What can the most awarded actress in the world and Princess of the Arts 2023 winner expect from a large group of young Asturians? At the very least, a change of script. In the most literal sense. She was to appear in Oviedo before several hundred ESO, Baccalaureate and Vocational Training students, and, just after performing her first bagpipe dance, the first thing she had to hear Meryl Streep It was a series of suggestions that could very well have been recriminations. Why Francesca, the protagonist of ‘The bridges of Madison’, do you have to choose between your husband and your photographer lover? Wouldn’t it be much better for her, for the film and even for the condition of women if she went beyond both (even olympic)? ¡sips! “Without a doubt,” the aforementioned defends, “that would be a brilliantly feminist solution.”
In reality, it’s all part of a game that also wanted to be something more. ‘Meryl’s decisions’ is the title of the activity carried out for months by students from different centers in Asturias and which on Wednesday brought together the students (along with their teachers) from upstairs in the impressive hangar of the La Vega Weapons Factory to review, study and, if necessary, alter the actress’s career. And do it with her in front of her. The idea is to reinterpret what has been interpreted and rethink what has already been thought about and maybe, just maybe, forgotten. Thus things, in a delirious exercise of ‘crossover‘One of the students had the idea of imagining the protagonists of ‘Oh mama’ opening her own fashion magazine in the image and likeness of the one run by Miranda in ‘The Devil Wears Prada’. “I don’t think it’s bad that someone would consider unseating Conde Nast and all those magazines that decide how women should be presented to the world,” Streep replied.
And he was not spared from reinterpretation.Memories of Africa‘. Why so much torment, so much suffering, so much going from one place to another? Wouldn’t it have been simpler for Karen to abandon her life of luxury and accept to live humbly in the middle of the savanna? “Maybe yes, it certainly would have been a wonderful movie too, but much shorter.” And so.
And once the counterfactual exercise was completed, the questions arrived: the usual ones and the others, the never ones. And from one and the other it was clear that Meryl Streep did not decide to be an actress, but that she always knew it. “At three years old I realized. My parents always supported me. In truth, they were more concerned that my brother wanted to be a dancer than that I was an actress. At the end of the day, what parents want is for their children to earn a good living,” he said and then recalled his first studies in comparative religion, philosophy, history, music… “Actually, I was going to study Law , but I fell asleep on the day of the entrance exam. My idea was to dedicate myself to environmental law… And I ended up at drama school after university when I was 23 years old.”
When asked if she ever hated the profession she claims to love so much, Streep recalled the moment when ‘Death suits you good‘ in which she saw herself stuffed into a green suit waiting for the digital effects that would come later. “Technology greatly reduces the scope of interpretation. What I like is the emotion of being able to lose yourself within the character.” And she said what she remembered when in one of her first jobs she saw herself next to two giants like Jane Fonda y Vanessa Redgrave. The memory remained there, in the middle, without further ado, like the profound and barely noted reconstruction of an instant. Only. “Interpreting for me is an addiction”he concluded.