Tom Hanks Jokes About ‘High Maintenance’ Meryl Streep: ‘You’re Expecting French Horns’
Even when Tom Hanks tries to throw a few jabs at Meryl Streep, he can’t keep up the charade for long.
During an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to promote their movie The Post, Hanks playfully joked about what it’s like to work with his costar.
When the host brought up Streep, the veteran actor rolled his eyes and said, “You mean, can I just say, ‘high maintenance Meryl Streep?’ ” Hanks replied.
Wanting more, Colbert asked, “Oh really? Diva?”
“Look, the shoes alone, man,” Hanks joked, quickly adding, “No, I am so joking.”
Turns out, the Oscar-winning actress doesn’t get any special treatment.
“You know what’s scary about Meryl? She comes in and does it just like everybody else does,” Hanks explained. “You’re expecting French horns before she enters the stage.”
Putting on a voice, he continued, “You expect a guy in livery to come out: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the actress known as Meryl Streep.’ And she comes in and waves to the crew the way the royals used to.”
However, Streep was thrown for a loop by Steven Spielberg’s directing style.
“She was mad at me because I didn’t tell her Steven doesn’t rehearse. He just wants to figure it out as he goes along. He’s almost like a guerrilla filmmaker,” Hanks shared. “He has the set, he has the space and he wants to fill it with something he hasn’t imagined before. I don’t mean to that he’s not prepared — he’s the most prepared man in the world.”
Spielberg takes a look back to the summer of 1971 when President Richard Nixon shattered norms by taking action to silence the media.
Thousands of pages of secret documents about the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, documenting from the end of World War II until 1967, were leaked to The New York Times, which began publishing them in a series that became known as the Pentagon Papers. Nixon responded to the leak by securing a court order that barred the newspaper from publishing after only a handful of stories were printed.
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That’s where Spielberg’s film picks up as The Washington Post, headed by publisher Katherine Graham (Streep) and editor Ben Bradlee (Hanks), must grapple with whether to begin publishing the reports themselves — at the risk of garnering the same swift shut down, or worse, if the Nixon administration decided to make an example of them.
The Post hits theaters Dec. 22.