Helen Mirren Laments That Kurt Cobain Died Before GPS Was Invented

I know what you’re thinking — that’s a doozy of a headline. But there it is. Two seemingly unrelated concepts — deceased Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain and satellite technology — put together by Academy Award-winning actor Dame Helen Mirren. And no, context doesn’t really help make it make sense…?

Appearing on Evgeny Lebedev’s Brave New World podcast, Mirren reflected a bit on the aging process, noting that aging in the public eye is “not brilliant.” She said, “I’m 79. I never thought I’d be 79” before reasoning, “And then you say, okay, well, this is it. This is what 79 is, you know. And it’s kind of okay. It’s not brilliant. But it wasn’t that brilliant to be 25 either. So it’s not a question of seeking youth at all. It’s a question of living the life you have as fully and positively and enjoyably and confusingly and everything that it was when you were younger. It’s just called life.”

From there, Mirren said she considered herself “lucky” to have reached 79 and still have her health when so many beloved figures in the talent community died young. “I always say it’s so sad that Kurt Cobain died when he did because he never saw GPS, as it’s the most wonderful thing to watch my little blue spot walking down the street. I just find it completely magical and unbelievable.”

Mirren then pivoted to a bleak prediction surrounding humanity and technology: From this point on, the human world will only know technology unless there’s some unbelievably catastrophic event and only a few people left on the planet.

“And everything, everything has been destroyed from this point on. For the rest of humanity, however long humanity survives, it will be a world of technology. And I’m so grateful that I was of a generation that knew the world before technology. And you know we will die out eventually.”

In all fairness, Brave New World is a podcast about “the realms of longevity, neuroscience, biohacking, and psychedelics.” But it’s hard to imagine Kurt Cobain feeling any type of way about GPS, at the very least because he was a DIY punk guy. Maybe Courtney Love knows what he’d make of all this blue dot stuff.

Listen to the whole interview here.