R. Kurt Osenlund, January 2014

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

  Meryl Streep is choking on her words. She’s trying to articulate the difficulties of playing a character as dark as Violet Weston, the pill-popping, venom-spewing matriarch in August: Osage County. But suddenly, all she can muster is a lot of gagging and tongue-wagging.                         

    “Bleehhh...eehhh...uhh...god, I hate this sometimes,” Streep says. It’s not the interview process Streep hates, necessarily, but the perils of summing up how someone like her, an actor whose style is calculated, yet virtually peerless in terms of incorporating inexplicable human nuance, can actually, ya know, do what she does. In the case of Violet, who is quite easily one of the most troubled and despicable women she’s portrayed, Streep seems not only tongue-tied, but hesitant in even recounting the grim demands of playing a character who is at once drug-addled, world-weary, grieving her husband’s death, and, oh yeah, dying of mouth cancer.

    “It wasn’t the most joyous experience, from my point of view,” Streep says. “I think as an actor you’re supposed to want to go into the ‘house of pain.’ But really, it’s not something that’s fun. And I resisted doing this part, initially, because of that. I just thought, uggghhh. Because on so many levels—physically, mentally, spiritually, emotionally—Violet is enraged and/or in pain.”

    Streep is chatting away—or trying to, at least—inside New York’s historic Essex House, her eye occasionally caught by a window overlooking Central Park. Watching her, specifically as she talks about a character’s pain, one can’t help but recall a slideshow of emotional firestorms this icon has brought to the screen: The horror of losing a baby in the wilderness in A Cry in the Dark; the anguish of losing a fleeting affair in The Bridges of Madison County; the shame of quotidian ennui in The Hours; and, of course, the grave devastation of the titular moment in Sophie’s Choice, an acting landmark that’s likely seared in the memory of anyone who’s seen it.

    Adapted by the great Tracy Letts from his own Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning play, August: Osage County begins with a vile moment between spouses. With burned-down cigarette in hand, and unknown doses of everything from Xanax to Percocet in her system, Violet stumbles into the study of husband Beverly (Sam Shepard), who’s candidly sharing his household dysfunction with Johnna (Misty Upham), the Native American maid he’s just hired to look after his Oklahoma home. It’s mere weeks before Beverly’s suicide, and despite the peace at which he seems to have arrived with his life and fate, he can’t quite bring himself to look at Violet, who can barely eke out slurred insults, and, without her wig, looks inches from death.

    “For me, that was one of the most upsetting scenes,” Streep says, “and it was one we shot very early on. Sam Shepard is a person I really have always admired as an actor. And to look at him, close up, and see his loathing of me—that was really hard. Because you get old, and know how you look. You look old, you feel old. And yet you still think that maybe there’s a spark of love in this person who’s gone through everything. And to look in his eyes and realize he would rather be dead than look at me. Ooooh. That was brutal. That sort of set the tone for where my dealing with his death, and everything afterward, was going.”

    Writing about film, it can get tricky distinguishing actor from character when describing certain moments, and making it clear that, say, the “she” in question is the woman conceived on the page, not the actress realizing her on screen. To hear a performer get caught up in this trickiness is terribly fascinating. Streep constantly references Violet as if talking about herself, actively, if not intentionally, blurring the line between player and persona. This is, unmistakably, part of the job, and countless artists of any medium will tell you that there’s inevitably quite a lot of them in their work. But for an actor mimicking life, sometimes at its ugliest, this can surely play with the mind, and it’s fairly clear that Streep hasn’t fully shaken Violet off.

    “One of the things that really interested me was where Violet was at any given point in the cycle of pain and pain relief—where she was on her painkiller cycle in any given scene,” Streep says. “And we sort of had to map that in a way just so I could know what level of attention or inattention I could bring to my fellow actors. And it was hard to feel that way about everybody. It was miserable. And it was also during the [last presidential] election, and...uh...the television is very...odd out there in Oklahoma. You can feel very disembodied in that world. So it was very important to make a connection outside of the set. Also I was smoking nonstop, which really makes you feel shitty.”

    To make herself feel less shitty, and to help unite a cast comprised of an embarrassing richness of talent (Julia Roberts, Juliette Lewis and Julianne Nicholson play Violet’s three daughters, while Chris Cooper, Margo Martindale, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Ewan McGregor play other family members), Streep conceived the idea to build an on-location “compound” behind a Toyota dealership, where the actors would live together and forge real bonds that would hopefully translate into the film. They ate together, watched TV together, argued with each other, and eventually took home leftovers of Martindale’s famous chicken-spaghetti casserole. Even director John Wells stayed with his cast, drawing attention to a notable absence. “[Producer] George Clooney opted out of our accommodations,” Streep quips, in a moment that could make you spit out your drink. “He’s so important.”

    Humor, of course, is what parts the gray clouds in August: Osage County, an epic among family dramedies, inspired by Letts’s own tell-it-like-it-is clan. The bursts of lightness, and the unity created among the cast, are what carried Streep through the bouts of performance agony, the lugging around of an aura so thick with despair. The actress, 64, says she relished such things as re-teaming with her Adaptation co-star Chris Cooper, who offers an awkward dinner blessing as Violet’s brother-in-law, and trusting in the supervision of Wells, who corralled the motley crew together.

    “You don’t get to vote on how you put your family together,” Streep says. “But John Wells was like God. He put us all together, and thought, ‘Oh this’ll get messy.’ [Laughs] And Chris’s character, I felt, was someone Chris would imbue with his enormous humanity, and compassion. And I knew the audience would love him. And I knew that they would hate me in equal measure. That is the story. That is the balance. One of the most excruciatingly funny pieces in this is the prayer, which is honestly, beautifully, earnestly given—to the best of this guy’s ability. And the way it unfolds reminded me of church, when I used to go to church. There was no laughter like the laughter you could get if you got the whole pew going. [Giggles, shakes, and shrugs].”

    Those who follow Streep’s career, which is to say, most filmgoers, have likely picked up on the amount of authority she seems to wield on set. Though none should doubt her sentiments about Wells, Streep doesn’t work with truly visionary auteurs, probably because she doesn’t want to serve under a director with absolute power. This is a woman who, despite a clear bounty of wisdom and grace, is aware of the position she holds, and the prominence she wants to maintain in her projects. And yet, August: Osage County sees her in more collaborative, greater ensemble territory than she’s explored in years, and the high she gets from working with fellow performers is palpable. Her head may be big given the reverence she’s earned, but her heart is certainly in the craft, a respect for which creates a generosity among co-stars.

    “The thing about this piece is, we were all absolutely integral to this thing working or not,” Streep says. “The balance of all these characters is such that you’re aware, as you’re watching the play, that if you turn your eyes from one to look at another, each person is affected. What you give you get, and what you get you give. And it only works if you’re all together. And we were so together on this adaptation. Every single one of these actors came to the first reading with a copy of the original play in their back pockets, and with their laughs. The humor is about pain, but you do need your laughs, too. And you need to laugh at yourself. It’s like when you come together with your friends, after Thanksgiving, and you’re like, ‘God, I have to tell you what my mother said. God, oh my God!’ And then you tell a story that was not funny when you were there, but in the telling, it’s fabulous. And that’s how you transform your life.”

R. Kurt Osenlund is the managing editor of The House Next Door, the official blog of Slant Magazine. He is also the film critic for South Philly Review, and a contributing writer for ICON, Slant, Details, Filmmaker Magazine and IndieWire. Follow him on Twitter @AddisonDeTwitt. Email: rkurtosenlund@gmail.com.

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