Meryl Streep's Character's Origin Story in ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING is the Same As Her Own in Real Life
Spoiler Alert for the first two episodes of Season 3.
Three-time Academy Award-winning actress Meryl Streep (Kramer vs. Kramer, The Post, The Devil Wears Prada) has joined the third season of Hulu’s Emmy-winning blast of a series Only Murders In the Building. She joins the show’s stars Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez, as well as a slew of other returning and guest stars, including newcomer this season Paul Rudd, and her character has had an intriguing start.
In this past week’s first two episodes, we have been introduced to Streep’s character, Loretta Durkin, a lovely and warm actress who has been passed up by Broadway and the like for decades, until finally getting her big break in Oliver Putnam’s (Short) new Broadway play. We got to see how she fell in love with the theater as a child, and the audience began to fall in love with her, but it may all be soured if/when we find out that she murdered her co-star. While we wait, we have a fun behind-the-scenes story about Streep getting hired for the role, and her uncanny tie to her character.
The show’s creator, John Hoffman, wrote the backstory for Loretta, which unfolds in the first episode, and when he met with Streep to talk about the role, she recounted it back to him as her own story, without ever having read the script! Hoffman explained to The Playlist:
"I started to tell her the opening of our first episode for 'No Strings,' and this little 10-year-old girl from St. Louis at her first Broadway show gets smitten by the Broadway bug or the theater bug. And I said, 'It was 'No Strings' or a Richard Rogers musical.' And she cut me off right at the beginning, and she said, 'I saw that.' And she said, 'Diahann Carroll, my mother took me to it when I was about 10.'"
He went on:
I was like, ‘O.K!’ And she literally on the Zoom started to sing the song that our lovely Rosharra Francis is singing in the opening of Season Three. And I was like, ‘Meryl, you have to stop right now because I’m going to lose it, because I’m going to send you the script after we hang up this Zoom, and you’re going to see on page one that lyric you just sang is on page one.’ And we were both like, ‘What the hell?’ So it had that kind of lovely, unpredictable sort of sweet fate around it.”
That’s such a cool story! It was meant to be that Meryl Streep was to live out part of her life through this character, and it’s awesome that she could recount that memory and see it play out on the show. Episodes 1 and 2 of season 3 are available to watch on Hulu now, with new episodes dropping every Tuesday.