Shirley MacLaine at 88: ‘I started talking to myself’ during the pandemic

“American Dreamer,” which premiered this week at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival. Based on a segment from the podcast “This American Life,” MacLaine plays a lonely widow who offers a cash-strapped professor (Peter Dinklage) the chance to buy her sprawling estate for mere pennies.

The deal, however, is not as it seems on the surface.The “Steel Magnolias” star told The Post — in a recent interview along with the film’s director Paul Dektor — that she took the role to work with Dinklage, for one.“I liked the script and I thought it was an interesting take on reality — and I wanted to work with Peter Dinklage,” she said. ‘I really practically didn’t see anybody for a year and that was an interesting experience’When asked if she had been a fan of the “Game of Thrones” actor for “a long time,” she tartly responded, “I don’t know, define time.”Amazingly, it’s Dektor’s directorial debut, and the filmmaker admitted that “everyone was, you know, taking a chance on me but I felt like they kind of made it easy for me not to feel intimidated just by the way they approached it.”When asked why she gets offered “feisty older lady” parts, MacLaine wisely answered, “Well, maybe, they’re not that way when they are written,” acknowledging her own “Doesn’t suffer fools gladly” personality.MacLaine revealed that after shooting the movie, she sheltered in place with nary a soul around.“I came to the mountains in New Mexico and I just, I really practically didn’t see anybody for a year [due to the COVID-19 pandemic] and that was an interesting experience,” she said.