The one director Meryl Streep wants nothing to do with has her on their wish-list: “I will never”
Obviously, any director worth their salt would love to work with Meryl Streep, because she’s Meryl Streep, one of the greatest actors of all time.
The 21-time Academy Award nominee and three-time winner has reached almost deified status, and while it rubs some of her peers the wrong way that she’s been placed on a separate pedestal to everyone else, it’s not as if Streep has a say in the way she’s perceived within the industry.
One of the many benefits that come with being a living legend, a decorated icon, and a top-tier thespian is that you can work with whoever you want on whatever you want, because if Meryl Streep decides that she wants to do something, then who’s going to stand in her way and tell her that she can’t?
That said, she has been slowing down her workload recently. 2026’s The Devil Wears Prada will be her first live-action appearance on the big screen in five years, and even that comes with an asterisk attached when Netflix’s turgid, star-studded caper, Don’t Look Up, barely got a theatrical release to speak of.
Ironically, the director she wants nothing to do with is slowing down, too, but that’s by design, rather than necessity. They’ve only got one chance left to recruit Streep, add her to their ensemble, and fulfil a long-held dream, but based on how the star feels about certain styles of cinema, it won’t be happening.
“I will never enter into that Tarantino world, ever,” she declared. “I’m just never going to laugh when someone has their brains splattered along the front of the windscreen.” Streep is missing out, to be fair, because that exact scene in Pulp Fiction is hilarious, in a bleak kind of way.
When Quentin Tarantino singled out Johnny Depp and Tom Hanks as two actors he was desperate to work with, he also name-dropped Streep and Michael Caine as another pair of names on his wish list, but that was back in 2012, long before he made it clear that he wouldn’t be helming any more than ten features.
He might get one or two of them for whatever his swansong ends up being, but from the sound of things, it won’t be Streep. Caine is retired, too, so that leaves Depp and Hanks as the only bucket list candidates the two-time Oscar-winning screenwriter stands a realistic chance at securing for his final filmic fling.
The thought of Streep wrapping her laughing gear around Tarantino’s signature dialogue is nothing if not a mouth-watering prospect, but when she’s so dead against the depictions of violence that have been a hallmark of his work since Reservoir Dogs, it looks set to remain wishful thinking.
Never Miss A Take
The Far Out Quentin Tarantino Newsletter
All the latest Quentin Tarantino content from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.