Dame Helen Mirren says tomatoes are bisexual, and you should finger them so they grow
Dame Helen Mirren says tomatoes are bisexual. (Photo by Jed Cullen/Dave Benett/Getty Images for evian)
Dame Helen Mirren says tomatoes are bisexual. (Photo by Jed Cullen/Dave Benett/Getty Images for evian)
Dame Helen Mirren has shared that tomatoes are bisexual, and that to help them grow, one should finger them.
No, we don’t know either. But we’ll try our best to explain.
Speaking to Jimmy Fallon alongside Pierce Brosnan to promote the pair’s new Netflix series The Thursday Murder Club, conversation on the 12 August episode of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, turned to salsa making.
After Fallon produced the ingredients for the salsa, Dame Helen Mirren then chose to impart wisdom unlike any heard on earth for generations: the humble tomato fruit is a bisexual baddie.
“Incidentally, I just want to give you a tip about growing tomatoes,” Mirren told Fallon. “You know the little flower [on a tomato plant]? Well, a good way to get a tomato out of a flower, is you have to tremble the flower, like this.”
‘Trembling’ in this case, as demonstrated by Mirren’s subsequent curled finger gesture in the air, means to lightly finger or caress.
“Stop doing that,” Fallon joked of Mirren’s finger movements. “I’m not doing that, at all, to my tomatoes.”
“You’ve got to!” Mirren insisted, before truth bomb number two. “A tomato is a bisexual thing, you see. Well, it is. I looked it up very recently because I had a problem with my tomatoes.
“It’s bisexual. You have to go around to each tomato, to each flower and go like this.”
See? Exactly what it sounded like.
After further research we can confirm that Dame Helen Mirren was right – sort of. Tomatoes contain both male and female reproductive parts, so they’re less bisexual and more intersex, if we had to put a human term on it.
Intersex people are born with a particular set of sex characteristics — such as chromosomes, genitalia, reproductive anatomy and hormones — that don’t fit neatly into typical binary categories of male or female.
An intersex person may have female chromosomes but ambiguous to male-appearing genitals, or male chromosomes but ambiguous to female-appearing genitals.
They could have what’s called “true gonadal intersex”, which means they have both ovarian and testicular organs, or they could have a complex or undetermined form of sexual development that doesn’t fit neatly into any of these categories.
With reference to the growing of the tomatoes being helped with a gentle finger, we haven’t been able to confirm.
Mirren and Brosnan starr in Netflix’s The Thursday Murder Club alongside fellow A-Listers, Ben Kingsley and Celia Imrie.
Based on Richard Osman’s bestselling novel of the same name, the series will hit Netflix 28 August.
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