June Squibb, 96, Is Having the Career Surge of a Lifetime
The Oscar nominee is back on the circuit, headed to Broadway — and still waiting for her Western
Greetings from Los Angeles, where I am once again marveling at seeing the hype of awards season translated into giant billboards and bus ads all over town. From the Wicked costumes on display at the AMC in The Grove to the dueling billboards for Glen Powell projects Chad Powers (an FYC campaign for his Hulu series) and The Running Man (in theaters this week, but, uh, not an awards contender), the mechanics of awards season are more visible in the skies above Hollywood than maybe anywhere else on earth.
That will be very literally true on Sunday night, when the Academy will host the annual Governors Awards on the roof above the Dolby Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. I’ll be there again this year, keeping a close eye on the contenders who garner the most enthusiasm in the room, and of course hanging on to every word of Dolly Parton’s acceptance speech for her Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award — even if she’ll be delivering it remotely from Nashville.
Check back on Monday for a full recap of the evening, and then on Tuesday, you can hear the conversation that brought me to town in the first place. Earlier this week, The Ankler teamed up with Amazon’s Prime Video to host a live recording of the Prestige Junkie podcast with The Summer I Turned Pretty creator and showrunner Jenny Han, following a screening of the season 3 episode she wrote and directed, “The Last Dance.” (It’s the one with the peach scene, for you die-hard fans out there.) I was thrilled to have the chance to talk to Han, who had seemingly the entire internet in the palm of her hand over the summer as the final episodes aired and the debate raged over Team Conrad vs. Team Jeremiah. (Even Leonardo DiCaprio got roped into it!)
It was a fantastic turnout for both the screening and the post-reception, where, as always, I tried to take the opportunity to ask TV Academy and guild voters which shows and movies have their affection right now… and as always, I got a different answer from everyone. I’m a believer in reading the room at these awards season events, but I usually leave only more convinced that people will like what they like, and you never truly know how an awards vote is going to go.
The full Jenny Han conversation will be on the Prestige Junkie podcast next Tuesday, in addition to an inside account from the Governors Awards with another special returning guest. Today, I’m sharing the conversation I had on a recent Sunday morning with one of the more indomitable stars of the moment, 96-year-old June Squibb, who is in the awards conversation for the second year in a row and is also about to star in a Broadway show… more than 60 years since her debut in New York theater.
June in Bloom
When she was the titular star of last year’s charming indie Thelma, June Squibb was frequently hailed for taking on her first-ever leading role well into her 90s. She had already achieved a remarkable accomplishment by receiving her first Oscar nomination in her 80s, for her wry supporting turn in Alexander Payne’s 2013 film, Nebraska. The post-Oscar glow left Squibb busier than most actors would ever dream of for the decade that followed. But starring in Thelma, a role both physically and emotionally intense — it’s an action movie! — felt like a true once-in-a-lifetime accomplishment.
Except that this year, Squibb is starring in yet another movie, once again the central character in a low-key, charming indie full of big feelings. In Eleanor the Great, Squibb plays the titular Eleanor, a woman grieving the loss of her longtime best friend who returns to New York City, moves in with her daughter, and, through an innocent mistake, winds up part of a Holocaust survivor’s support group — despite not being a survivor herself.
Eleanor the Great had actually been in the works for years before Thelma, with Tory Kamen writing the script specifically with Squibb in mind. Squibb’s been in the business long enough to know that projects can come and go and momentum can be fleeting, so as for having two star vehicles back to back, she says, “I can’t account for it. And my God, it’s two beautiful leading roles with a 90-year-old. I have no idea what happened!”
Released by Sony Pictures Classics earlier this fall, Eleanor the Great is Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut, and Squibb praised Johansson (“a fine actress”) for bringing an experienced actor’s focus to the story of Eleanor and the young college student she befriends, played by Erin Kellyman. But it was Squibb and Kellyman themselves who built the warm dynamic you see onscreen.
By coincidence, Squibb says, she and Kellyman were living in the same New York apartment building before the shoot. The elder actress invited her junior costar up for dinner, and they quickly became fast friends — even attending dinner parties together at the New York landmark Joe Allen — by the time the film’s production set them up for what was supposed to be a bonding dinner. As Squibb puts it, “I mean, it was ridiculous!”
Though she says she’s still waiting for someone to cast her in a Western (“I think once I got on, I could probably stay on the horse”), Squibb is otherwise running the gamut of dream experiences for an actor. She’s come a long way from her childhood in Illinois, where her mother played piano accompaniment for silent films at their local theater. Her early film roles came in features directed by Woody Allen (Alice), Martin Brest (Scent of a Woman) and Martin Scorsese (The Age of Innocence), and amid multiple television appearances in recent years (Girls, Grey’s Anatomy, American Horror Stories), Squibb also has lent her voice to some massive hit animated movies like Toy Story 4 and Inside Out 2 (and she’ll add the upcoming Zootopia 2 to her till later this month).
The work keeps coming, too. Next week, she stars on Broadway in Marjorie Prime, opposite Cynthia Nixon, Danny Burstein and Christopher Lowell. Having made her Broadway debut as Electra in Gypsy in the late 1950s, it’s a significant homecoming, and she swears a lot hasn’t changed. “We went into the theater yesterday, and there’s something still the same about walking backstage and the theater lights turning on,” she tells me.
After collaborating closely with so many people across so many decades, Squibb has learned a lot about whom to put her trust in — and told me there was one specific former co-star she still sees as a model: Adam Sandler.
“I had never worked with him, but he was one of the most brilliant leaders I have ever seen on a film set,” Squibb says of the actor, a current Oscar contender for Netflix’s Jay Kelly.
In the 2020 comedy Hubie Halloween, Squibb plays Sandler’s mother and winds up wearing a T-shirt that reads “Boner Donor,” among other ridiculous moments. Though Sandler wasn’t the director of the film (Steven Brill had the honors), Squibb says, Sandler was nothing but himself.
“He was the lead in the film, and he took responsibility to make everybody happy,” she says. “But it was not pushy. It was wonderful. I think he was so, so good at that.”