In the action comedy “Thelma,” 94-year-old actress June Squibb plays the title role, a grandmother who one day gets a call from her “grandson” who claims he’s in jail and needs her to send $10,000 or things will get really bad.
Thelma sends the money and then she discovers she’s been scammed. She’s so outraged that she recruits her friend Ben, played by the late Richard Roundtree in one of his final roles, and sets off across the San Fernando Valley on a two-seat electric scooter to get her money back.
The so-called “grandparent scam” is a common con perpetrated on seniors who instinctively want to help their grandchildren out of trouble.
And for writer-director Josh Margolin, it got personal when his own grandmother, Thelma Post, now 103 years old, was targeted about a decade ago with a call purportedly from Josh in jail.
“It just really shook up my sense of her,” says Margolin, who admired his grandmother for her seemingly unstoppable ability to care for herself. “She has always been so unflappable and so sharp and so tough in a way. So to see her get duped, especially with my name being used, it just felt like maybe we were entering this new moment.”
For Post, the scam was caught before she actually lost any money. But Margolin, who’d been filming his grandmother almost as a documentary subject for years, the “what ifs” of that moment set his imagination in motion.
“I started wondering what might have happened if she sent it and then set out to get it back, which I think is something she very well may have done,” he says. “Many of the things June did (as Thelma in the movie) are things she might have done if given the chance.”
The movie he wrote celebrates the grit and determination he admired in his grandmother. It mines the humor in the family dynamic – Squibb and Roundtree are far more capable than her hapless heirs, Thelma’s daughter and son-in-law, played by Parker Posey and Clark Gregg, and grandson Danny, played by Fred Hechinger.
And it lets the film’s Thelma be an action hero, albeit one moving a little slower, OK, a lot slower, but just as gamely as Tom Cruise, whom she’s seen watching in a stunt-filled movie early on.
“That cocktail of things is what sort of got me really excited about it,” Margolin says. “It made me realize I had to write it.”
But first, he’d need to find his leading lady.
A star is born – at 94
Squibb says she was on board to play Thelma by the time she reached the final page of the screenplay.
“My initial reaction was: I must do this,” she says. “I think I just reacted to her. I understood her age, certainly. And I felt that I would probably do these very things if something was done to me. It was just all there.”
For Margolin, Squibb, who was nominated for best supporting actress for 2013’s “Nebraska,” wasn’t just No. 1 on his list. She was his entire list.
“I had her in mind because I’ve just been a longtime fan of her as an actress,” he says of Squibb, a character actor whose films include “The Age of Innocence,” “About Schmidt,” and “Far From Heaven,” as well as dozens of guest star turns on television. “She just has a wonderful mix of qualities that to me felt essential to the character, and at a certain point, I had a lot of trouble imagining anybody else doing it.”
Margolin and Squibb were mutual friends of the actress Beanie Feldstein, who not only had worked with Squibb in “The Humans” but knew Margolin’s grandmother too.
“She basically said, ‘Well, I hope you’re going to send this to June,’” Margolin says of Feldstein. “I said, ‘That’s my dream casting,’ and she very generously read it and then sent it to June, and we connected from there.”
Squibb’s early life was spent on stage; in 1960, she appeared in the original Broadway run of “Gypsy.” She made her film debut at 71 when she was cast in Woody Allen’s 1990 movie “Alice.” Supporting roles and character parts kept her busy ever since. Now “Thelma” is her first-ever leading role.
“I think that’s funny,” she says of making her debut as a leading lady at 94. “It never occurred to me I was doing a leading role, something different.”
“The biggest difference is probably that you’re on set more days in a row,” Margolin says.
“I think I was on set 27 out of 29 days or something like that,” Squibb replies.
“I think for us, or for me, having you as the lead just set the tone,” he adds. “Being the leader, your presence on set was what set the lone.”
Can you dig it?
Squibb wasn’t the only one breaking new ground with “Thelma.” For Margolin, the film was his feature directing debut, a task he says was made easier by the veteran actors in his cast.
“I think a big part of having a cast that you trust, and who are kind of these consummate pros, who show up and really give themselves to the work, it puts you at ease,” he says. “You realize there are times when you can take a step back.
“There are times when you’re obviously going to get involved to make sure things are the way they need to be,” Margolin says. “There’s other times where if something’s not working, sometimes they know that at the same moment you do, and they’re like, ‘Let me take that again.’”
In addition to Squibb, Posey and Gregg, “Thelma” also features Malcolm McDowell as the scammer that Thelma finally tracks down. But it’s Squibb and Roundtree who share the most screen time, becoming something like the classic partners in a buddy movie – Thelma charging ahead, Ben more cautious – and their chemistry shines throughout.
