June Squibb is "proudly troublesome" in trailer for Scarlett Johansson's Eleanor The Great

The Cannes premiere marked Johansson's directorial debut.

By Emma Keates  |  August 12, 2025 | 1:03pm
Photo: Sony Pictures Classics
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Once again, June Squibb is proving that there’s no age limit on being a leading lady. The nonagenarian stars in Scarlett Johansson’s feature length directorial debut, Eleanor The Great, as a “witty and proudly troublesome 94-year-old” forced to move from Florida to Manhattan after the death of her best friend, Bessie (Rita Zohar). After a series of misunderstandings, Eleanor ends up telling “a tale that takes on a dangerous life of its own,” per the film’s logline. But while Eleanor may be bending the truth, her story ends up leading her into a brand new friendship, this time with a young journalism student named Nina (Erin Kellyman) who’s dealing with a loss of her own. As Nina delves deeper into Eleanor’s (phony) tale of her life as a Holocaust survivor, she also finds a way to re-connect with her grieving, news anchor father (Chiwetel Ejiofor).

The film looks guaranteed to be a tearjerker; even the trailer might make you a little misty. While Johansson says she’s “very proud of it and proud of all the work everybody did to make it,” production was also an emotionally challenging process in a different sense. “Every day the movie fell apart in 400 different ways,” she told The Hollywood Reporter. “It would be easier to make something that was the sequel of a $180 million movie or a genre movie that was subpar. To get much, much, much less money for an independent film with an original story that has a lead actor who was 94 was very, very, very challenging.”

Luckily, Johansson found her way to Sony Pictures Classics, which she said “saved the day” by “still making original ideas and putting faith in first time directors.” The film went on to premiere at Cannes and will also screen at TIFF this fall. Everyone else will get to experience Squibb’s latest turn in theaters September 26.

 
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