Helen Mirren just wishes Kurt Cobain lived long enough to experience GPS
"I always say it’s so sad that Kurt Cobain died when he did because he never saw GPS," decorated actor Helen Mirren said. No, really.
Did you know the little Google Maps Streetview guy is named "Pegman"? You learn something new every day doing this job. (Credits: Cindy Ord/Getty Images, YouTube, Frank Micelotta/Getty Images)
When contemplating the tragedy of Kurt Cobain’s death—the lives affected, the music lost, the mass transmission of despair to a whole generation of fans—we don’t often think about how sad it is that he never got to use Waze, or even Google Maps. And by “we” in the previous sentence, we obviously mean “those of us who are not Dame Helen Mirren.” Who recently opined during a podcast interview that…okay, actually, we’re just going to print the whole quote, so you don’t think we’re making it up:
I always say it’s so sad that Kurt Cobain died when he did because he never saw GPS, as it’s the most wonderful thing to watch my little blue spot walking down the street. I just find it completely magical and unbelievable.
If you listen to the podcast interview, from Evgeny Lebedev’s Brave New World—in which Mirren is, unsurprisingly, charming, witty, and delightfully no bullshit—well… the statement still comes pretty far out of context. (At no point does Lebedev ask, “Hey, Dame Helen, what’s the saddest thing about Kurt Cobain’s death?”) But it does become clear that she’s using Cobain as a shorthand for celebrities who died young, or maybe just anyone who died of suicide; it’s a wider point about the small wonders that continue to pop up in life if you allow yourself to experience its full breadth, just phrased in a way where—and we mean no disrespect to Helen Mirren—we had to spend like 20 minutes today convincing ourselves this came from a real interview, and not a fake one from our old colleagues at The Onion.
(Okay, also, right now we’re fixating on the “I always say” part. We would love to have corroboration that Helen Mirren “always” says this, possibly while fondly contemplating a member of the fine Garmin family of global positioning system products.)
Even if you can tear yourself away from Dame Helen’s Nirvana-based koan, there are plenty of other good quotes in the interview, including her lobbing back a “No it’s not” when Lebedev says her “spirit” is young, and noting that, while being 79 doesn’t feel “brilliant,” “It wasn’t that brilliant to be 25 either.” Helen Mirren: Treasure.