A family affair
‘Ricki’ marks Streep’s first film with her daughter
Streep shares the big screen with daughter Mamie
At one point, Ricki’s style is likened to a “hooker from ‘Night Court.’ ”
On screen, Meryl Streep has raised a brood of A-listers.
“I’ve been mother to Renée Zellweger and Claire Danes,” she says, referring to 1998’s One True
Thing and 2002’s The Hours. So when it came time to cast the actress playing her daughter Julie in Friday’s Ricki and the
Flash, Streep already had a co-star in mind: her real-life offspring Mamie, 32.
“Why should some other actress get this great part?” Streep says. “She would kill in this part. She’s amazing. She’s funny and she’s fierce. Those two things? She could pull those off easy. She’s a really good actress.”
So she talked it over with her daughter and her husband — and Mamie’s dad — Don Gummer, and both agreed. “It was a no-brainer.”
But Streep never takes the easy road.
Ricki’s relationship with Julie is ugly and antagonistic, borne of a resentment Julie feels after being abandoned by her mother, who chose a musical career over her three children.
Although she didn’t show up for Julie’s wedding, Ricki arrives to provide comfort, of a sort, after her daughter’s husband dumps her. At one point, Julie likens her mom’s aging-rocker style to that of a “hooker from Night Court.”
To maintain that tension, and prevent Streep and Gummer from reverting to the very nurturing relationship they share in real life, director Jonathan Demme told Streep to ignore her daughter on set.
“I talked to Meryl and to Mamie,” he says. “It was like, ‘Please don’t be Mommy and Daughter for the next six weeks. Please. You be Julie who hates her mom. You be Ricki, who left her kids behind and you have that guilt.”
Streep was a hands-on parent who never left home for more than a few weeks to work when her kids were little. But she can understand the fraught nature of Julie and Ricki’s connection. And while she would never try to curry favor with her three estranged children like Ricki does, Streep understood her.
“There was a certain inevitability, given her personality, to her actions,” the three-time Oscar winner says. “She was who she had to be. Usually, there’s a builtin apology in characters like this. If a woman makes a mistake, she has to redeem herself. There’s no real apology in her. She’s kind of happy.”
Plus, there’s Ricki’s very specific style: full of bangles, braids and unfortunate black boots.
“It was fun to put together that look,” Streep confesses. “The key were the boots. It just started from the bottom up. The (shoes) said everything. The aspiration to be edgy and punk, but they’re kind of cheap. I had some things in my closet, believe it or not.”
Believe it, says screenwriter Diablo Cody, who credits Streep with much of Ricki’s style. “Meryl conceived it,” she confirms. “I respect Ricki for clinging to her look. She refuses to throw on the appliquéd sweater.”
With her own four kids — son Henry, 35, and daughters Louisa, 24, Grace, 29, and Mamie — grown, Streep says she’s “waiting for grandchildren.” These days, she is free to fly away to shoot
Florence Foster Jenkins, about the world’s worst opera singer.
But even then, the birds never left the parental nest.
“I just made the first movie that I left home for,” Streep says of the three-month Florence shoot in England. “I thought it would be fabulous.”
But “one after another, they came and stayed a week,” she reports. “First Henry and his girlfriend. Then Mamie came for 10 days. Then Grace came for a week. Then Louisa came. They all stand around in the kitchen, asking, ‘Why don’t you have anything in the house to eat?’ It followed me. It’s hard when they grow up. You forget that they’re not little anymore.”