Susan Orlean on the “almost comical” feeling of being played by Meryl Streep
“Who would play you in the movie of your life?” is the kind of question often landed upon your cerebral lap at dinner parties or dates, and it’s a fun one to answer, most of the time. But imagine a movie based on your day-to-day does actually get made, and playing you is none other than Meryl Streep, one of the finest actors in movie history. That level of talent would mess with your head for sure.
Messing with heads is pretty much what filmmakers Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze specialise in, as anyone who has watched Being John Malkovich, Synedoche, New York or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind will attest to, and the 2002 film Adaptation was no exception to that rule, as the pair told the story of Kaufman’s own real life struggles to adapt a book called The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean, while employing not one but two Nicolas Cages and blending fact and fiction to dizzying effect.
Streep was brought in to play the author Orlean, a move that blew the real-life writer’s mind, who said, “It almost seems like a swear-word, that you would imagine in your own private fantasy who would play you, to say Meryl Streep. What arrogance! It’s almost comical to think about something like that.”
But Streep did indeed play her, and did it to traditionally superlative effect, winning a ‘Best Supporting Actress’ Oscar nomination for the role. That’s not really a surprise, given Streep at that point had picked up 12 nominations during her career, and has now collected 21, making her the most Oscar-nominated actor, male or female, in all of cinema.
Streep herself said: “It’s dense visually, but also in terms of its ideas and its emotions. It looked like a really interesting ride. It wasn’t like anything I’d been asked to do before.”
Orlean added, “You believe (in) her as a writer. It can be really hard for actors to play people in a job in movies. A lot of times, you don’t believe that they would ever do that job in a million years. I thought she was great.”
While Streep actually took a pay cut to play the part, Adaptation picked up another three Oscar nods, winning one for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ and Chris Cooper, who played John Laroche, the subject of Orlean’s original book who was the mastermind behind a scheme she investigated for stealing rare orchids in Florida in the early 1990s.
Jonze and Kaufman had developed the film while they were working on Being John Malkovich, another film that took real-life people and events and twisted them into the surreal. Kaufman was working on trying to do a straight screenplay of The Orchid Thief and got so frustrated by writer’s block that he began to invent circumstances, including having a far more creative twin brother that he named Donald Kaufman (hence there being two Nicolas Cages in the movie).
Considering the niche subject matter and comparatively complex storyline, the movie was a reasonable success, and, at least for one person, was a laugh and a half.
