Erin Kellyman, June Squibb Struck Up a Real-Life Friendship

For British actress Erin Kellyman, spending a few months in New York felt like home thanks to June Squibb, the 95-year-old screen icon she stars alongside in Eleanor the Great.

Kellyman and Squibb lived in the same apartment building during the eight-week shoot, allowing the women to pop over to each other’ homes, Friends-style. Kellyman attended dinner parties Squibb threw for friends every Saturday, and sometimes would even get Squibb’s advice on her outfits.

“It just felt like girls being girls. There’s no age on that,” Kellyman, 26, says of those bonding moments.

Those bonds were key given that the Scarlett Johansson-directed film hinges on the friendship shared by Squibb’s Eleanor and Kellyman’s Nina, an American journalism student who strikes up a friendship with an older woman who relocates from Florida to New York after a devastating loss. The two meet after Eleanor unwit- tingly wanders into a support group and shares a tragic story that garners more attention than she expected.

Elanor the Great came together quickly for Kellyman, who auditioned in December 2023 and started the shoot just weeks later in February after spending time on Zoom working on sides with Johansson. She put on an American accent, which she’d been doing since she was a kid watching Miley Cyrus in Hannah Montana.

Kellyman grew up in Tamworth, England and was an anxious child. She started worrying about a future career at a young age,

and wanted to become a professional gymnast before her mother bluntly told her that wasn’t in the cards for her. She then tried modeling, but didn’t care for that. Given her anxiety, she never imag- ined she’d like acting, but when she was 12, her mother took her to an audition involving improv.

“I left that audition, and I was like, ‘Mom, whatever that was, I want to do that,’” she recalls. “I just felt the most comfortable that I could remember.”

From there, she joined Television Workshop in Nottingham, which trains young actors, and later booked a role on the Chanel 4 comedy Raised by Wolves, which ran for two seasons in 2015 and 2016.

She jumped to the global stage in Solo: A Star Wars Story. Landing the part in the young Han Solo movie required multiple auditions, as well as showing she could do stunt exercises, which she was surprised dovetailed directly into a screen test with Alden Ehrenreich. “I’m thinking, ‘I’m so sweaty, I can’t focus. I’ve forgotten my lines,’” she says of going from the stunts to meeting Ehrenreich in a matter of minutes.

When Solo hit theaters in 2018, audiences assumed the masked freedom fighter known as Enfys Nest was a grown man, but when the character finally takes off

the mask, it was Kellyman’s face people saw. While the feature was not a hit, it placed Kellyman on an upward career trajectory.

Solo co-writer Jake Kasdan remembered her when it came to cast Willow, the 2022 Disney+ drama that continued the story of Solo director Ron Howard’s cult classic 1988 film of the same name. “I didn’t really think any- body was taking notice of what I was doing really. I just was trying to get through the day without fangirling or freaking out,” she says of being surprised when Kasdan reached out with the role after Solo.

Willow earned praise for its LGBTQ representation, with Kellyman, who is gay, sharing an onscreen romance with co-star Ruby Cruz.

Kellyman’s noteworthy work also includes an antagonist role in the 2021 Marvel Studios series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and the upcoming Danny Boyle sequel 28 Years Later. Despite being quite steeped in genre films and TV shows, she holds a special place for indie projects such as Eleanor the Great. As the co-lead in at two-hander with Squibb, it marks her most significant screen time in a feature to date.

“The energy was really high, and people were having fun despite the movie being so sad,” she says, adding that Johansson’s “was able to be in every department constantly, which I think is such a big challenge — to be able to give so much of your time to so many people.”

Kellyman recently sat down to watch the film ahead of its May 20 debut at Cannes, which will be her first time attending the fest, and also marks her first time seeing Squibb since they wrapped. She was struck by how much it made her miss Squibb, whom she has many moments she’ll think back on. One moment that comes to mind was a day shooting a diner scene. Says the actress: “We just stayed at this diner booth all day, and we just chatted all day.