Title: June Squibb Joins the Show!

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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart. Welcome back. We're spotlighting some of the most noteworthy independent films on today's show. Let's get back into it with a film about a nonagenarian who gets scammed online. The film is called Thelma. It stars actor June Squibb, who plays the scorned 90-year-old titular character who gets robbed of $10,000 from a few bad guys. Police don't have any leads and her family is wondering if this is the first sign of Thelma's decline.

Thelma wants her money back. She takes matters into her own hands, armed with a mobility scooter and a trusty sidekick named Ben. Thelma is available to stream now on Hulu. Actor June Squibb joined me not too long ago to talk about her performance which earned her an Independent Spirit Award nod. I started off asking her to describe her character. Let's take a listen to that conversation.

June Squibb: Oh, I think she's a wonderful 90-year-old with great grit and determination. She obviously is someone that won't let anything go by her. If they steal her money, she's determined to go and get it back.

Alison Stewart: The person who understands Thelma well is her grandson, a nice guy who can't seem to figure himself out, played by a friend of our show, Fred Hechinger. We love Fred.

June Squibb: Oh, Fred's heaven.

Alison Stewart: We've known Fred for a long time. What does she see in her grandson that others don't?

June Squibb: Oh, I think she sees a wonderful young man who's just ready to blossom and is probably-- I feel that she thinks he's holding himself back and if she can just help him let loose, then he will just blossom into whatever it is he wants to be.

Alison Stewart: Your relationship with Fred has been noted by many reviewers as you two have real chemistry together. He's at the start of his career, he's in his early 20s. What made him a good partner for you in this film?

June Squibb: Oh, he's so dear. He's so loving and he's so honest. He's honest as a person and he's honest as an actor and I like that. I need that when I'm working. I need someone who is as honest as I hope that I am. It was a no-brainer. Josh brought him over to meet me at my apartment and we just immediately fell in love with each other.

Alison Stewart: When you say you need someone that you can be honest with, what do you mean by that?

June Squibb: In acting, at your best, you're giving an awful lot of yourself. I feel that the only way to do that is to do it honestly. I don't pretend. I'm really giving a lot of myself. Fred is the same way. He just has a real honesty about him, a very realness about him when he's working.

Alison Stewart: When you see Danny and Thelma together, what do Danny and Thelma share in terms of how the rest of the world sees them?

June Squibb: I think they both feel the world doesn't see them in their completeness. I don't think they're naive in terms of who they are or what they are, but I think that there are things to both of them that they both feel the world doesn't see. I think Danny's problems with his girlfriend, his problems with his mother and father, and Thelma's problems with her daughter and son-in-law and even Ben, they want to have the world look at them in their fullness. I think they both feel that they are not looked at in that way.

Alison Stewart: In the film, Parker Posey plays your overly worried daughter, and her by-the-book husband is played by Clark Gregg. How do Thelma's children-- How do Thelma's adult children, I should say, how did they describe her?

June Squibb: Describe Thelma?

Alison Stewart: Yes.

June Squibb: Oh, I think they feel she's losing it. I don't know if it's because of what she's doing or just her age. We expect it to happen at certain ages. When you get to certain ages, you're going to slow down, that your mind is going play tricks on itself. I think that they see her as stereotype and she's not. I guess that that is one of the big problems with the people around you and even the people you love, because I think that Thelma loves her daughter and son-in-law and I think that Danny loves his mother and dad, but they realized that these people will never really understand them.

Alison Stewart: My guest is June Squibb. She's starring in Thelma. It's in theaters now. Let's listen to a scene from Thelma. It's the motivating action. Thelma gets scammed. She puts a lot of money in the mail. This is the scene what happens when she goes to the police. She explains what's gone wrong. The police officer speaks first. This is from Thelma.

Police Officer: We could report a tracking number if it's with Western Union, FedEx, UPS. With the latter, our only real option is to contact the postal service, and with these types of things, the odds are slim, especially without the address.

Thelma: I think I have it here. That's such a mean thing to do. It's just sick.

Speaker 3: Isn't there anything that can be done? A database of some kind?

Speaker 4: We have no moral center as a society. This is a systemic issue.

Thelma: I don't have it.

Police Officer: If it's any comfort, these kinds of scams are increasingly common.

Thelma: Well, how do they know who I am?

Police Officer: They contact people at random using telephone listings and social networking sites.

Thelma: Like Facebook?

Police Officer: Sure, like Facebook.

Thelma: Well, how can Zuckerborg let this happen?

Police Officer: Sorry?

Thelma: Shouldn't Zuckerborg be able to fix this?

Police Officer: Are you on Facebook?

Thelma: Am I?

Speaker 3: No, you're not. She's not. This was a tangent.

Police Officer: I would suggest canceling your cards and freezing your accounts until you're sure you didn't provide any information that leave the door open to more fraud. Beyond that, there's not much we can do at this point. Sorry.

Alison Stewart: That's from Thelma. This scene in the movie actually happened to the real Thelma, the mother of writer and director Josh Margolin. How did he explain what happened to you?

June Squibb: I think that people are very eager to help their loved ones, and I think when you're threatened, someone calling you and saying that your grandson is in jail and he needs $10,000, I think it's natural that you don't question it that much. You think, "Oh, my God, I can get it together. I'll do that and do whatever they ask just to help him."

Alison Stewart: On this trip to get the money back, I'm curious, do you think she just really wants to get the money back, or does she want to prove she can get the money back?

