On January 30, Dame Helen Mirren was finally able to complete her trophy cabinet full of Oscars, Emmys, and BAFTAs with Hasty Pudding’s Woman of the Year award. However, instead of playing a queen to win her award, she was surrounded by them as she competed to earn her Pudding Pot in the annual Woman of the Year Roast. The always-elegant Mirren showed a new side as she twerked her way to victory before sitting down to watch a few numbers from the Hasty Pudding’s upcoming show, “Victorian Secrets,” which opens February 7. The Harvard Crimson had a chance to interview Mirren the morning after the festivities to get her take on the most unconventional awards ceremony of her career.

The Harvard Crimson: How did you react when you were first told you were Hasty Pudding's Woman of the Year?

Helen L. Mirren: I was incredibly thrilled and honored…. I was looking at the list of people—of recipients—and there’s actually not a lot of British women on the list, and so on that level in particular, I was very, very honored to be recognized. I’ve always felt that the Americans were incredibly generous, you know, and it was just a lot of manifestation of that as far as I was concerned.

THC: Hasty Pudding's awards ceremony strays quite a bit from the conventional—did you know what to expect coming into the event?

HM: Not really, no. They kept giving me these schedules of what would happen, and I could never quite make heads or tails of it.

THC: What was the highlight of the ceremony for you?

HM: Certainly the highlight was the parade…. I felt like a beauty queen on the back of a car like that.