The “miserable” movie Meryl Streep hated making: “It wasn’t the most joyous experience”
There is perhaps no other name that holds as much weight and magnitude as Meryl Streep, with the actor channelling an unparalleled inner strength and emotional world when embodying her characters. Whether it be the unprecedented impact of the courtroom scene in Kramer vs Kramer, the blunt honesty of her character in Little Women or her role in Manhattan, the actor has forged a revered reputation as one of the true greats, giving everything each part and setting an almost impossible standard for other performers.
As a result, her mind is often forced to go to some fairly dark places to prepare for each character, from Big Little Lies and the extremely repressed nature of Mary-Louise to the strained mental state of Clarissa in The Hours and the impact of generational trauma. However, there was one film that Streep deeply struggled to make as a result of the dark subject matter being explored, sharing her strained experiences and difficulty in surviving the shoot.
Many directors have attempted to create ensemble films, with sprawling casts that portray dysfunctional families and interconnected lives in small towns and cities. Whether it be Pulp Fiction, Magnolia, or Festen, filmmakers are often drawn to the subject of family, and more specifically, families that don’t get along very well. But while it makes for ripe and entertaining subject matter, it isn’t always the easiest dynamic to portray, prodding on difficult memories and uncomfortable feelings.
August: Osage County, directed by John Wells in 2013, looks at the lives of each daughter in the Weston family, who are forced back together in their childhood home over the Christmas holidays, reunited with each other and their dysfunctional mother.
The cast is littered with Hollywood stars, with Streep acting alongside Julia Roberts, Ewan McGregor, Sam Shepard, Julianne Nicholson and Dermot Mulroney. However, as much as it was fun to work with such an eclectic bunch of people, Streep struggled during filming due to the dark relationship that her character had with each person, creating a tense and loaded mood.
When describing this, Streep said, “It wasn’t the most joyous experience, from my point of view it was hard to feel that way about everybody. That was miserable. It [the filming] was also during the election and also television is very odd out there [in Oklahoma]. You can feel very disembodied, in the whole process it’s important to make a connection beyond, outside the set. Also, I was smoking non-stop which really makes you feel shitty”.
It would be understandably jarring to experience this level of resentment and hatred from every person in the room, even if it is just pretend. While Streep was aware that these people were acting, the process of playing a character still requires you to take on a certain amount of their pain, and often your body cannot tell the difference between real and imagined pain.
As a result, the collective demons of the other characters and their complex relationship to her began to also burden her, leading to a memorable and difficult emotionally taxing shoot.
