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JA Squibb is 94 years old and would like to commit murder. “Ooh, I’d like to!” The new movie star hums a little, thinking about the concept. “I have been murdered, but I’ve never killed before, so that would be fun.”

Squibb, best known for her Oscar-nominated role as the foul-mouthed family matriarch in Alexander Payne’s monochrome road movie Nebraskathinks about her fantasy roles because they are suddenly – improbably, you might say – feasible. For the first time in her seven-decade career, she is the lead actress in her own film, which is now in theaters.

The mischievous, resourceful Thelma is also not quite what you might expect from a film starring a 90-year-old. It’s more or less an action movie, or at the very least a lively mystery-cum-thriller, only with a hero who tires easily, likes puzzles and can’t quite handle Google. Squibb nails her character’s comic vulnerability, but also her anger and irritation – the mild-mannered widow Thelma Post knows her body is giving out on her, and she doesn’t like it one bit.

That’s partly why she’s so angry when she’s scammed out of $10,000 by a phone scammer. Only then does Thelma become the Liam Neeson-in-Taken of the geriatric set. Despite the concerns of her family (daughter Parker Posey, son-in-law Clark Gregg and grandson Fred Hechinger, of The White Lotus) about her declining health, Thelma sets out to identify the crooks and get her money back, teaming up with retired stage actor Ben (the late Richard Roundtree, in his final appearance). Thelma handles guns, plays with criminals and pops a wheelie while riding her mobility scooter. “I didn’t do that,” Squibb tells me matter-of-factly. “That was a stuntwoman.”

Squibb is at home in Los Angeles, serene in a black shirt dress trimmed with white curls. Her hair is a glamorous ocean wave of silver, and behind her stands a bookcase adorned with awards. She has an inherent kindness – but also a sharp, astute practicality. Squibb does not do sentimentality.

“I’m physically weak,” she says. “But this is what happens and you can’t control it. You have to live with it. I have to use a cane and sometimes, if I have to walk far, I use a wheelchair.” She shrugs. “At first it bothered me, but now it doesn’t. It’s like… I don’t want to walk! Push me!” She lets out a big, beautiful laugh. “You want to say, ‘Oh, I can do it!’ Well… there are things you can’t do.”

Thelma was inspired by an equally feisty older woman, specifically the grandmother of the film’s writer and director, Josh Margolin. The real Thelma Post is still alive and kicking at 103, and currently lives with Margolin’s parents after the death of her husband. “We’ve always been close since I was a kid,” Margolin explains over the phone. “I’ve always considered her a friend.” The real Thelma was thankfully not scammed, but she has followed a similar trajectory as the fictional Thelma.

“She’s always been very smart, very capable, and a self-starter in many ways, but I think — probably over time — any life that was driven by her wants and needs kind of took a back seat to my grandfather’s career and life,” he says. “She became a wife and a mother, first and foremost.” When Margolin’s grandfather passed away nearly a decade ago, though, Thelma blossomed. “She had this long period of 70 years where she was part of these other ecosystems, and this was the first time she ever had her own space and was able to keep her own schedule and do her own thing.”

Squibb’s own story was very different. Born in Illinois in 1929, she was determined to march to her own beat. Even more impressive, this was an era that imposed specific and rigid expectations on young women. “I fought against that my whole life,” she says. “When I was a child, when I was a young girl…” She folds her arms at her sides, as if saying to the universe, “Enough!” Despite her parents’ objections, Squibb moved to New York in 1957 at the age of 28, where she found work in plays and nightclubs. Her success was obvious to all, but her parents remained adamant that acting was a phase. “My mother saw me on Broadway once and said, ‘Well, now that you’ve done that, you can come home and get married and have children.’” She laughs. “And that’s what I mean—I fought it tooth and nail.”

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Squibb’s voice drops to a whisper. “My father, I think, understood me in his own quiet way. I don’t think my mother ever, ever understood me. Who was this child that she had? This child that wouldn’t listen, that did her own thing and said, ‘To hell with everybody!’, you know?”

Squibb had a son in 1970 at the age of 40, thus maintaining her unconventional nature. By then she had married a director and acting teacher named Charles Kakatsakis and continued her career. She made her film debut in 1990, at the age of 60, with a small role in Woody Allen’s Alicebefore working on and off Broadway for the rest of the decade; her resume is also peppered with occasional guest roles on TV. One of these was her beloved Law & Authoritythe police and lawyer drama she watches to this day. (“Although FBI (“Tuesday night on CBS is my favorite show right now,” she politely informs me.)

Her biggest break was a small role as Jack Nicholson’s wife in the 2002 film About Schmidtwhose death sets off his character’s existential crisis. Alexander Payne directed that film and remembered Squibb more than a decade later for NebraskaThe film was a hit and earned Squibb an Oscar nomination. It’s one of the best supporting performances of the 2010s – feisty and profane, Squibb throws himself into a character who swears like a soldier and flashes the gravestone of an old and seemingly boring flame.

Many small bursts of work followed – she memorably played Lena Dunham’s ailing grandmother in an episode of Girlsand recently Nostalgia in Inside Out 2 – but the Oscar attention didn’t change her ambitions. Even a top position in Thelma hasn’t changed the way she works. In other words, there have been no diva moments. “I appreciated it, but it didn’t make a difference,” she says. “I was working from a script. I was learning my lines. My way of working didn’t change. I didn’t change at all.” Still, she admits to enjoying the newfound attention. If she had been on a billboard before Thelma? “Yes,” she hesitates, “but not alone!” She chuckles. “I’m not going to pretend it’s not exciting.”

Margolin says he immediately saw his grandmother’s “spirit, determination and tenacity” in the actor he picked to play her on screen. “June was just a consummate professional,” he recalls. “She never dropped a line, which is crazy for an actor of any age. But she also comes from the stage and an era of acting where there’s so much discipline and so much training.” She was 93 during filming and insisted on doing as many of her own stunts as possible. “But we were obviously hyper-concerned and hyper-focused on making sure she was as protected and safe as possible,” he says. “She didn’t do the scene where Thelma falls — we didn’t push June into the dirt in the middle of the night, I promise. But she ended up doing a lot more physical feats than we expected.”

As for Squibb herself, she hopes audiences will go away from Thelma with more confidence in themselves. “No matter your age, there is always a is still life to live,” she says. “I know so many people who give up. They don’t move anymore. They don’t do this, they don’t do that. There are definitely things I can’t do, but there are also things I can do. So just enjoy what you can do.”

She also wants to give me a bit of wisdom. “We have to be strong in what we want,” she says firmly. “And if you really want it, you will break all the rules to get it.”

‘Thelma’ is in theaters