Meryl Streep: Tom Hanks is very sexy

Meryl Steep

Twenty-one Oscar nominations, three statuettes to her name and countless phenomenal movies, how can one describe the genius that is Meryl Streep? This year, she has been nominated for Best Actress for her role in The Post, which is about a time when the Washington Post decided to continue publishing the Pentagon Papers (which the New York Times had printed before Nixon shut it down). She speaks to us about the groundbreaking moment the movie is based on, the relevance of the movie today and why she thinks it's very sexy to work with Tom Hanks.

Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep in The Post

Why is The Post so important?
It was the first time that the government tried to pre-emptively stop the press before they wrote a story. At the centre of it was a woman running a newspaper, which was very, very unusual in those days. The Post's publisher Katharine Graham fell in the line of decision makers, at a time when there weren't very many women in any positions of power anywhere. There were few women in business, few women in law, or the Supreme Court. This was a moment where they could have lost everything, and Graham had to decide if she was willing to jeopardise her family's legacy, the paper, and thousands of jobs, if they would shut down.

As you studied Katharine Graham, what did you learn?
Well, she was delivered into her position by virtue of the fact that she was an heiress and her father bought the paper in the 30s. He looked around for a successor and gave it to her husband, and she felt that it was appropriate because that's the way the world was then. It's very hard for people now to imagine how different the world was back then, so when her husband committed suicide, the mantle of the post was put on her shoulders, and she did not feel up to that job, even though she was arguably one of the most brilliant women of that time. She was raised to be a mother and a society matron. I was just graduating out of college and I remember the limited number of opportunities for my graduating class, yet, it was exactly at that moment of time, everything was starting to open up. It was a seismically important time. I feel like this movie is meeting its moment. We're at a similarly ground-shaking moment in time.

Some of the lines that we hear Nixon say are exactly the ones we hear today from the President of the United States, when it comes to the press.
Nixon was excoriating Neil Sheehan who was a New York Times investigative reporter, who found the Pentagon papers and Nixon went after him specifically. We see this repeated today where the press is in jeopardy. When the state goes after the press, it's a very dangerous situation in a democracy because it gives it license for this to happen all over the world.

Surprisingly, this was your first movie with Tom Hanks who plays the role of Katharine's Graham's managing editor (Ben Bradlee)...
Tom has the reputation of being the nicest guy in Hollywood and he is very nice, but he is also really smart, like Cracker Jack smart, and I think that's probably a thing that he shared with Ben Bradlee. It's such an attractive quality of how he is just a few steps ahead of everybody in the room. He also has this crackling wit and a demanding personality that wants more and more from everybody. It's very sexy and I think people will be surprised that he
is that.

This movie may have started off as a Trump era movie but it has become a Weinstein era movie in terms of a woman finding her voice? The movement (TimesUp and MeToo) feels seismic but as a part of the industry, do you feel optimistic that it might lead to a structural change?
I see it leading straight to a backlash and then a reckoning, and maybe out of that, will come something really good. I don't think we move in an easy progress trajectory towards an enlightened future. I think we go two steps forward and one back. We're going to hit a wall on this one soon. But I really do think that young people read the events of the recent days differently than older people and that's the hope. You can feel that they are very optimistic about the changes that will come. I think change will come, but I don't think it will be easy.

Watch if Meryl Streep takes home the golden statuette this year on Star Movies and Star Movies Select HD on March 5 at 5:30 am

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