“He was a wonderful, warm human being, and such a good actor,” Squibb says of Roundtree, who died in October at 81. “You never forgot, though, that he was Shaft. I don’t think there’s any way you could. He is so strong and so straight and so noble in his own way.
“Riding that scooter, I just was so aware, always, who was on the back of the scooter with me,” she says. “We had a great time, we really did. I think we ended up with a wonderful relationship, he and I.”
And she does stunts!
About that scooter – in most scenes, the driver really is Squibb, who like Tom Cruise, did most of her own stunts, even if they were performed at much lower intensity than Cruise works in the Mission: Impossible franchise.
“In reading it, I got all excited that I was going to be able to drive that scooter,” Squibb says, laughing. “I was a dancer in New York for years, and I physically kept my body going. I swam a lot. I do Pilates now. And I just felt I could do most of the things that I was reading, that Josh had written.”
Margolin and his stunt coordinator were nervous, though, she adds.
“But I proved to them in my complex here that I could drive the thing,” Squibb says. “I had the stunt coordinator running alongside me the whole time. He was so frightened that I was gonna kill myself. But you know, after a while they relaxed, and they got used to the idea I could do this.”
When your star is in her 90s, it’s natural to want to keep her safe and healthy, but Squibb says she surprised the crew more than once with her abilities, climbing atop a bed to reach on tiptoes to the top of a cabinet to retrieve a gun in one scene, crashing her scooter during a chase scene in another.
“The scooters were supposed to clash, and they told me, ‘Now don’t do that, just go up to it and we’ll fix it,’” Squibb says. “I decided, ‘Well, what the hell.’ So I clashed with Richard’s scooter, and everybody, ‘Oh my God!’ You could just hear the reactions going on.
“But I did it, and I zoomed off afterwards. And the only thing I could think was, ‘Well, they got that on camera.’”
Respect for the elders
One of the loveliest aspects of “Thelma” is the dignity with which it treats seniors of different ages and abilities. Yes, Thelma fell for a scam, but that doesn’t define her as much as her go-get-’em attitude does. Sure, some of her friends in the film need more assistance as they age, and that’s fine, too.
“I think both Josh and I look at film as reality, and we want to see lives shown to us that are somewhat real,” Squibb says of the realism the film portrays even when she’s on the hunt on that scooter. “If they’re not, they can become funny, and it’s not good.
“I just think we both went into this with the attitude that we wanted to show this woman in her reality,” she says of the real-life Thelma. “She’s a hell of a woman, Thelma herself is. She could sit and talk to you probably longer than Josh or I could, and she’s going to be 104.”
Margolin, who says Grandma Thelma has slowed down a little as she entered her second century of life, agreed.
“Her old age, to your point, is not a monolith,” he says. “Like, she’s been ‘old’ my whole life. She’s gone from 70 to 103, and each chapter had its own needs, its own stories.”
The inclusion of seniors in the film extended to one of its key shooting locations, the Motion Picture and Television Fund’s independent and assisted living campus in Woodland Hills. It’s where Squibb and Roundtree have their scooter chase, and some of its residents, all of them veterans of film and TV careers, show up in passing shots.
“There’s a ton of people there with these incredible, sort of storied careers in film and television,” Margolin says.
“They know what you’re doing,’” Squbbs says of the interest of residents in the film shoot.
“Exactly,” he replies. “People know, ‘Oh, we’re gonna be in the shot, we’re gonna go this way.’ They were all so interested and curious and excited that it was happening there.
“Some of the residents appear in some of the establishing shots, which was fun. This one old guy who crosses frame I found out later was the assistant director on ‘The Godfather.’ You’re like, ‘Oh, amazing!’”
‘Thelma’ and Thelma
Residents of the Motion Picture and Television Fund community recently got their own special screening of the film partly shot where they live. Grandma Thelma also has seen a finished cut of the film, Margolin says.
“I think she’s both very touched by it and excited about it, and also, it’s a little bit surreal,” he says of her reaction. “Kind of out of body, like, ‘What is this? There’s a movie? And it’s my name.’ “
Not long ago Squibb got to meet the woman whose she loosely inhabits in “Thelma.” They hit off famously, not least in their mutual pride in what Margolin accomplished with “Thelma.”
“She’s proud of you,” Squibb tells Margolin. He laughs.
“When I walked in I said, ‘I’m Thelma Post,’” Squibb says of their meeting. “She said, ‘No, I’m Thelma Post.’ And we laughed.
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