How Meryl Streep really feels about being one of the greatest actors of all time: “I thought you were calling me a goat”
On the surface, being known as the greatest of all time in your chosen profession sounds like a pretty enviable position to be in. Intriguingly, though, Meryl Streep may beg to differ.
Streep’s status as the greatest to ever fucking do it has been set in stone for decades at this point, and it’s not hard to see why. In a career littered with iconic performances, classic films, and the most Oscar nominations in history (21 and counting), you just can’t deny those numbers.
Amusingly, while Streep has known about her exalted status in the eyes of others for years, she wasn’t familiar with this new lingo until she was promoting Don’t Look Up in 2021. Jonah Hill, one of her young co-stars, kept calling her “the GOAT” during his press engagements, and she couldn’t work out why he was referring to her as a goddamn farmyard animal. Was he making fun of her in some way? Did they have some kind of goat-themed interaction in the movie that she’d forgotten about?
Ultimately, Jennifer Lawrence, another co-star in the movie, was the one who finally explained to Streep that, in modern parlance, GOAT stands for ‘Greatest of All Time’. Hilariously, she somehow wasn’t offended even when she thought Hill was comparing her to livestock. But, when she finally understood he was complimenting her, he claimed she told him, “Hey, thanks for calling me the GOAT. I thought you were calling me a goat this whole time.”
All fun and games aside, Streep has been honest in the past that being dubbed the greatest by everyone she works with is actually not all it’s cracked up to be. If anything, it can actually be a hindrance to doing good work. When she arrives on a set with such a reputation, many of her co-stars can’t help feeling intimidated by her, even if that’s the last thing she’d ever want. “It’s just nauseating and unhelpful in the deepest sense of what acting is,” she groused in 2022. “It makes it harder. It’s like this big thing that you have to deflate.”
In truth, Streep would much rather she could be perceived as just another actor, as opposed to someone who is any better than anyone else. After all, when she makes a movie, she’s not playing ‘Meryl Streep, beloved actor’, she’s playing a character. Therefore, it’s not helpful for her colleagues to work themselves into knots about how they’ll fare opposite the greatest of all time. That can affect their performances, and it’s often totally out of Streep’s control.
Even worse, sometimes she can tell her scene partners are overawed by her as they’re shooting, which leads to them being more like a fan watching her work, as opposed to being in the moment as their character. “Sometimes people watch me while I’m in the scene with them, instead of being with me, which is a really disconcerting thing,” Streep told Vanity Fair in 2013. “It’s not good. I’m just an actor. That’s all.”
At the end of the day, Streep’s reputation will always precede her, and there is little she can do about that. Being put on that kind of pedestal is actually a pain in her neck, though, and she wishes she could reach a point of “critical mass” where her GOAT status could just fade away into oblivion. It’s no wonder she complained, “Increasingly, it’s more of an obstruction to be gotten through.”
