Watch out, Tom Cruise. There’s a new action-movie star in town.
June Squibb, 94, plays an ass-kicking vengeance-seeker inspired by Cruise’s Mission: Impossible movies in the comedy Thelma.
PEOPLE has the exclusive first trailer, which features Squibb executing heists to obtain a weapon, making things explode, and driving a scooter at top speeds.
“I was so proud of myself doing this,” the Nebraska Oscar nominee told PEOPLE in January at the movie’s Sundance Film Festival premiere. “The scooter was great fun — it was a joy to be on that.”
Squibb plays Thelma’s “unlikely action hero,” a synopsis states, a “feisty 93-year-old grandmother who gets conned by a phone scammer pretending to be her grandson.”
David Bolen
Playing her grandson is Fred Hechinger (The White Lotus), who in the trailer calls Thelma “a tough cookie.”
Malcolm McDowell and Nicole Byer also star, while Parker Posey and Clark Gregg play Hechinger’s onscreen parents. They panic after Thelma is scammed out of $10,000 — and when she becomes determined to elude them in recovering the cash by any dangerous means necessary.
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Thelma also stars Richard Roundtree as Thelma’s friend and accomplice Ben, one of his last roles before his October 2023 death. The Shaft star “gives such a beautiful performance in the movie,” writer-director Josh Margolin tells PEOPLE.
Magnolia Pictures
“We set out to make something human and relatable but also kind of insane — a nonagenarian on a perilous mission across the city (on foot and on scooter) to reclaim what was taken from her, against all odds,” continues the filmmaker, who based the character of Thelma off of his own 103-year-old grandmother.
“It’s a celebration and play on the action genre as well as a way to explore aging and autonomy.”
Squibb, in her first leading film role after decades of scene-stealing performances, “gives Tom Cruise a run for his money,” adds Margolin. With stunt coordinator Ryan Sturtz, the actress did more of her own stunts “than we ever thought she would!”
David Bolen
Also on Squibb’s busy schedule as a movie star this year are Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead, voicing the emotion Nostalgia in Inside Out 2, and Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut Eleanor the Great.
Thelma is in theaters June 21.