Warning: light spoilers for Hobbs & Shaw are in play. If you haven’t seen the film yet, please back out and come back once you’ve caught up.
If you ever want proof that dreams come true, never forget that Academy Award winner/acting icon Dame Helen Mirren told the world she wanted to be in The Fate of The Furious, and found herself brought into the fold of that very franchise.
Now, with her reprising the role of matriarch Queenie Shaw in both Hobbs & Shaw and the upcoming Fast 9, it’s clear Helen Mirren’s work on the franchise is more than a mere one-off favor. Which asks the question of whether or not we’ll see Mother Shaw kicking ass and driving fast, like she’s always wanted to? The short answer, for the time being, is that it’s currently undecided.
During the recent junket day in London for Hobbs & Shaw, I attended on behalf of CinemaBlend and asked about this very prospect, which you can see for yourself below.
Much like you wouldn’t hire Idris Elba as a powerfully enhanced villain that could easily be offed, you don’t hire Helen Mirren to play the mother of the Shaw family just to have her sit behind bars or make pithy comments. Thankfully, that first part of the equation is solved during the end of Hobbs & Shaw, as Queenie’s son and daughter visit her with a particularly special cake that’ll help her bust out of the clink.
For the moment, it seems that the prospects of Queenie Shaw getting behind a wheel for Fast 9 are up in the air. But considering how much her role means to the worlds of both Fast & Furious and Hobbs & Shaw’s ultimate narratives, it really shouldn’t be a hard decision.
Queenie is equally bound to the code of defending family as everyone else is in the saga. In fact, she’s lived up to her end of the bargain by helping Dom in a pretty huge way, both in lending resources to defeat Cipher and also with having her boys save Dom’s little baby boy from said villain towards the end of The Fate of The Furious.
More importantly, and to a similar effect that I mentioned earlier, this is Dame Helen Mirren we’re talking about here. The woman’s more than earned her ability to write her own ticket in this industry, and with her third appearance in Fast 9, she has more than enough backstory to allow her to become a part of the action.
Mirren certainly is no stranger to action and adventure, as her role of Victoria in the RED series of films had her playing a former spy/assassin who comes out of retirement to help Bruce Willis and his friends on a couple of capers. While she admits this is probably her most badass role as of yet, Helen Mirren is more than willing to outdo herself with Fast 9, or any other Fast & Furious film that allows her to do so. For the sake of the fans, it’ll be great when that time finally comes, especially if it brings any more members of the Shaw family we haven’t seen yet.
For now, though, you can see Mirren’s Queenie Shaw pop up for a little in Hobbs & Shaw, which is breaking bones and buildings at the box office at this very moment.
