Fred Hechinger and his grandmother enjoyed much silver screen indulgence together in his childhood. Namely, via the early 20th-century programming of cable channel Turner Classic Movies. She’s a keen cinema-goer too and so he would also join her on trips. Sometimes he would be tasked with choosing the film, but shared genetics wouldn’t always amount to shared tastes. “She’d be like, ‘You know, I don’t like this, I don’t get this.’ Some [films] just wouldn’t really speak to her,” he tells me via Zoom, from his native New York.

“So, I wanted to make something that I could show and watch with her,” the actor admits. Life-affirming June action-comedy Thelma, the directorial debut of Josh Margolin, more than fits the bill. Centred around vengeance-seeking titular lead Thelma Post (June Squibb), based on Josh’s real- life grandmother of the same name, the ostensibly frail but fearless 93-year-old embarks on a perilous pursuit across LA to recoup what is rightly hers, after she loses thousands of dollars as the unsuspecting victim of a tele phishing scam. Her family, including grandson Danny (Fred), are faced with the reality that despite their temptations to mollycoddle the nonagenarian, with merely her elderly pal Ben (the late Richard Roundtree) and his motorised scooter in tow, Thelma can, in fact, more than handle her own affairs. “It’s a perfect blend of messy human life, very funny family difficulties and legitimately high-stakes action,” Fred shares. “I felt that Josh created a cauldron of different influences and expertly mixed them together.”

“Josh said that watching his grandmother get up off of her bed is as stressful as the most climactic sequence in Mission: Impossible,” Fred smiles. “They are the same level of fear and thrill.” The film quickly quashes any notions that the character, or June herself, is an unlikely heroine of the genre, and rather presents one’s advancing years as the optimal moment to conquer the high-octane action arena. June is, needless to say, reported to have done most stunts for the project herself. “All of the most heroic people in my life are, I believe, slightly under-estimated,” Fred highlights. “My grandmother is a remarkable woman and has always been so in an underestimated and under celebrated way.” The mundane demands of daily lives do, as it happens, elicit action-hero qualities in us all. “When I’m trying to catch the bus and I know that it leaves in seven minutes and I’m nine minutes away, I am sweating like I’m Jason Statham,” he says. “It’s intense to be in a human body. It’s a lot sometimes. You don’t need to explode The Death Star to feel that way. I think all of our lives feel equally complicated and confusing and enormously big.”

Fred’s professional life is most certainly vast these days. The phrase ‘booked and busy’ can be bandied about with excess, but three years since breaking out conclusively in season one of Mike White’s satirical privilege parade The White Lotus, the 24-year-old is simply hopscotching from one career-accentuating film to another. So much so, we have to extract 45 minutes from his Sunday morning to chat. He’s just got back from grabbing breakfast and taking a walk with a friend. “It was a slow-build morning,” he says. It feels wrong to divert him from it. You get the impression he would ‘Sunday’ well – he’s effortlessly buoyant and bears a wide-eyed contentment primed for leaning into whatever an unhurried day off might present.

But it’s back to business – he’s got three additional projects incoming after all. Following Thelma, Autumn will see him star in the adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s literary account of 1960’s reform schools Nickel Boys, before a role in Ridley Scott’s star-laden Gladiator II and a winter induction into Sony’s Spider-Man universe in Kraven the Hunter. Navigating such a compact succession of jobs is surely a lot to process, I suggest, but he seems to be weathering it deftly. “To take a temperature check, it feels like I’m at a nice temperature at the moment,” he says.

Thelma will be available in UK cinemas from 19th July.

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