Meryl Streep’s “knock-down, drag-out fights” over the scene she never wanted to shoot
We may not have seen too much of Meryl Streep on the big screen for a while, given her last movie was in 2021, and even then on Netflix, but we have heard her, although only those in the know or who pay very close attention to her career will be aware of it.
That’s because this year alone she has provided cameo voices in two of the major hits of the year so far: the global phenomenon that is Ryan Gosling’s Project Hail Mary (as a version of his rejected rock-spider sidekick) and Disney Pixar’s Hoppers, in which she had a small role as an Insect Queen. But this is Streep we are talking about, possibly the world’s best living actor, and so of course she has her own cinema-packer on the way in which she plays the joint lead.
That would be the long-awaited (20 years in fact) The Devil Wears Prada 2, a follow-up to the 2006 comedy in which Streep and Anne Hathaway excelled, with the former picking up her almost customary Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actress’.
It was a monster hit, earning $325million on a budget of just $40m, and it showed that even 30 years into her career and 26 years after her first Oscar win, Streep had lost none of her power to thrill audiences.
Two years later, she went in a very different direction to Manhattan skyrises and high heels as she starred opposite Philip Seymour Hoffman in a drama about abuse in the Catholic church that even for someone of Streep’s experience proved to be a tough ask. Written and directed by John Patrick Shanley, who had won an Oscar for Cher’s Moonstruck in the late 1980s, it was the story of a Catholic school head who begins to question a priest’s relationship with a young Black student.
Originally a play written by Shanley for Broadway, the film differs from that production, with the inclusion of several scenes that are designed to influence the viewer’s position on the guilt or innocence of Seymour Hoffman’s priest. Streep had genuine issues with one such scene in the movie, where Hoffman is seen planting evidence, to the point where she said she had “knock-down, drag-out fights” with one of the film’s producers to try to get it cut.
She told The Telegraph about the moment, recalling, “To me, it destroys part of Sister Aloysius’s doubt about what she has done. And that was hard for me… I wasn’t angry. I was speechless, because I really don’t think that doubt in increments should be removed from this at all. Doubt is our friend. And once you tip the scales in one direction or another, it’s very, very dangerous.”
Streep stayed on board, however, and once more it led to her collecting an Academy Award nomination, the film earning five of them in total, including one each for Amy Adams and Viola Davis.
Shanely got a nod for ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’, and he gave his thoughts about Streep’s threats about the controversial scene, saying, “’I think what happened with Meryl is that the better she thought the film was, the more anxious she became, because then she had something to lose. Even when she was worried about this or that aspect of the cut, it was because, ‘My God, this could really be something and don’t fuck it up’.”