June Squibb: I think it's probably a combination of things. I think that it hurt her tremendously to know that she was duped, that she fell for this, and I think it made her feel dumb. I think that that's natural. I think we do feel dumb when things happen to us, that it's our fault, we've done it, but it was a mistake. I think she just wants to prove that she's not dumb, and I think she also wants her money back. I think when she says, "I want to say where this money goes. I don't want it just to go off to you willy nilly."

Alison Stewart: To make her grand plan work, she needs help, a mobility scooter. Both come from Ben, the husband of a friend of hers who's passed away. Richard Rountree is your co-pilot, your partner in crime. What was it like to work with Richard Rountree on what would have been his last role?

June Squibb: It was wonderful. He's such a good actor and such a lovely, delightful guy. Everybody loved him. He was just the best. It was my birthday during the shooting, and he wasn't called that day, but he came driving up with two dozen red roses for me. My assistant had gotten a lot of white wigs so that whenever I looked around that day, I just saw someone wearing a white wig that looked like myself. He had a white wig on. He was just the best. He really was. We were all really so devastated and hurt by his going. It was so sad to all of us.

Alison Stewart: You'll have that great memory of the birthday, though.

June Squibb: Oh, yes. Always. We have a picture, actually, of it so we could really remember that one.

Alison Stewart: The two characters have different feelings about aging. He's okay with living in an assisted situation. She likes it at home. What do you think Ben and Thelma teach each other?

June Squibb: The things that are important to them, I think they are able to give the other one glimpses of that. Whether it will make a huge difference, I don't know, because I think they're both pretty set in their ways. I don't think Thelma will go into a retirement home graciously or in the near future, and I don't think he will be out adventuring that much without her. If she shows up again and says, "Let's do this or let's do that," he might do it. I think that they were able to prove to the other one that there is life and there are choices and that they have more choices than they originally thought they had.

Alison Stewart: My guest is June Squibb. We're talking about her film Thelma. June Squibb, action star. You do your own stunts. Whose idea was that?

June Squibb: Mine completely, because when I first read that script, I thought, "Oh, that scooter sounds great. I can't wait to get on that," but everybody assumed that it would be the stunt person doing all the scooter riding and doing all of the stunts, everything physical. I really wanted to try things. They let me try, much to their dismay sometimes, and I didn't kill myself. I was fine. I didn't hurt myself. Little by little, they let me do more.

Alison Stewart: Had you ever shot a gun before?

June Squibb: I have on stage. I've never shot a gun on film, but I have shot a gun on stage.

Alison Stewart: What did you learn about action movies that you didn't understand before?

June Squibb: I think the most important thing is to have a big fire behind you as you're walking off. I love that. Every time I see the film, I get tickled when I see that.

Alison Stewart: I wonder what advice Richard Roundtree, the original Shaft, gave you on playing a gun-toting action hero.

June Squibb: We never really talked about Shaft that much. I keep saying that I was always aware that was Shaft on the motor scooter behind me though, all the time. We really didn't talk that kind of-- We talked about our families a lot and we did talk some about what we wanted to do and vacations. Just the general things we talked about.

Alison Stewart: Tom Cruise gives Thelma the idea. She's watching Mission Impossible. She's read articles that he's still an action star in movies, that he can jump to new heights. First of all, do you know if Tom Cruise has seen the film?

June Squibb: I don't know. I do know he has a link or whatever they sent him so he could see it. We don't know if he's seen it yet or not.

Alison Stewart: We'll wait to hear about that. Thelma has a fall in the film. She has a moment when she realizes her friends have died. What do you like about a script that doesn't sugarcoat aging?

June Squibb: I think we have to. Theater, film, whatever for me is reality, the closer we get to reality, the better it is. Certainly, I don't think age should be sugarcoated. It doesn't need to be sugarcoated. At any age you have negative things happen to you. t's not a huge revelation that when you get a certain age, all these things happen. I think that the more we know about age, people are getting more and more fascinated about age. You just read more and more about it, more and more articles being written about it. Our whole population is aging and I think everybody wants to know what's happening to us.

Alison Stewart: There's a lot of really great needle-pointing going on in this film.

June Squibb: Oh yes.

Alison Stewart: I love to needlepoint myself.

June Squibb: Oh, you do?

Alison Stewart: I do love to needlepoint. Was that you? Did they have a needlepointing expert?

June Squibb: No, Thelma herself is a needlepoint expert. I don't think she did them. I think they had somebody else do them. I went in and piddle paddled around with it, but I didn't do too much work. I think they had to take out everything I did every day and start over again, but I was doing it.

Alison Stewart: You have a bit part in a beloved, beloved series, Inside Out 2 playing the voice of nostalgia. She comes in. It's short. Everybody loves it. Is there another film in the work featuring perhaps Nostalgia a bit more?

June Squibb: I have no idea. They were laughing about that when we were doing the audio on Nostalgia. They said, "We ought to do a cartoon about Nostalgia." I said, "A short one maybe, I hope," but we were all joking around. I don't know that there's plans for it. I rather doubt it. I think if they do Inside Out 3, God knows how long it'll take them to do it, but that would be fun to go in and do Nostalgia again.

Alison Stewart: June, what are you working on now?

June Squibb: I just committed to an adult cartoon that tickled me. I thought it was pretty funny, a great idea. I think we're starting that, they think after the first of the year. I have a few other things that I'm deciding on right now.

Alison Stewart: The film is called Thelma, and that was my conversation with actor June Squibb.

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Alison Stewart: Saturday Night Live is turning 50 years old. A film depicts the chaotic feel of its opening night. I spoke with Saturday Night writer-director Jason Reitman

Speaker 5: And star Gabriel LaBelle.

Alison Stewart: That's after the break.