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Yesterday, Meryl Streep joined directors Ava DuVernay and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy in a conversation panel, moderated by Jon Stewart, at the Women in the World Summit. Vanity Fair has summed up the panel, which can be watched in its entirety in the video archive. Streep described the hardest thing for an actress to do—to get anyone but women to identify with them onscreen. As evidenced by everything from the way toys are marketed to which movies win Oscars, the general assumption is that women will identify with female and male characters, while men will only identify with other men. Or, as Streep puts it, “I wanted to be Tom Sawyer, not Becky.” (The way she says “Becky,” by the way, is 19 Oscar nominations worth of talent in two syllables) For Streep, the hardest thing as an actress is “to have a story that men in the audience feel like they know what I feel like.” In the video, you can see DuVernay—who beefed up the role of Coretta Scott King in the script for Selma– and Obaid-Chinoy—who won an Oscar for a 2012 documentary about women attacked with acid in Pakistan—nodding in agreement. Pictures have been added to the image library.
