Death becomes Dame Helen Mirren in ‘Collateral Beauty’

When director David Frankel approached Helen Mirren about “Collateral Beauty,” in theaters Dec. 16, he said, “Helen, I want you to play death.” It was a simple statement about a complex role, which arrives in a holiday film that deals with grief and human connection in a unique way. At first, though, Mirren hesitated.

“I wasn’t thrilled,” the 71-year-old actress admits, sitting down to tea at the Luxe hotel in Los Angeles. “The first thing I did was to look at the images of death online. Page after page of hooded creatures with skulls, carrying scythes, or scary creatures with blood dripping off their hands. They were horror pictures. I thought, ‘That’s not me.’”

But then Mirren came across an image of a bluebird, which in certain South American cultures is a representation of death. “I thought, ‘That’s lovely,’” she says. Nearby hotel guests are staring in recognition of Mirren, who has established herself as one of Hollywood’s most revered actors since getting her start on the London stage in the late ’60s. “The blue is of the eternity of the ocean, the eternity of the sky,” she adds. “That was much more the death that I wanted to personify.”

To be fair, Mirren doesn’t exactly play death. She plays an aging East Village actress named Brigitte who, in turn, is hired to play the personification of death. This “death” appears to Will Smith’s character — wearing a blue feather boa — after he pens a letter to death following the loss of his daughter to cancer. Mirren is one of three personifications who help him cope with his grief and reconnect with the humanity around him — time, love and death.

“It’s about the beauty that can come out of incredible hardship and pain,” Mirren reflects. “It’s a very difficult concept to struggle with because you don’t want to negate or underestimate people’s suffering because there is huge suffering in the world. But I do believe that there is, in the crassest possible way, a silver lining. I thought a film that investigates and tries to reveal that fact was very interesting. The way in which the way the story is told is very strange and imaginative. When I [read] it I thought, ‘Wow I don’t know if this will ever work, but there’s something really truthful in this story.’”

Mirren’s role in “Collateral Beauty” is a far cry from her other recent onscreen characters. She played a stoic military colonel in “Eye in the Sky,” columnist Hedda Hopper in “Trumbo” and signed on to host IFC’s comedy series “Documentary Now!” She doesn’t care to repeat herself and she believes that there is no direct correlation between her roles. “I do try to do things that shake it up a bit,” she notes. “The whole fun in what I do for a living is to explore so many different — completely different — and unconnected characters. That’s the absolute fun in what I do.”

Mirren is so interested in challenging perceptions and trying new things that she petitioned to get herself cast in next year’s “Fate of the Furious,” which will be the franchise’s first edition without Paul Walker. Mirren spent one day on set in Atlanta shooting her scenes and loved every minute of it. “I zoomed in and I did two scenes and I zoomed out again,” says Mirren, who once appeared on “Top Gear” simply because she wanted to race around their test track. “I had the best time. It was fantastic. I just had this desire to do ‘Fast 8.’ I’ve been lobbying for a while. Begging really. I’ve always loved car driving stuff to do in films. I very foolishly pride myself on my driving.”

If you glance at Mirren’s filmography it seems as though the award-winning actress, who is currently shooting Disney’s “The Nutcracker” in London, has breezed through good role after good role. She’s consistently found interesting parts in an industry not known for giving women — especially those over the age of 40 — complex roles. But if you ask Mirren, she constantly wonders whether she’ll keep working.

“I’ve been amazingly lucky,” she says. “And who knows how long it will go on for. I said in a talk once that all actors think of themselves as basically out of work because they’re always facing unemployment. Brad Pitt said, ‘Well, I don’t feel like that.’ He was right, incidentally: He’ll never be unemployed. But for me it’s not so much ‘Will there be another role?’ Because there probably will be. But will it be something I want to do? Will anything ever come again that I want to do that’s exciting?”

She adds, “That’s been the story of my life, jealously looking at what other people are doing. ‘I wish I could do that! I wish I was as good as that!’ I think that’s slightly the nature of our job. Or maybe I’m the only one who feels like that. I don’t know. I’ve gotten used to that feeling because I’ve had it my whole bloody life. The reality is that good work is few and far between. Especially in movies.”

For Frankel, who directed Mirren for the first time in “Collateral Beauty,” having someone like her on set helped production tremendously. He found that the rest of the cast, particularly the younger actors, pushed themselves harder when Mirren was around.

“What’s fantastic about great actors — and I’ve been really lucky to work with a lot of iconic performers — is that they tend to be the easiest to direct,” says Frankel, who has “The Devil Wears Prada” and “Marley and Me” under his belt. “Helen’s been knighted and won every award you can win, so now it’s about doing the best work she can do. There’s this extra bonus where they pull the best work out of everybody around them. Everybody wants to be very prepared. They’re going to work with Helen Mirren and they want to be at the top of their game.”

Mirren felt particularly close to “Collateral Beauty,” partly because she spends a lot of time thinking about how different people connect. She has a tattoo on her hand, which she got when “only gay sailors and Hell’s Angels got tattoos,” that represents an understanding of the opposite. It’s a reminder that difference exists and that you can connect through that difference. She’s grappling with that idea in the wake of the U.S. election, during which Mirren spoke out adamantly about Donald Trump, and she hopes that strength will come from the result.

“Life is always a struggle,” she muses. “We have to remember that it’s not just about the last 10 years or the next 10 years. It’s about the last 10 million years and the next 10 million years. It’s not just about us in the moment.”

For her, the message of “Collateral Beauty” is that we can’t remove ourselves from humanity simply because we’re in pain. That it’s the connections, especially the unexpected ones, that heal us.

“It’s an individual journey that we all have to make,” Mirren says. “I don’t think the film is making any lectures on that. But it is trying to say that we’re all on this journey together. I always say, ‘You either die young or you get old.’ There’s nothing in between. I think the film is just saying you should allow yourself to be a part of the human race and the human journey.”

She smiles and adds, “Don’t cut yourself off from that.”