The “tedious” movie Meryl Streep vowed never to repeat: “My first, my last, my only”
Meryl Streep has never been afraid to try new things.
The actor has done everything from messy divorce dramas to musical comedies, stepping into the kinds of roles that many stars always dream of, such that it seemingly feels everything comes easily to her, which is what happens when you cement yourself as one of Hollywood’s most impressive actors.
Still, Streep has tried out some things that she has quickly decided against, like working with heavy special effects, something that she never, under no circumstances, wants to do again, and while special effects have their place in Hollywood, it’s understandable that an actor would find it challenging having to tailor their performance to suit effects set to be added in post-production, which is exactly why she hated the experience so much.
You can’t mess with an actor’s creative flow, and Streep found it bizarre having to shoot some rather unnatural scenes for Robert Zemeckis’ Death Becomes Her. It might be a beloved campy cult classic, but it’s not a film that she looks back fondly on.
Zemeckis has always loved to get his hands all over the latest special effects, even, as The Polar Express demonstrated, when they’re rather uncanny and unnerving. For Death Becomes Her, he employed an extensive team of special effects artists to bring his ideas to life, including a scene in which Streep’s character’s neck twists to an unnatural degree.
According to Tom Woodruff Jr, who served as a body effects designer on the film (via The New York Times), “We had created a Meryl puppet and installed motors. So if you picture the silicone head of Meryl Streep, we were able to program all these little servo motors so that her eyes move, her cheeks move, she blinks, and she can grimace. Then we prerecorded the movement of the lips to a CD of her actual dialogue.”
Evidently, this was an experience unlike anything Streep had done before, and she found it too mechanical, too unnatural. She just wanted to act normally without the planning that had to go into each scene. “My first, my last, my only,” she told Entertainment Weekly in reference to working on a movie with such extensive special effects.
“I think it’s tedious. Whatever concentration you can apply to that kind of comedy is just shredded. You stand there like a piece of machinery, they should get machinery to do it,” she added.
While she liked the final film, she just didn’t get enough out of the experience of shooting to make it worthwhile, and you can’t blame her for finding the whole process a challenge, but at least she learned that special effects-laden movies just aren’t for her. And thank God, we don’t need to see Streep in a Marvel movie anytime soon.
“It’s not fun to act to a lampstand. ‘Pretend this is Goldie [Hawn], right here. Uh, no, I’m sorry, Bob, she went off the mark by five centimetres, and now her head won’t match her neck!’ It was like being at the dentist,” she concluded bitterly.
