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Helen Mirren criticises people who look at her nude scenes online

Helen Mirren has criticised online culture for making it easier to share nude scenes from movies, claiming it’s symptomatic of an overall decline in privacy for actors.

“There used to be an understanding of privacy,” Mirren told iNews during the promotion for her latest movie The Leisure Seeker. “There is no understanding of privacy now. Privacy is completely gone. Random people taking photos, e-mails being hacked, people doing screen grabs… it used to be if you did a nude scene, for example, closed set, no photography. Now they [take] a screen shot from the movie and put it on the internet, for everybody to see.”

It must be a strange element of the evolution of film for actors and actresses who started out in Mirren’s era, where the cinema was once the only place you’d see films with nude scenes, TV was more restricted, and video-shops didn’t exist. Now nude scenes are online, completely free from any context.

But they’re not the only Internet thing Mirren’s unhappy about. She also said streaming services like Netflix had been “devastating” for filmmakers like her husband, Taylor Hackford, who want their movies to be a “communal” experience.

“It’s devastating for people like my husband, film directors, because they want their movies to be watched in a cinema with a group of people,” she said. “So it’s a communal thing.”

In a wide-ranging conversation, Mirren also spoke about accepting death, saying: “We are all headed in that direction … so one might as well confront it, and what better time to confront it than the latter part of your life?

“As you travel through life, you do realise that you lose friends and colleagues and death becomes a part of your life, and that happens at every age, it’s not just what happens to older people.”

The Leisure Seeker, an OAP road movie romance that pairs Mirren with Donald Sutherland, opens in cinemas on 20 April.


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