Last summer, 95-year-old actress June Squibb got her first starring role in “Thelma,” a hilarious and action-packed movie about a Jewish grandma on a revenge mission. Now, Squibb, who converted to Judaism in 1953, is taking on another Jewish grandma role. This time, it’s in Scarlett Johansson’s upcoming directorial debut, “Eleanor the Great.”
In “Eleanor the Great,” Squibb plays Eleanor Morgenstein, an elderly Jewish woman who starts anew in New York after the death of her best friend, a Holocaust survivor named Bessie. Screenwriter Tory Kamen was inspired to write the film after this exact sequence of events happened in her own Jewish grandmother, Elinore. However, Eleanor and Elinore are not meant to be the same person. “I want to make that so clear,” Kamen explained to Deadline, “or I will be kicked out of the family.”
“Eleanor the Great” is similar to “Thelma” in this way — “Thelma” filmmaker Josh Margolin lightly based Squibb’s character in his movie on his own Jewish grandmother. Unlike “Thelma” though, “Eleanor the Great” is not an action film. It’s a drama focusing both on Eleanor’s new friendship with a young student named Nina (Erin Kellyman) and her accidental joining of a group for Holocaust survivors. Through her participation in the group, Eleanor learns about the lives of these survivors and is reminded of Bessie and the stories she told about surviving Nazi-occupied Poland.
Excitingly, the movie cast real-life Holocaust survivors to portray the survivors in the film, connecting with people with the help of the USC Shoah Foundation, Temple Rodeph Shalom (a synagogue the movie shot at) and Jewish actress Jessica Hecht, who plays Eleanor’s daughter. “We don’t have really too many films about what it looks like now, as these survivors are in the final chapter of their life, and what that looks like and what that means,” Kamen said. “It was an honor to be able to help tell some of these stories.”
Perhaps it’s because of these stories or her closeness to her own grandmother that “Eleanor the Great” resonates in a deeply emotional way for Scarlett Johansson. “When I read it, I cried, and that almost never happens,” Johansson revealed to Deadline. “Sometimes you’ll read a script that’s really moving. When I read ‘Jojo Rabbit,’ I cried. Sometimes a script will move you like that, which is extraordinary.”
Johansson, who herself is Jewish and had extended family murdered in the Holocaust, describes the movie as being complex and about Jewishness, but not exclusively. “The film to me very much is a movie about grief, it’s about human connectivity, and it’s also about forgiveness. It’s also about the truth versus reality, and it’s also about who has the right to tell someone else’s story, or do we have the right to tell someone else’s story? There’s a lot in it,” she noted. “Certainly, Jewish identity is a part of that.”
“Eleanor the Great” will open at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, and for her part, Johansson says that it’s her dream for June Squibb to walk the red carpet. “The world needs June now more than ever,” she concluded. At Hey Alma we think we can speak for all Jewish grandma fans out there in saying: We could not agree more!
