It’s a hot day on the River Thames and, truth be known, we small invited group of journalists – enticed by the mere idea of sailing down past the Houses of Parliament in a mini-cruiser with the cast of RED 2 - are now feeling somewhat trapped under the glass-top ceiling and the less-than-gentle rocking of the boat in question.
As we pull out of the dockside, Dame Helen Mirren and Mary Louise Parker take their seats near the bough. Willis, it transpires, isn’t quite ready to meet his public, but Mirren is a dab hand at holding court and entertaining her subjects. She is happy to pass the time as we wait, talking about the royal baby (Kate had just gone into labour that morning) and possible names. “It must be weird everyone knowing you’re in labour. I hope it’s a girl, we need more queens..!” (“Queen Tiffany?” offers Parker with a smile).
As Mirren is once again apologising for the rising heat index, Willis finally makes his entrance. “Our fearless leader…” winks Mirren.
It’s pretty clear that while the ladies are happy to answer questions, Willis is less interested in the proceedings. Noting that the RED films are based on the comic book (by Warren Ellis), it seems reasonable to ask Willis if was a fan of comic-books in general.
“I wasn’t really a comic-book guy… I spent most of my time outside. So there really wasn’t a connection there with comics… unless you want me to make something up? ‘I was a BIG DC comics fan!!! Nobody’s a bigger fan than me!!!’” he shrugs with mock enthusiasm.
Given that almost all of Bruce’s recent output has been over-the-top action action movies (The Expendables 2, A Good Day to Die Hard, GI Joe: Retaliation and now RED 2) it’s a surprise to hear from his own lips that he seems to be somewhat bored with the genre.
“I try not to take it very seriously. It’s just a difficult thing if you take yourself seriously or what you’re doing seriously. We’re all really just trying to be entertaining and the action sequences and things like that are just part of a certain kind of entertainment, not my favourite, but I like to try and make people laugh more than I like to fight in films. But I have done a lot of them …” he offers. ““I like to work in ensemble casts, especially with this group of actors. I think we were very fortunate to get Tony Hopkins and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and the cast that we did the first film with. All we try to do all day long is make each other laugh and hopefully that gets onto the screen and the audience find something funny as well.”
Mirren is much more enthusiastic, delighted by the fact that she’s getting a diverse selection of projects to choose from.
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“I’m just lucky and from time to time people ask me to do things. I was so, absolutely, excited and just over the moon the first time I got offered the role in RED…” she says, then pauses. “That’s a bit of a lie, come to think of it, I was a little bit ‘Ewwwww.. are people going to think I’ve sold out?’ Then I realised how utterly stupid that was and how it was an incredible opportunity to do something I’d never done before. Once I decided that, I was very, very excited by it and loved every minute and couldn’t wait to come back for the second one… That was just luck that they asked me. It’s SO much to do with luck. It’s not MY choice, but all I try to do is mix it up all the time. When the penny dropped, as far as RED was concerned, I realised it was a perfect opportunity to mix it up… I was just coming off doing the first ‘Queen’ movie and it was brilliant to jump in the opposite direction.”
Mary Louise Parker’s role as Sarah, dragged into more adventures when the ‘Retired Extremely Dangerous’ team face down the possibility of a free-range nuclear device being detonated in Moscow, is one of an eager, but somewhat hapless bystander. The actress enjoyed the action, but admits that most of the most hairy sequences (including a car-chase through Paris) were probably best left to her stand-ins…
“I’m a horrible driver. I don’t drive at all, really. Ever. The one scene where they let me drive, I drove straight into a wall and the director put it on a loop and watched it over and over again. No, they don’t trust me to even pull out of a parking spot!” she rolls her eyes. “I love doing any scenes with Bruce, that’s the best part of the movie. But my character is so hopeless at action … she sort of fails miserably at it. It was fun to be bad at it…”
Mirren has paid the Queen twice (three times if you count stage-work) and played Jane Tennison on seven series of the classic Prime Suspect; Parker has appeared in The West Wing and Weeds and Willis seems to be at home in franchise movies. So I ask all three of our guests whether they like coming back to roles to explore them over more than one entry or whether there’s a greater appeal for totally new material.
“I still don’t think about ‘creating a franchise’, that task is the producer’s job, to make the film come together and get everyone together and make sure they’re on time. The discipline of film is a specific thing, but if you want to talk about really acting, it would be theatre. Because in theatre it’s all live and it’s all happening at the same time – there’s no second take. It creates much more fear in your heart than working on film,” Willis tells me. “My favourite part of making films is the actual day to day process of getting in front of the camera and trying to make it seem life-like. Trying to make it funny, make it romantic. All this, I know is a big part of films, the sales of it all – it’s the explanation of how we made the movie, how we did it. My favourite park is actually making the movie, going to work every day…”
“I think that it’s a FANTASTIC opportunity to come back to a character. There’s always more to discover, you can push the character further. It’s rare – I know Bruce has done a lot of that, but in general, in an actor’s work in film, you very rarely get to play a character twice. It’s fantastic to revisit it. I would love to do it again,” Mirren offers.
“I’ve never done a movie with a ‘2’ after it before. This was the first one. I thought it was really fun. I do theatre and television and I like being with the same group of people and working with them and having an emotional short-hand. It’s really a luxury…” Parker agrees.
“I was pleased to return because...I’ll say it a different way, and tell you WHY I was happy to come back. When we did the first film, it was very ambitious. It’s not often they try to make a film that has romance, action and comedy all in the same film. I always thought that one part was going to be kicked out. It stayed in – and it all stayed in, so this time the writers just added more romance, more action and more comedy,” Willis continues. “When we all got back together it was about two years in-between, but when we got back to work it was as if we had just seen each other the day before. Everybody was already in character and showed up ready to play…”
With the brief trip along the Thames over, the trio disembark. Willis smiles and nods politely as he passes by but there’s no denying he seems particularly eager to be off the boat. He may not have been the best ambassador for the film itself but with the heat still beating down, this is apparently the warmest he’ll be to journalists all day if other reports are to be believed.
RED 2's formulaic action may not set the world alight, but its characters and stars are not about to retire quietly…
RED 2 is released by entertainment-one this week...
