Helen Mirren Plays Patricia Highsmith in Anton Corbijn's 'A Talent for Murder'

Helen Mirren portrays Patricia Highsmith in A Talent for Murder, directed by Anton Corbijn and adapted from Joanna Murray-Smith's 2014 play Switzerland. The film imagines Highsmith late in life, living in a brutalist house in the Swiss Alps with her pet snails, when a young New York publisher (Alden Ehrenreich) arrives hoping to persuade her to write another Ripley novel. Speaking on Vogue's The Run-Through podcast with Chloe Malle and Taylor Antrim, Mirren said her turn toward villains stems from aging: older women, she argued, are expected to be unpleasant. Her husband Taylor Hackford first introduced her to Highsmith's writing, and she became a fan of both the books and their screen adaptations. Costume was central to the transformation — Highsmith dressed in masculine clothes and had a short neck and hunched posture later in life, so Mirren had shoulder pads built up to suggest a figure poised to pounce. Reflecting on her early career, Mirren called the roles then available to women poor and said they have improved greatly; her advice to her younger self would be to be as rude as possible. The conversation also touched on recent red-carpet looks, the stripper heels she bought on Hollywood Boulevard, and making her own clothes.