Greta Gerwig Talks About the Helen Mirren F-Bomb That Was Nearly in the Opening Sequence of BARBIE
Barbie keeps chugging along in the box office, bringing in the big bucks and breaking all the records. I took my daughter to see it over the weekend, and we were in a sold out theater a month after the movie was released! It’s pretty fun to be back in packed theaters experiencing movies with audiences again. It’s a pretty great movie, and that’s why it’s done so well, but it’s fun on the other side of its release to hear all the things that almost made it into the movie in previous edits.
One of those scenes was the opening sequence, which we saw in the final cut as a 2001: A Space Odyssey homage, complete with voiceover by Oscar-winner and fan-favorite actress Helen Mirren. In the iteration of the opening that was scrapped, Mirren was going to make a Marie Curie joke and drop an F-bomb right off the bat.
Gerwig spoke about the cut joke on the ReelBlend podcast, and revealed that it was actually meant to tie into a bit about famed physicist Marie Curie that was cut completely from the movie.
"Suffice to say, there was a sort of extended joke with Marie Curie which didn't end up being part of it. But, yes, there was a page one F-bomb that just sort of that set the tone for the whole thing. What the line was was, it was actually Helen Mirren saying to Marie Curie, 'Pipe the f**k down, Marie Curie,' That was like my favorite, because you know you only get like one F-bomb."
The final version of the movie does feature one censored F-bomb, at the end when the Kens ride into Kendom, only to realize that the Barbies have resumed control of their dream houses, making them dreamier than ever. "That's because they're dream houses, motherf***er," Issa Rae's President Barbie exclaims while walking down the steps of the dream house. The moment is hilariously bleeped out with a Mattel logo covering her mouth. Gerwig confirmed that Rae gets the film's sole F-bomb, but still clearly has a soft spot for the idea of posh-accented Mirren dropping a curse word in the film's opening moments.
"We knew we only got one F-bomb and we were like 'Well, let's use it at the very beginning,'" she explained. "There's just something to me about Helen Mirren saying, 'Pipe the f**k down, Marie Curie.'" The filmmaker also confirmed that Mirren did in fact record the line, but it was taken out somewhere in the edit. "There's audio somewhere in the world of her saying, 'Pipe the f**k down, Marie Curie' with like a proper British voice,'" Gerwig assured podcast listeners. Though it sounds like the F-bomb could've stayed in, she does note that it was the number one line in the script that took people aback. "That was, I would say, the line that everyone was like, 'Ohh no, no no.'"
I think Gerwig made the right choice. She pushed all the right boundaries while making the heart of the movie shine through so big and bright.