Helen Mirren has broken her silence on an incident last year in which she was harassed in the street by a man who called her an “evil Zionist b****”.
The Metropolitan Police announced in May that they were investigating the incident, footage of which began circulating that month, as a possible hate crime. The clip showed Mirren and her husband, the filmmaker Taylor Hackford, being filmed as they walked the streets of London together in November 2025.
After discussions with Mirren and Hackford, police closed the case without a formal investigation, according to The Jewish Chronicle.
In the footage, Mirren could be seen asking the man filming her whether he is OK, before the man could be heard saying: “And there is Helen Mirren, the avowed Zionist. You said Israel should last forever because of the Holocaust. And she was very happy the Palestinians’ houses were gone. You are an evil Zionist b****. And [Hackford] as well, f*** you as well.”
Hackford could then be seen telling the man to “f*** off” and asking him to leave them alone.
Speaking at the Taormina Film Festival in Italy today (11 June), Mirren was asked about the incident. She said, Variety reports, that she was “attacked by mistake by a man who was maybe a little over passionate or maybe mentally not quite stable”.
Mirren then discussed her relationship to Israel, based upon her experiences visiting the country, as well as her participation in the 2023 biopic Golda, about the former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir.
“Evil forces are rising everywhere, even in a country like Israel,” she said. “How could you possibly repeat the actions of what was done to you as people to other people?”
She added: “I have such great friends from Israel. The artistic community in Israel, the intellectual community in Israel, are so remarkable. I was born at the end of the Second World War, I grew up in Europe post-Second World War and the realisation in my parents’ generation of what had happened in the Holocaust was so profound, so important.
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“Therefore, the creation of Israel was a very important moment, although maybe it was done in completely the wrong way, in the wrong place, I don’t know. But something had to happen after the horror.”
In a 2023 interview, Mirren recalled her experiences hitchhiking around the country in the late Sixties, where she volunteered at a kibbutz, an Israeli communal settlement. She said that she “witnessed things that were wrong. I witnessed Arabs being thrown out of their houses in Jerusalem. But it was just the extraordinary magical energy of a country just beginning to put its roots in the ground. It was an amazing time to be here.”
She has also historically voiced her advocacy for the country, and in April signed an open letter alongside fellow stars, including Boy George and Sharon Osbourne, in which she pledged her support for the country’s inclusion in the Eurovision Song Contest.
During her talk at the Taormina Film Festival, Mirren suggested that she now had complicated feelings about the country.
“Why was Catherine called ‘the Great’? Because she took land. Why was Alexander ‘the Great’? Because he took land. He invaded, he killed people, he destroyed cities and he took land,” she said. “Why is he remembered in history? Because with incredible brutality and unbelievable cruelty, he took land.
“So it devastates me. That’s what I mean. The evil is always lurking, waiting to take over, even in a place like Israel. I played Golda Meir and worked in a country that was the idealistic Israel, and I always thought it was a country that would never do wrong, but of course they were doing wrong, even then.”
Mirren was recently in the headlines after sending “love” to her MobLand co-star Tom Hardy, after rumours circulated that they were involved in an on-set feud.
Numerous outlets claimed that Hardy had been axed from the British crime drama after wrapping production on its second season, amid alleged run-ins with people behind the scenes.
According to an unnamed source who spoke to The Hollywood Reporter, Hardy “refused to come out of his trailer for hours at a time” and kept Mirren and their co-star Pierce Brosnan waiting “for hours”.
Despite the speculation, Mirren shared a photo of Hardy to her Instagram, writing: “Love you now and always, Helen.”
