June Squibb: The 94-Year-Old Action Hero the World Didn’t Know It Was Waiting For

June Squibb, the 94-year-old Nebraskan who has spent most of her life politely waiting for the planet to notice she could act, has finally become a global phenomenon. One wonders if the Earth simply ran out of younger people willing to risk their hips on a speeding mobility scooter for art. In May, Squibb completed her own vehicular stunt work in Thelma—a feat that made headlines from Sydney to São Paulo, mostly because stunt coordinators discovered that “nonagenarian” is not a typo for “ninety-year-old ninja.”

Across continents, her delayed stardom reads like a late-capitalist parable: a woman who watched the Cold War freeze and thaw, fax machines die, and TikTok toddlers become millionaires, only to be told at 85, “Congratulations, you’ve booked your first lead.” The international press, ever hungry for a tidy fable, has seized on Squibb as proof that meritocracy merely suffers from cosmic lag—like a Deutsche Bahn train that will arrive, eventually, give or take four decades.

In Seoul, where youth is a national export and sixty is practically prenatal, Squibb’s ascent has triggered a minor identity crisis. Local broadcasters ran panel discussions titled “Could Grandma Out-Act K-Droid?” Meanwhile, French critics—who traditionally treat American optimism like unpasteurized cheese—embraced her as existential absurdist performance art. Le Monde declared Squibb “la preuve vivante que l’ennui bourgeois est mortellement surestimé,” which roughly translates to “a living rebuttal to every Cannes film about rich people staring at the sea.”

The geopolitical symbolism is irresistible. Squibb’s career timeline overlaps neatly with the rise and fall of Bretton Woods, the invention of the internet, and the invention of the internet’s regret. Casting her as an action heroine now is like appointing the Berlin Wall to coach a parkour team. Yet here we are, live-streaming a grandmother on a mobility scooter evading phone scammers through Los Angeles sprawl—a plot so American it could only be improved if the scooter ran on high-fructose corn syrup and student debt.

Global markets have responded with savage efficiency. Alibaba now lists “June Squibb stunt scooter replicas” at three price points, including an “authentic wobble” edition. The Swiss, sensing fiduciary opportunity, introduced a Squibb-themed longevity ETF whose prospectus warns, “Past performance is no guarantee of immortality, but dividends may outlive you.” Even the Russian Ministry of Culture issued a terse statement, grudgingly admitting, “Elderly woman make good film, less need for tank.” Soft power, it seems, now comes with a nine-decade gestation period.

Scholars of soft power note that Squibb’s stardom arrives precisely as Hollywood panics about Chinese box-office gatekeepers and European streaming quotas. What safer export than a nonagenarian who can’t be canceled on Twitter because she still thinks it’s a bird-watching app? In an age when nations weaponize memes and trade embargoes arrive via Spotify playlist, Squibb offers the rare commodity no algorithm can deepfake: accrued time. You can counterfeit a lot of things—NFTs, elections, gluten-free bread—but you cannot Photoshop 94 years of not dying.

And so the world leans in, half-awed, half-ashamed. A woman who once shared Broadway stages with Elaine Stritch now shares bandwidth with Korean esports champions and AI-generated pop stars. The UN briefly floated making her an honorary Sustainable Development Goal—“Goal 18: Try Not to Expire Before Recognition”—but the motion died in committee, ironically, due to time constraints.

At the Cannes press conference, someone asked Squibb what she wants next. “A nap,” she replied, inadvertently summarizing the global mood. Because if a 94-year-old can wait this long to headline a film, perhaps the rest of us can wait for climate policy, peace treaties, or even a functional printer driver. In the meantime, there’s comfort in watching a woman old enough to remember breadlines execute a 180-degree scooter spin while flipping off fraudsters. It’s not progress, exactly, but it’s motion—proof that the carousel of absurdity keeps turning, even if the horses are now mobility scooters and the ringmaster is a grandmother who refuses to dismount.