The three movies Meryl Streep regretted making: “I’ve made a terrible mistake”
While the majority of Meryl Streep’s most acclaimed roles are in hard-hitting dramas or moving tales of romance and heartbreak, her propensity for comedy is equally as impressive. Thus, it’s hard not to admire her performance as Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada, which saw the actor effortlessly blend humour with hardness and solemnity.
The film emerged at a time when movies geared towards young women were incredibly popular. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, the fashion industry experienced significant growth, and paired with the rise of postfeminist media that positioned a new kind of woman—one who loved to shop, had a cool job in journalism or fashion in a big city, and would rather get drinks with her friends than live a traditional domestic life—a wave of fashion-forward media soon emerged to great success.
Her role as the demanding and tyrannical Miranda rather unsurprisingly earned Streep an Oscar nomination for her performance. It was different from the actor’s previous comedy movies, though, such as Postcards from the Edge or Death Becomes Her, with her character’s reluctance to enjoy the fun – always taking work too seriously and appearing icy and standoffish – creating a humorous reaction in the viewer. She’s not cracking jokes, but Streep’s delivery of serious yet inherently funny lines like “Florals for spring? Groundbreaking” are perfectly executed for easy comedic effect.
It’s no wonder that Streep found the role challenging because while the rest of the cast was having fun, the actor had to remain as cold as possible. It was almost a form of method acting to distance herself from the rest of the cast to maintain her character’s sense of unconquerable power and intimidation.
“I didn’t try to stay in character, but I’m naturally in a bad mood, so it was not that difficult,” she explained. “I couldn’t enjoy myself on the set in the way that I’m accustomed to, and fooling around with everybody, because it just didn’t serve the dynamic in the movie… if I kinda broke out of it and palled around with everybody. So, I kinda stayed to myself and sulked.”
This being Streep, she still managed to turn her misery into widespread acclaim, and it wasn’t the first time she’d found herself becoming increasingly dejected during production. In fact, in one of her first movies, Jane Fonda’s 1977 drama Julia, the permanent Oscar botherer was ready to give up acting for good.
“I had a bad wig, and they took the words from the scene I shot with Jane and put them in my mouth in a different scene. I thought, ‘I’ve made a terrible mistake, no more movies. I hate this business.’” Obviously, she persevered and became one of the best ever, but a decade and a half later, she was miserable once again, this time working with heavy levels of CGI for the first time in Robert Zemeckis’ Death Becomes Her.
It was her introduction to the world of cutting-edge visual effects, and it wasn’t an experience she was seeking to replicate. “My first, my last, my only,” she told Entertainment Weekly. “You stand there like a piece of machinery; they should get machinery to do it. I loved how it turned out, but it’s not fun to act to a lampstand. It was like being at the dentist.”
Actors regularly suffer for their art, but considering her career has spanned almost half a century and earned her three Oscars from a record-breaking amount of nominations, three despairing productions isn’t a bad return at all.
