Pierre Coffin on Female Minions, Immortality and Future

Imagine creatures that never age, never leave, never change—except in wardrobe and haircut. That's the simplest way to think about the Minions, according to Pierre Coffin, who has once again lent his voice to the yellow troublemakers and steered the ship behind Minions & Monsters.

The new film is the third Minions prequel and the seventh installment in the wider Despicable Me universe. Alongside Coffin's signature gibberish, the movie features a stacked voice cast: Alison Janney, Christoph Waltz, Jeff Bridges, Jesse Eisenberg, Zoë Kravitz, Bobby Moynihan, Phil LaMarr and Trey Parker. As the latest installment sparks fresh curiosity about the Minions' backstory, longtime fans have asked the same handful of strange, irresistible questions: Do Minions die? Are there female Minions? How do they reproduce?

Coffin answered those questions in a recent interview with The Guardian. His take is refreshingly simple. Minions, he said, are essentially immortal. They do not age in the human sense. They exist across eras without showing signs of growing older. That explains why Minions pop up in wildly different historical settings and still look like, well, Minions.

Pierre Coffin says Minions are effectively immortal.

As for female Minions, the studio might be open to the idea someday, Coffin suggested—but he himself is ambivalent. He worries that introducing women into the yellow ranks could feel more symbolic than substantive, a gesture aimed at pleasing audiences rather than serving a clear creative purpose. In other words: it could be a box-ticking move disguised as storytelling.

Still, he didn't close the door entirely. If the franchise endures and the right story emerges, female Minions could appear—especially if someone finds a meaningful way to introduce them. Coffin admitted he once toyed with a specific concept: an island inhabited entirely by female Minions. It sounded fun on paper, but the idea never moved past the sketch phase.

One of the quirkiest answers came when Coffin was asked how Minions reproduce. His reply was brief and wonderfully on-brand: they don't. There's no elaborate mythology to explain their numbers. No biological manual. They simply are. For a world built on slapstick and absurd logic, that answer fits perfectly.

Minions & Monsters is in theaters now, and with it comes more of the franchise's peculiar charm: big laughs, stranger-than-fiction glimpses of history and a steady stream of fan theories. Whether the series ever introduces female Minions or decides to rewrite its rules remains up to future filmmakers and the appetite of audiences. Until then, the yellow army marches on—ageless, inexplicable, and impossible to ignore.