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SAN DIEGO — There she was, the Academy Award winner Helen Mirren — she was introduced that way — working the crowd in Hall H at Comic-Con here. It really was like the Cannes Film Festival, with bad food. (On the culinary front, the safest bet inside the convention center would appear to be the bananas, but they cost $2.75 each, no kidding). Ms. Mirren, best known for her Oscar-winning turn as Queen Elizabeth II in “The Queen,” was radiant, and said all the things an actress is supposed to say. “This miraculously came along for me,” she said of her role as a bloody assassin in “Red,” Summit Entertainment’s movie based on a graphic novel. Ms. Mirren said it was delightful working with a cast that included Bruce Willis, John Malkovich and Karl Urban. “It was an unknown world to me, an unknown gen-re,” she said, getting the French pronunciation just right.

“I learned how to say the word ‘genre’ today,” said Bruce Willis, who was making his first appearance at the convention. Ms. Mirren allowed that working on the movie was easier than she had expected. Making long speeches, she said, is more difficult than learning how to shoot a gun.