirren's daughters, recalls of their early conversations. "I felt so grateful, but also, I didn't want to be putting her through something."
In the movie (streaming now on Netflix) written by Winslet's now 22-year-old son Joe Anders, Mirren's character, the titular June, discovers her cancer has returned. This time, it's terminal, and doctors say she doesn't have much time to live...in fact, she probably won't make it until Christmas, which is just two weeks away. So her four adult children, two of whom — Winslet's Julia and Andrea Riseborough's Molly — have a fraught relationship, her grandchildren, and her husband, Bernie (Timothy Spall), gather to be with June in her final days.
Kimberley French/Netflix
Helen Mirren and Kate Winslet in 'Goodbye June'
As June's health declines, though, Mirren — who Winslet says has a personal rule of not playing characters with dementia or cancer, but broke that rule for her director — preferred not to discuss the ins and outs of the illness.
"The way that she kind of managed herself, really, was that she didn't actually wanna talk about anything until we got there on the day. So she would get there, she would be prepared, but then she would just say to me, 'I don't like it today. I don't like, I don't like the gown and the wig and the thing. I don't want to get in the bed. Okay, right, I've got that off my chest. What shall I do?'" Winslet recalls. And I would say, 'Get in the bed. lie down, don't move your head. Okay, action.' And I just had to be very practical with her. What more do you offer someone like Helen Mirren who is going to instinctively respond to whatever's in front of her in brilliant ways?"
Winslet went the extra step to create a set that was free of as many distractions as possible, "not by way of direction or things or words or clever tricks or s---, I didn't wanna do any of that 'cause she would've sniffed that out a mile off and become incredibly suspicious of it, as would I, and as I have done when directors have tried that with me," Winslet says. That meant making herself, the production equipment (cameras, lighting, microphones, etc.), and crew out of sight, however she could.
Kimberley French/Netflix
Johnny Flynn and Helen Mirren in 'Goodbye June'
"Film sets are really busy places, lots of coming and going and people and chaos and crew, and everyone's trying to do their job. So I worked very closely with our crew in finding ways to make the space as empty as possible. So we didn't have any overhead booms; we had hidden microphones everywhere, and everyone was radio mic'd," she explains. "So the boom operator who would normally hover in the corner and just catch that one line, that person wasn't there at all. The children were completely free and wandering, no one hitting marks, just playing and just being."
Winslet says she and the crew also used various hand signals with the adult actors to know they were rolling, so they could start naturally interacting with the children for the scenes — especially important for one particular sequence that comes at the end of the film, when they stage the Nativity play for June in the hospital.
Kimberley French/Netflix
Helen (Toni Collette) and her nieces and nephews perform the Nativity play in 'Goodbye June'
"I also was able to lock off our cameras at times and have nobody in the room at all. So the actors would show us how they wanted a scene to be, and we would set our camera, set our focus, and then I'd say to the actors, 'Okay, we'll leave you to it.' And they'd go, 'Where are you going?' And I would say, 'I'm gonna be just out there. You don't need us.' And we'd leave everyone. Everyone, camera operators included, would walk away, and these actors would be alone with cameras silently rolling, and no people in the space at all," she says. "It really made a difference to how they all felt. It gave that sense of realism and intimacy, and the smallness of it was really meaningful for them."
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While June's children spend their time by their mother's side, it's her husband who seems to be in denial about her condition — watching football on TV or going to the local pub rather than face the reality of the situation. But after his son yells at him for seemingly not caring, he realizes the depths of his heartbreak when he finds him singing Ray Charles' "Georgia" — one of the couple's favorite songs — at the local bar, but changing the lyrics to "Junie."
Kimberley French / Netflix
Kate Winslet and Timothy Spall on the set of 'Goodbye June'
"That was the only scene in editing when I just literally could not stop crying," Winslet admits, "because even though I'd seen it, and I was there on the day, and it was incredibly moving on the day, actually really shaping it and sculpting it in the edit, oh my God, it's just extraordinary.... How much that Bernie is hiding and concealing even from himself, existing in a state of denial and regret about his own life and the impact that that has on him, being able to just communicate on even a very basic level, it's completely heartbreaking."
on Entertainment Weekly
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Source: Entertainment
Published: December 30, 2025 at 06:45AM on Source: RED MAG
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