The effortlessly formidable Helen Mirren

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Dame Helen Mirren wants you to know that she got her tattoo – two small, interlocking triangles, at the base of her left thumb – decades before they were fashionable. "I don't know if it's a badge of honour, but I had it done when only Hell's Angels and criminals had tattoos," she says, chuckling. "Long before it was bourgeois. I'm shocked and horrified that it's become mainstream. It's so unfair."

We met back in September, when Mirren's new drone-warfare drama, Eye in the Sky, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival (it opens in Canada next Friday). She was wearing a sleek, long-sleeved black dress, moderate heels and a bright red lip. Her hair was silver, short and chic. A honking diamond sat on her left ring finger like an egg in a nest.

She acquired the tattoo in her late 20s – "when I was old enough to know better," she says, "on an Indian reservation in Minnesota. Half a bottle of brandy is the thing that probably prompted it." It signifies "equal and opposite. It's my little 'love thy neighbour' thing, to recognize that things that are different from you have equal value."

Mirren, 70, is so effortlessly formidable, it would be understandable if she regarded the rest of humankind from on high, as the drones do in her film. Yet she doesn't seem to. There's something earthy about her, something game – she's the diamond, and the tattoo.

As if to confirm this, she mentions that she painted her fingernails their fashionable brown-black colour because they were ingrained with soil from the property in southern Italy that she and her husband, the director Taylor Hackford, own. "I can't tell you how I scrubbed them, and they still looked grubby," she trills. They've planted 400 pomegranate trees, and plan to produce their own juice. Mirren announces with pride that she's been designated an official Italian contadina.

The couple spends as much time as they can in Italy – "very far from all this," Mirren says, gesturing toward the bustling hallway – and try to blend into their community. "But of course we never will," she acknowledges briskly. "They call me 'l'attrice' [the actress], and sometimes 'the Oscar winner.' She rattles off a sentence in Italian, and then translates: "'I saw the actress in the supermarket. Incredible.'" She laughs again.

That Oscar came in 2007, for playing Elizabeth II in The Queen. Mirren also has a handful of Emmys – including one for playing Elizabeth I in the miniseries of the same name – and a Tony, again for playing the Queen, in The Audience.

As Colonel Katherine Powell in Eye in the Sky, Mirren essays a different kind of icy command. From a London bunker, she oversees an operation in Nairobi to capture a British woman who's conspiring with the Islamist extremist group Al Shabaab. But when her drone camera reveals suicide bombers gearing up to attack a shopping mall, Powell wants to change the order from "capture" to "kill." As the film unfolds in real time, and the action bounces around the world – from a child in the line of fire in Nairobi, to drone pilots in Nevada, to an American politician in Beijing – we watch the buck passed up the chain of responsibility, and are pulled viscerally into the ensuing moral debates.

The whole thing is as taut as a tripwire, and much of that is attributable to Powell's (and Mirren's) unwavering commitment. She knows what needs to be done. She's clear about the consequences. But can she convince everyone else in time?

Mirren nearly had signed on to a different film, with a much bigger paycheque, when the Eye script arrived. "From the moment I read it, I said to my agent, 'I don't care, this is the movie I want to do,'" she says. "It's a great movie about war, because it shows you the split-second decisions one has to make, that are so morally ambiguous, so difficult."

For research, she met with military personnel, and came away fascinated with how "the military mind" is evinced even in the way they wear their uniforms. "The way your sleeves are rolled, whether your combat trousers are tucked into your boots or not – these things become huge, because they convey precision, discipline, intention," she says. "'Rebel' is not what you want in that world."

Mirren herself wouldn't last a day in such an environment, she admits. "The dehumanizing words they have to use, like 'assets,'" she says. "And they live in a physically ugly world, concrete and neon, brutal and hard, with no vanity. I'd say, 'No, I'm not going back there tomorrow, that's horrible.' Physical environment to me is terribly important."

As is costume – surveying the wardrobe rack of tweed and wool that she had to wear in The Queen, Mirren cried. Then she girded herself in it, because what she believes in most is work.

Her upbringing in Essex was itself a mixture of diamond and tattoo: Her Russian father played the viola in the London Philharmonic, then drove a taxi and became a civil servant. Her mother was a working-class Londoner, the 13th of 14 children; their father was a butcher. But Mirren was such a sensation at the National Youth Theatre that at 21, she landed a place in the Royal Shakespeare Company. She hasn't stopped working since.

"There are three engines that drive me," Mirren says. "One is constantly self-critical: 'No, you've got to be better than that. Let's hope you get another role, so you can use this, and do it better.' And then ego, the desire to be successful. And financial, of course.

"My family was working class," she continues. "There was no money to get you through. The minute I left college I was completely on my own financially. So that sense of earning my own living and paying my own bills has always been very important to me. I take great pride in it. Everything I have is because I earned it."

She's proud of her work, too, but more in its aggregate than in individual performances. "When I look back at my whole career, my work over all the theatre, television, and movies, I'm kind of surprised when I see everything that I've done," Mirren admits. She lifts her chin. Her voice is clear. "I've done at least two jobs every year, for every year of my working life. And sometimes three or four. I look at the diversity of the whole story, and yes, I do take pride in that. Yes." That's a badge of honour, and she knows it.