Greta Gerwig talks about Helen Mirren’s F-bomb that was almost in the opening sequence of BARBIE

Barbie it continues to push ahead at the box office, making big bucks and breaking all records. I took my daughter to see it over the weekend and we were in a sold out theater a month after the movie came out! It’s quite fun to go back to packed theaters to see movies with audiences again. It’s a really great movie, and that’s why it’s done so well, but it’s fun on the other side of its output to hear all the stuff that almost made it into the movie in the 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 voice-over from the Academy Award winner and fan favorite actress Helen Mirren. In the iteration of the opening that was scrapped, Mirren allegedly made a joke about Marie Curie and dropped an F-bomb right after.

Gerwig opened up about the cut joke on the ReelBlend podcast and revealed that it was actually meant to tie into a part of famous Marie Curie physics that was completely cut from the film.

“Suffice it to say that there was some sort of long joke with Marie Curie that ultimately didn’t make it into it. But, yes, there was an atomic bomb on the front page that kind of set the tone for the whole thing. . The line was, it was actually Helen Mirren saying to Marie Curie, ‘Pipe the dick, Marie Curie,’ That was my favorite, because you know you only get an F-bomb.”

The final version of the film features a censored F-bomb, at the end as the Kens enter Kendom, only to realize that the Barbies have taken back control of their dream homes, making them dreamier than ever. “That’s because they’re dream homes, motherfucker,” Issa Rae’- exclaims President Barbie as she descends the steps of the dream house. The moment is hilariously signaled with a Mattel logo covering her mouth. Gerwig confirmed that Rae gets the film’s only F-bomb, but she still clearly has a soft spot for the idea of ​​Mirren with a posh accent throwing a profanity in the film’s opening moments.

“We knew we only had one atomic bomb and we were like, ‘Well, let’s use that from the start,'” he explained. “There’s something to me about Helen Mirren saying, ‘Pipe the dick, Marie Curie.'” The director also confirmed that Mirren did indeed record the line, but she was taken off somewhere in the editing. “There’s audio somewhere in the world where she says, ‘Pipe the f**k down, Marie Curie ‘in a real British voice,'” Gerwig assured podcast listeners. While it seems like the atomic bomb could have stayed, she notes that it was the first line of the script that surprised people. “That was, I would say, the line where everyone was like, ‘Ohh no, no no.'”

I think Gerwig made the right choice. He pushed all the right boundaries making the heart of the film shine so big and bright.