Helen Mirren criticises Israel at film festival after being called ‘evil Zionist’ in viral video

JTA – British actor Helen Mirren criticised Israel at a film festival in Italy, in her first public comments since security footage of a November incident where she was accused by a stranger of being an “evil Zionist bitch” went viral late last month. 

“Evil forces are rising everywhere, even in a country like Israel,” Mirren said in an interview with journalists at the Taormina Film Festival in Sicily, according to reports in entertainment media. “How could you possibly repeat the actions of what was done to you as people to other people? Crimes against humanity, it’s called.” 

The Academy Award-winning actor, who is 80, is being honoured with a lifetime achievement award at the festival on Friday. Her many roles have included playing former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in the 2023 biopic Golda, which she premiered in Jerusalem. 

Mirren is not Jewish but has a long history of connection to Israel, dating back to 1967, when she travelled with a Jewish boyfriend to work for a month on a kibbutz in the country’s north. 

She referenced that period in her comments at Taormina. 

“I saw it from the inside and I saw some things that disturbed me from the inside in Israel at that time,” she said, according to the Deadline website. “I’m talking about six months after the Six-Day War.” 

Mirren has previously criticised the Israeli government. While promoting Golda in early 2023, she said she believed that Meir would be “utterly horrified” by Israel’s current leadership, which she referred to as a “dictatorship”. 

But she also spoke favourably about Israel during the promotional events, which shortly preceded the Hamas attack that began the war in Gaza. 

“I believe in Israel, in the existence of Israel, and I believe Israel has to go forward into the future, for the rest of eternity,” she told the country’s Channel 12 in August 2023. “I believe in Israel because of the Holocaust.” 

During the November 2025 incident, the person who accosted Mirren and her husband, Taylor Hackford, appeared to reference those comments, saying, “She said Israel should last forever because of the Holocaust, and she was very happy that Palestinians’ houses were gone.” 

Hackford responded, “Fuck off”, and Mirren didn’t say anything in the video. 

At Taormina, the actor offered a more nuanced characterisation of her beliefs while also praising Israel’s creative and intellectual communities. 

“I grew up in Europe post-World War II and the realisation in my parents’ generation of what had happened in the Holocaust was so profound, so important,” Mirren said. “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.” 

According to Variety, she also said, “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.” 

About the viral video showing her being accosted, Mirren told journalists at the festival she believes she was “attacked by mistake by a man who was maybe a little over passionate or maybe mentally not quite stable”. 

She added, “I don’t know whether he read things on the internet or thought he read something which he hadn’t read, I don’t know.” 

Though London’s Metropolitan Police initially said it was possible for an incident to be investigated as an antisemitic hate crime even if the victim isn’t Jewish, it won’t be investigating further, as Mirren and Hackford have decided not to press charges.