Scottish drag queen Lawrence Chaney was scrolling idly through their inbox one day when an email caught their eye. “It went, ‘Hi Lawrence. We’ve got this role in this film called Arthur’s Whisky and we’d love to invite you to be in it. You’d be starring alongside Diane Keaton, Boy George, Lulu …’” Chaney had become a bit of a celebrity on the drag circuit since winning RuPaul’s Drag Race UK in 2021, but it hadn’t gone to their head. “I thought, I know how the next email will go, ‘Great. I’m so glad you want to be a part of it. Send £7m to this untraceable bank account.’” They left the email unanswered for a fortnight.
At around the same time, Boy George was performing in Las Vegas when the phone rang: it was Lulu, asking if he would be interested in playing himself in a little film she was involved in.
The result must also rate among life’s more surreal experiences for the inhabitants of the model retirement village in Surrey where an important part of Arthur’s Whisky was filmed over one bitterly cold week last spring. As catering lorries plied a busy trade in hot drinks for the crew, elderly residents flocked from their idyllic redbrick cottages, across the immaculate lawns, to assemble in the village hall for an invitation-only show unlike any other.
Beneath the proscenium arch, a neon palm tree dominated a stage bathed in a louche purple glow. The rest of the hall was a less glamorous clutter of cables, clapperboards and camera booms. This was no longer the community hub of Whiteley Village, a short train ride from London, but the Coronet Vegas theatre, where Chaney, resplendent as a Las Vegas drag hostess, introduced Boy George, who had just one song to deliver over and over again: Culture Club’s 1983 chart-topper Karma Chameleon.
In the audience, things got weirder still when three giggling groupies were summoned to the stage. “I think I recognise that woman: it’s Lulu, isn’t it?” announced one elderly man triumphantly, as the diminutive singer teetered up the steps in ankle-breaker platforms, flanked by a rangy Keaton, with trademark hair flapping over a sparkly silver suit, and a crisply belted Patricia Hodge. The trio then took turns to goof around with Boy George.
The scene turns out to be the climactic moment of Arthur’s Whisky, a wacky age-positive comedy directed by Stephen Cookson. Lulu, Keaton and Hodge play Susan, Linda and Joan, old friends whose discovery of a youth-restoring whisky in the shed of Joan’s recently deceased inventor husband sends them off on the adventure of a lifetime.
Lulu, by all accounts except her own, is the film’s fairy godmother. “Oh I wouldn’t say that. I kind of made a couple of phone calls to people that I knew would be perfect for the job,” says the 75-year-old singer. Apart from getting Boy George on board, it was she who convinced Chaney that the invitation was genuine (they met when she was a guest judge on RuPaul’s Drag Race). “I am not a great actress. I mean, she’s a great actress,” she says, gesturing at Hodge. “Diane’s a great actress. I’m really a singer. This is my second job. But I do love to act.”
Keaton, who is 77, was recovering from jetlag and retired to her own bungalow between takes. But Lulu and Hodge, who is the same age as Keaton, squeezed gamely into a tiny backstage room to be interviewed. The two had bonded to the extent that they finished each other’s sentences. “The script just jumped off the page. I thought it was, importantly, about women our age,” says Hodge. “Yes,” Lulu butts in, “but there’s a line in the film that says age is just a number. Right? And I think that says it all. But we’ve got all personal backstories that are relatable.”
Lulu’s backstory as Susan is that of a bubbly people-pleaser who has somehow never found her one-and-only. Hodge’s, as Joan, is of a long-suffering wife whose one-and-only was not her crazy inventor husband, Arthur. Keaton’s, as Linda, is of divorce from a cheating husband whose one-and-onlies became successively younger over the decades. What distinguishes the film from other ageing-down comedies is that the women return to their younger bodies – played by a trio of young lookalikes – without losing their older minds. So there’s an interestingly creepy reversal of control when they start playing around with younger men.
The three stars’ first task, on being assigned their roles, was to get together and work out what could have brought such different women together. So they went out to dinner. “I said, ‘It has to be a shared sense of humour.’ I think as you get older, you do learn to laugh, you’re able to be silly together,” says Hodge.
“Absolutely,” chips in Lulu. “The great thing about getting older is that we laugh at the things we used to take so seriously, such as, you know, being too thick, not thin enough, not beautiful enough, not tall enough – all the things that we thought were important.”
Though the tone is upbeat, the film has a serious message. “I think when we talk about diversity, we must include older women,” says Hodge. “And now suddenly there’s a wave, which Diane is part of in America, and we’re finally doing it.” Keaton last year made a sequel to 2018’s silver-years comedy Book Club, about female friends of a certain age radicalised by reading Fifty Shades of Grey. Hodge has done her bit by teaming up with Nigel Havers to reinvent Noël Coward’s Private Lives in London as a comedy of septuagenarian divorcees falling back in love.
“This is our time,” adds Lulu, whose 75th birthday was celebrated by LGBT History Month. Both, though, are aware that there is no free ticket back to the easy wins of youth. Hodge recalls a recent conversation with an acting contemporary. “I said, ‘God, you look wonderful.’ And she said, ‘I never leave home in a hurry.’ You have to manage it; it’s hard work.”
But, says Lulu, “The point is that women are living longer. So our age is only a number, because our bodies might be slowing down, but women like us are very active. We have a job that we love, so our role is to say to others, ‘You can do it too – look at us, we’re the same as we always were, just with a lot more experience.’”
Halfway through my surreal day in Whiteley Village, it occurs to me that age is not the only sort of diversity the film is exploring. It is also pushing at barriers between different performance traditions. Hodge is a stalwart of a classical English tradition of stage and screen. Keaton is Hollywood comedy royalty; Lulu is a Eurovision song contest winner who has repeatedly reinvented herself. Then there is Boy George, the 1980s pioneer of gender-fluid musical performance, and Chaney, the 27-year-old winner of a competitive drag race which would have been unthinkable on primetime TV when any of the others were making their names.
It’s a mashup that isn’t without its accidental moments of comedy: “I was really anxious about remembering lines,” confesses Chaney of a heart-to-heart scene between their character, Lucy Rulez, and Keaton’s Linda in a dressing room. “And then Diane walks in. I was so nervous about this Hollywood legend speaking to me, but she said she liked my makeup. I was like, ‘Oh my god, pinch me.’ Then we started doing the scene. She started crying and I literally handed her a tissue and said, ‘Oh, honey, what’s up?’ She said, ‘I’m acting. This is my job.’”
As Boy George, who is now 62, points out, you have to move with the times. He recently wrote a song, How to Be a Chandelier, as a tribute to Liberace, once the personification of the naff excess associated with Sin City. “In my generation Vegas was for old people, but now everyone wants to go there,” he says. He’d like a long-term residency, which would enable him to showcase all his musical interests. But he’d also like to be offered a proper acting role one day, rather than repeatedly being asked to play himself. “I don’t know if I’d get away with it, but I know I could do it – a cockney Shakespeare maybe.”
He’s chuffed to have had a chance to dance with Keaton. “She’s been in my life in the movies for a long time. And everyone would like to get a phone call from Lulu. But we’re all just people. There’s nothing special about anyone,” he says, as he steps back on stage for another take of Karma Chameleon. As the drag queen Lucy Rulez tells Linda in the dressing room: there’s no secret to accepting who you are. “You just have to walk your own path. Sometimes in stilettos.”
Arthur’s Whisky is on Sky Cinema
