Earlier than filming Large Little Lies, Meryl Streep realized a stunning truth about costar Nicole Kidman.
“Reese [Witherspoon] informed me the very first evening we had been up in Monterey, earlier than we began capturing, she mentioned, ‘You realize what she does?’” Streep, 74, recalled on the American Movie Institute Life Achievement Award Gala on Saturday, April 27. “I mentioned, ‘No, Nicole?’ She goes, ‘Yeah, you already know what she does? She goes out at 5, earlier than daybreak, and he or she goes skinny-dipping behind the lodge within the ocean.’ I checked out Nicole and I mentioned, ‘Are you kidding me? The Pacific is like 48 levels in March.’ Nicole mentioned, ‘Yeah! I adore it!’”
Streep, who introduced Kidman, 56, with the respect on the Los Angeles occasion, gushed that her pal is “a wild mongrel expertise.”
“You’re like a mustang, a workhorse, and a champion racer multi function, however one whose spirit, they’ll by no means break. By no means. The vary of your work is gorgeous. Your checklist of credit and roles and good deeds on this planet would take a traditional individual three lifetimes to attain,” Streep mentioned. “Your life and your resume challenges all the things we learn about what number of hours there are within the day and what number of locations a lady might be at one time. It’s exhausting to not envy Nicole, nevertheless it’s additionally inconceivable to not be in awe of her.”
Streep praised Kidman’s performing ability set after witnessing it throughout season 2 of Large Little Lies, which aired in 2019. “When an actress bares all and leaps off into the unknown, she dives deep into the darker components of what it’s to be a human being,” Streep mentioned. “However I don’t suppose it’s bravery. I believe it’s love. I believe she simply loves it. And I believe that’s the best attribute an actor can have — that mix of urge for food and curiosity and recklessness. You could have that, child.”
Streep joined the star-studded crew of Kidman, Witherspoon, 48, Shailene Woodley, Zoë Kravitz and Laura Dern after season 1 of the hit HBO sequence. Streep performed Mary Louise White, the mother-in-law of Kidman’s Celeste and grieving father or mother of Perry (Alexander Skarsgård), who was murdered within the first season.
After accepting the function, Streep admitted that she didn’t even learn the script. “[My agent] mentioned, ‘There’s a component that they wrote with you in thoughts as a result of they referred to as her Mary Louise.’ … I mentioned, ‘Yeah, I’ll do it,’” she defined throughout a New York Metropolis panel dialogue in 2019. “He mentioned, ‘Don’t you wish to learn it?’ I mentioned, ‘No.’ It was the best factor on TV. It actually was, that first season.”
