Dame Helen Mirren has said she would like to add another tattoo to her body, teasing “a whole sleeve” of a snake design.
The 70-year-old actress already has a tattoo of interlocking Vs on her left hand, which was inked on a Native American reservation in the 1970s.
During an interview to promote her latest movie Eye In The Sky, Dame Helen told the Radio Times she does not regret her body ink.
“I want to get another one, actually. I’d like a whole sleeve. As you get older, I think it’s a better and better idea,” she said.
She went on to describe “some sort of curving pattern running up my arm,” and added: “Maybe a snake – I quite like snakes.”
Renowned for her unconventional streak, she famously showed off her twerking skills after winning Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Woman Of The Year award in 2014.
The year before, she dyed her hair pink.
Dame Helen is not a fan of being labelled “sexy”, despite being celebrated as a positive role model for older women.
“I’ve always been tired of being called ‘sexy’. It’s annoying and irritating – I just have to put up with it,” she told the magazine.
Portraying Elizabeth II won her an Oscar for The Queen and she won an Olivier for The Audience, and in thriller Eye In The Sky, the London-born star plays another commanding woman.
Already drawing plaudits for her role as Colonel Katherine Powell, Dame Helen plays an officer in charge of a top-secret drone operation to capture terrorists in Kenya.
Through remote surveillance and on-the-ground intelligence, Powell discovers the targets are planning a suicide bombing and the mission escalates.
But as American pilot Steve Watts (Aaron Paul from Breaking Bad) is about to engage, a nine-year old girl enters the kill zone, triggering an international dispute which reaches the highest levels of the US and British government.
Alan Rickman, who died in January from cancer aged 69, co-stars as Lieutenant General Frank Benson.
Dame Helen recalled one of their earlier collaborations which ended up being a rare critical failure in 1998.
“We did Antony and Cleopatra together at the National Theatre, rather disastrously actually, but with great love for each other,” she said.
At the time, The Guardian described the production as a “plodding spectacle” and the Daily Telegraph talked of a “fatally absent” sexual chemistry.
She paid a warm tribute to her old friend’s performance in Eye In The Sky and said he would have been proud of the movie.
“It’s Alan as I knew Alan – a brilliant character actor, funny, urbane, intelligent and very human. It’s really great to see him up there.”
The acclaimed Prime Suspect star said she was attracted to her latest film because women are central to the movie, rather than on the sideline.
“Our political world is masculine. It means that women can only gain power by becoming masculinised themselves.”
Eye In The Sky is released in the UK on Friday.
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