Fast & Furious: Helen Mirren needs to drive

Fast & Furious cast members Helen Mirren and Michelle Rodriguez want to drive and want women to have more to do in the franchise.

For the Fast & Furious franchise, like for anyone, Dame Helen Mirren is no imposition. Her presence and requests are music to everyone’s ear. If she is to reprise her Fast & Furious role in the next movie, her request is simple: to drive.

When Mirren asked — begged, in her words — Vin Diesel and the people of Fast & Furious to join the franchise, they happily obliged to the tune of adding the legendary actor.

“They very kindly wrote me in,” said Mirren to Entertainment Weekly, PEOPLE and InStyle at the Toronto Film Festival Saturday. In The Fate of the Furious, Mirren played the villain Magdalene Shaw, boss of the Shaw crime family.

“I’d love to come back. But, guys, I want to drive next time,” Mirren said Saturday.

Guys is a colloquial term contingent on circumstance. It either takes its literal meaning as way to address men or it means ‘everyone here.’ It feels like a way of saying only men are worth addressing — like the Silicon Valley joke about actual Silicon Valley’s male dominated corporate perspective, when the Gavin Belson character begins every proclamation with “gentlemen” only to turn to the one woman and say, “and lady.”

It appears Fast & Furious has a ‘and lady’ problem. And the women are saying something about it (Mirren’s use of guys is just perfect, shifting the weight of the loaded term onto the dudes).

Franchise original Michelle Rodriguez, in an Instagram post promoting the digital release of F8, wrote “I hope they decide to show some love to the women of the franchise on the next one. Or I might just have to say goodbye to a loved franchise,” (per Deadline).

Imposition and rudeness be damned. Rodriquez and Mirren are badass, and so they require the franchise to utilize their talents or it can say good-bye to them on their way out.

Being a boss is the point of the Fast & Furious franchise. Its story will spin out in perpetuity, each film a leg in a never-ending car chase. It’s awesome. What could be more awesome, intimidating and exciting than seeing the sternness in Mirren’s eye as she chases down someone in a souped up car?

We’ve seen spurts of Rodriguez’s intensity behind the wheel. An entire plot unleashing Rodriguez on the streets of the Fast universe? Yes, please.

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Do what Helen Mirren and Michelle Rodriguez say, Fast & Furious. On this and probably as a general rule.