Helen Mirren turns 65 years old next month. And she’s taken off her clothes for New York Magazine. I’m all for older-lady NSFW porn and all (I don’t discriminate, y’all), but if I was Helen, I would have gone topless in a much more fabulous style. While I do think she looks sexy sitting there in her bathtub, I also think it has the look of a photo shot by her randy older gent hubby. There’s another photo – which I have cropped – of Helen in the tub, with her breasts visible underwater (here for the NSFW photo). Mirren is promoting her role in Love Ranch, where she plays a madam in 1970s Reno. So of course she talks hookers and sex and all of that, and to her credit, she dials down the crazy for the interview, but you can still feel the crazy in the air, lurking, waiting to pounce like a hooker/nurse. The full NY Mag piece is here, and here are some of the highlights:

On being “notorious”: “I am a little notorious… It’s weird when your life becomes vintage, like a period movie,” she says half-seriously. “I’m getting less notorious as I get older. People forget that I ever was.”

Being directed by her husband Taylor Hackford: For years, Hackford, whom she married in 1997, has asked her to play smaller parts in his films. “And I said ‘Oh, for God’s sake! Of course I’m not going to do that!’ ” says Mirren. “They were never interesting enough parts, and I wasn’t going to do it just because he was directing it.”

Playing love scenes with a 30-years-younger actor, Spanish newcomer Sergio Peris-Mencheta: “He’s got a fabulous big-animal thing in that sort of raw, brutish, ugly-beautiful way,” says Mirren, who shares a steamy, and, because it’s her, entirely plausible love scene with Peris-Mencheta.

On being “the good girl who’d like to be a bad one”: “It’s true! I haven’t grown out of that, have I?” she says, laughing. “I’m still the good girl who wants to be a bad girl. But I’ll never make it as a bad girl … I’m not a prude or a moralist and I never have been, but I’m too fearful, too much of a wimp, really.” When her husband tried to convince her to spend a night at the Mustang Ranch, Mirren refused. “I said, ‘Read my lips: I’m not going to spend a night in a brothel.’ ” In the end, she dispensed with research and simply took direction. “It’s amazing how quickly you get into dildos everywhere and pink-feather handcuffs. Within an hour you’re completely used to it.”

Mirren believes that brothels should be legalized because its safer for the sex workers. But she’s also loathe to romanticize working girls: “Susan Austin [the Mustang Ranch’s real madam] said you had to be tough, because maybe you do have 25 psychotic whores. A lot of them come from very dysfunctional backgrounds, and women together like that can be very dangerous.”

Actors versus prostitutes: “The girls who work in the sex industry, they put themselves out of their bodies. An actor does sort of the opposite,” says Mirren, who talks about acting as giving every intimacy—emotional and physical—except actual intercourse. “People say ‘Oh, you play someone else.’ I’m always playing myself. You can only do it by going into yourself, in the deepest, most terrifying way. Not to say I haven’t ever prostituted myself quite often and happily. But in my heart it’s very serious.”

Mirren doesn’t think Hef was a feminist: “The Playboy Mansion, coke, and the rise of all that—Guccione and Hefner always pushed it as liberation, but it didn’t seem like that to me,” she says. “That was women obeying the sexualized form created by men—though maybe we always do that, because we want to be attractive. But I was kind of a trailblazer because I demanded to do it my own way. I’d say, ‘I’m not having it put on me by someone else.’ I didn’t want to be the sort of puritanical good girl with a little white collar who says, ‘Don’t shag until you get married.’ ”

Mirren on the younger generation: “I’m thrilled young girls are claiming their sexuality for themselves,” she says. “I love bold women: Madonna and Scarlett Johansson—sexy and gorgeous, but not only that. And Miley Cyrus—fantastic! And Lady Gaga. I love the way she’s elevated pop to performance art, or dragged performance art down to pop, or maybe made a wonderful amalgam of the two.” With her coy smile, Mirren looks like the conspiring queen who’s usurped the throne, securing the kingdom for her heirs: “My girls: Miley, Scarlett, Lady Gaga. My team … Yes.”

[From New York Magazine]

Bless her batsh-t crazy heart. I mean it, I love her. She’s nutty as a fruitcake, but Dame Helen makes life more interesting. I wonder if she those were the first names that popped into her head for “bold, sexual” women: Lady Gaga (sure), Madonna (of course), Scarlett Johansson (uhh) and MILEY? What the hell, Helen? I also laughed a little at her lack of empathy for the “psychotic whores” – because Helen said it, we’re all like, “Oh, that’s almost poetry!”

Photos courtesy of NY Mag’s slideshow, including one NSFW photo.