So you’ve just watched, rewatched, or re-rewatched Barbie, Hasbro’s 2023 answer to the question “How to we use the United States’ deregulation of children’s toy advertising in entertainment in the 1980s to make something that isn’t pure evil?” You are likely moved, inspired, and only just now realizing that you don’t know who played the narrator. Don’t you worry, boss. Don’t you worry one bit.
Behold Helen Mirren:
See? That’s her, cosplaying as Vice-Admiral Holdo from The Last Jedi at the Cannes Film Festival without anybody calling her out on it. Imagine how much clout that takes. If you showed up to Sundance in a Darth Vader helmet, you’d probably get kicked in the neck by Robert Redford. Behold her again:
See that? That’s Helen Mirren on a poster for Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, credited as “the narrator.” It’s about as close as you’re going to get to definitive proof that she did, in fact, narrate Barbie. They gave her her own one-sheet, despite the fact that her face does not appear in a single frame of the finished picture.
And why? Because she’s as metal as a 78-year-old British performer can be. Mirren took the Betty White, Jeff Goldblum career trajectory: blowing up early, cooling off for a while, then booming back into the spotlight later in life. She is, at present, one of four British actors who’s managed to keep the lights on without ever being in a Harry Potter movie, and one of two who’s done the same without taking a job on Doctor Who. While Judi Dench was busy getting her digital fur applied over on the set of CATS and wishing she’d never let go of the James Bond franchise, Helen Mirren was probably filming one of the four Fast and the Furious movies that she’s appeared in, signing the paperwork to play the bad guy in Shazam 2, or shooting one of her 26 episodes of the Peabody Award-winning satire series Documentary Now!
Between playing a litany of memorable characters and appearing as herself in various specials, documentaries, and behind-the-scenes interviews, she’s accrued just shy of 500 IMDb credits, and spent the back half of 2008 convincing everyone on Earth to say some variation on the sentence “Did you see Helen Mirren in that bikini photo?” She’s friends with Vin Diesel, who has publicly proclaimed his eternal love for her. She’s appeared on screen as Queen Elizabeth twice, Queen Charlotte once, and voiced the Queen of Egypt in The Prince of Egypt. In short, she rules.