“I forgot what I was about”: the movie that reminded Meryl Streep how to be an actor
There are four things that are a certainty in life: death, taxes, and Meryl Streep turning in a good performance.
For as long as she has been in the public eye, the reigning queen of Hollywood has been the gold standard when it comes to well-rounded acting. She can bring you to the brink of tears, have you rolling in the aisles, or even play a weirdly sympathetic version of Margaret Thatcher, which I’m not sure why you’d do that, but sure.
One of her most interesting recent gigs came in Adam McKay’s Oscar-nominated allegory Don’t Look Up, set in a world where a giant world-ending asteroid is hurtling towards Earth, where Streep plays Janie Orlean, the president of the United States, who is reluctant to do anything about the impending danger.
The astral body serves as an analogy for climate change, a clear and obvious threat to the world that the political elite refuse to engage with, and it saw Streep drawing from a number of real-life figures to play the character, who has more than a little Donald Trump about them.
Considering it’s a film about governments refusing to take things seriously, it’s quite ironic that the shooting for Don’t Look Up began in November 2020, when most of the world was still grappling with various stages of the Covid-19 lockdown, and Streep was one of those affected by the enforced isolation.
As she explained to Entertainment Weekly, returning to work was a strange experience, noting, “When I would come in to shoot my stuff, [I’d] get out of the car and hadn’t spoken to anybody in three weeks. [I’d] walk into the stadium in Worcester, put on the wig and the nails and the suit, and make a speech to all these people. I just lost it. I forgot how to act, I forgot what I was about. It sort of dismantles your humanity to be isolated like that. But thank god for Jonah [Hill], because he kept us laughing.”
Hill plays Jason Orlean, the White House chief of staff who just so happens to be the president’s incompetent son, serving as a yesman to his mother, reinforcing the idea that the asteroid isn’t a big deal. He had a great time working alongside Streep, whom he referred to as ‘The Goat’, but unfortunately, this led to a bit of a mishap where Streep thought he was calling her an actual goat.
Of course, Meryl Streep on a bad day is still Meryl Streep, giving an excellent performance as the deluded commander-in-chief. It’s a little bit of a caricature, but the entire movie is meant to be an over-the-top satire of modern politics, so it works, making it surprising when she was left out of most of the major award ceremonies, only picking up a group SAG award nomination for ‘Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture’.
The lockdown was hard on all of us, but it’s actually quite reassuring to know that even the great Meryl Streep was affected by it; turns out she is human after all.
