Helen Mirren Is Speaking Up for Endangered Animals

To zoo or not to zoo

Do your homework and find out what kind of a zoo it is you are visiting. Is it accredited? See if the zoo is doing the kind of work and the animals are living in a way you feel is righteous. Never go to the kind of zoo where you're there to have your photo taken with a wild animal. That is unconscionable.

Animal crush confession

I was always a giraffe person and a rhinoceros person. I love the animals with that prehistoric feel about them. I took an extraordinary trip across Africa with a theater group — which now you can't do because of the political dangers — and we did see giraffes in the wild. You love the animals because they're wild, that's why they're called wild animals, because they don't live in the middle of Chicago. But on other hand, we will lose so many species if a concerted effort is not made by the people with the resources and the inclination and the science to do that work — and those people [work] in zoos.

Her childhood life with animals, Part 1

I grew up in a suburban environment. So honestly nature and I were strangers. It wasn't really until I left college that I started seeing a world that I hadn't been aware of before, quite honestly.

Her childhood life with animals, Part 2

We had a slobbery old bulldog [Brutus] who was always slobbering everywhere and then a series of cats. We weren't sort of a big pet pet-ty family, we had the normal sort of household pets.

The revelations of being “stuck” at home during the pandemic

Because so much of my life has been packing and unpacking in hotels, it was good to actually be in one spot with my husband. At the end of three months [during the pandemic], we realized it was the first time in 30 years that we had done what most normal couples do, which is sit down for dinner every night. Cooking and eating, exercising and just having mental space. Not to have the sort of constant pressure and grate of having to work. Obviously we were in a very, extremely privileged situation, in that we could afford to just take three months off.

Quarantine cooking

We did cook. The trouble with making bread is that you then have to eat it — it's very dangerous. So we avoided making bread. We got very into the New York Times' “What to Cook This Week."

A new theatrical tragedy

My great heartache is the theater being so devastated. That's for me where all the drama and storytelling in the dramatic form begins. There's probably no likelihood for the theater opening for another year or until there's a viable and realistic vaccine. You can't do a play to socially distanced people. It's just not what the theater is about, so that's my great heartache.

Her careful return to film acting

It's one step at a time. Production is just beginning. Everyone is finding their feet, trying to find out how to make this work. They're finding protocols to make it possible. Next week I'm filming Solos, a monologue for Amazon, so an easier thing to control. Our whole business is fracturing but finding its new forms.

A bit about that viral little July 5 Instagram selfie in mask and goggles

It was my first trip on an airplane. It was great. I feel safer on a plane than I do at the supermarket, because I know the air is changed every four minutes, completely new air. The planes are incredibly disinfected and clean, and on certain flights, socially distanced, and also the airports are kind of empty. But nonetheless the first flight out, it's better to be safe than sorry.