London police are ‘reviewing’ video of Helen Mirren being called ‘an evil Zionist’

JTA – London police are reviewing footage that showed actress Helen Mirren being called “an evil Zionist bitch” by a person on the street. 

The video, which circulated widely online, records Mirren walking with her husband, Taylor Hackford, when a person off-camera approaches and calls her an “avowed Zionist”. 

“She said Israel should last forever because of the Holocaust, and she was very happy that Palestinians’ houses were gone,” the person says, before cursing at the couple. Hackford responds, “F*ck off,” while Mirren doesn’t say anything in the video. 

The confrontation is believed to have taken place at the end of last year, a spokesperson from Metropolitan Police told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. It was shared on Thursday by London & UK Street News, an X account that aggregates crowdsourced citizen journalism. 

Police said they were “aware” of the video “showing a man and a woman being subjected to antisemitic verbal abuse in Tower Hill”, an area near Mirren’s neighbourhood in East London. 

“Officers are currently reviewing the footage and making attempts to contact the victims to establish whether they would like to report the incident,” the spokesperson said. The official added that Metropolitan Police have made more than 90 hate crime arrests since the end of March. 

Complaints from a victim aren’t always required to investigate a hate crime, depending on the offence. The police didn’t confirm whether a report from Mirren was necessary in this case. 

Mirren, who is not Jewish, has portrayed prominent Jewish figures, including former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in the 2023 biopic Golda and Maria Altmann, an art collector who fled the Nazis, in the 2015 film Woman in Gold. 

While Mirren was promoting Golda in August 2023, she said in an interview on Israel’s Channel 12, “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. I believe in Israel because of the Holocaust.” 

Mirren also said that she believed Meir would be “utterly horrified” by Israel’s current-day leadership, in an interview with AFP at the Berlin International Film Festival in February 2023. 

Addressing the Israeli government’s moves towards a judicial overhaul that was criticised for undermining the country’s balance of powers, Mirren said, “It’s the rise of dictatorship and dictatorship was what has always been the enemy of people all over the world, and she would recognise it as that.” 

Mirren added that she had visited Israel in 1967, shortly after the Six-Day War, and worked at a kibbutz. 

Mirren has not publicly addressed the incident captured on the video.