Three remarkable actress – Academy Award-winners Meryl Streep and Dianne Wiest, and Emmy Award-winner Candice Bergen – share the screen in a new film by director Steven Soderbergh, “Let Them All Talk,” an exercise in improvisation, in which its actors were required to create much of the dialogue themselves. Correspondent Rita Braver talks with the trio about the rarity of starring in a major Hollywood film about three women in their 70s.

Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman James Corden, and Andrew Rannells are prepared to be “the biggest thing to happen in Indiana” in the star-studded trailer for Ryan Murphy’s Netflix film, The Prom. Murphy released the first full trailer for the movie musical on Thursday, announcing that “everyone is invited to the celebration of a lifetime!” The movie follows the story of high school student Emma Nolan, played by Jo Ellen Pellman, who’s been banned from attending the prom with her girlfriend Alyssa (Ariana DeBose). Once Emma shares her story on Twitter, stars from Broadway (Streep, Corden, Rannells and Kidman) head to small-town Indiana to help Emma find a solution – in an attempt to gain good press following their Broadway show flop. The Netflix film also includes a supportive high school principal, played by Keegan-Michael Key and the PTA head, played by Kerry Washington. “The Prom” arrives on Netflix on Dec. 11.

Early December will be early Christmas for all Streep fans – not that we don’t deserve an extra dose of blessings this year. HBO Max has finally released the trailer for “Let Them All Talk”, which will premiere, wait for it, on December 10, a day before Netflix releases “The Prom”. Steven Soderbergh’s film stars Meryl Streep as Alice, an award-winning author whose two oldest friends (Candice Bergen and Dianne Wiest) join her on a voyage across the Atlantic. As the three actresses revealed to EW earlier this year, the film was shot in just two weeks aboard the Queen Mary 2 in 2019, with the actors improvising almost all of their dialogue. “They would give us the outlines of a situation, and then we knew where we had to end up,” Streep explained. “But they didn’t tell us how to get there.” “When it was over, I thought for a while that I had dreamt doing the movie,” Bergen added. “It was over so quickly.” “Let Them All Talk” also stars Lucas Hedges as Alice’s nephew and Gemma Chan as her agent. The gabfest is the first in a series of projects for HBO Max and HBO from the prolific Soderbergh, who has already begun shooting his next movie for the streaming service, a crime film titled No Sudden Move. You can watch the trailer above and in the video archive. Screencaptures, along with the film’s poster, have been added to the photo gallery.

The New York Times has an in-depth article on Hollywood’s recent revival of musicals, with a focus on the upcoming “The Prom”. The complete artcile can be read over at their website: On a sun-nuzzled February morning earlier this year, “The Prom,” Ryan Murphy’s film adaptation of the Tony-nominated musical, prepared for a location shoot in a high school gym on the eastern edge of Hollywood. Basketball hoops kissed the ceiling. Rubber matting and webs of cables carpeted the floor. Beside the snack tables, James Corden, Kerry Washington and Meryl Streep, in a wig the red of a cocktail cherry, practiced a dance number, sashaying through the same steps at not quite the same time. The filmmaking, Corden said, once he had spun his final spin, had been amazing, joyous, nearly as much fun as “Cats,” particularly these song and dance rehearsals. “You feel like you might be in the greatest touring production of all time,” he said. The stage version of “The Prom,” a story of a young woman who wants to take her girlfriend to a school dance and the Broadway stars who debatably come to her aid, has scheduled an actual tour for January, Covid-19 permitting. That’s a little more than a month after Netflix releases Murphy’s film, which tells the same tale with a starrier cast, fancier sets, delirious wigs and an orchestra that includes four French horns, four more than the Broadway pit could afford.

I’ve added all recent virtual performances that Meryl Streep has participated in. 2020 has been short of public appearances, for obvious reasons, but we’ve been able to catch Meryl Streep in online appearances more than ever. Among the additions are her most recent appearance on Bette Midler’s “Hocus Pocus” Hulaween Special to benefit the New York Restoration Project, The Public Theater’s tribute to Sam Waterston, the Kageno Virtual Harambee and a recent tribute by the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation. Have a look at all added videos below. Screencaptures from all appearances have been added as well. Enjoy, and please, stay safe everybody.

The first trailer for Ryan Murphy’s “The Prom,” the star-stuffed movie musical adaptation of the beloved Broadway musical, has landed from Netflix. Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, Kerry Washington, James Corden, Andrew Rannells, Keegan-Michael Key, and many more headline this flashy song-and-dance movie, which arrives on the streaming platform December 11. Watch the new look at the film below. The Broadway musical comedy follows a group of washed up Broadway actors who help a lesbian go to prom as part of a PR stunt. Dee Dee Allen (Meryl Streep), a two-time Tony Award winner, pairs up with Barry Glickman (James Corden) in a musical about First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt that’s a total flop. They each receive career-killing reviews, and decide to revive their reputations by throwing their weight behind a charity cause. They’re joined by veteran Broadway chorus girl Angie Dickinson (Nicole Kidman), along with out-of-luck actor Trent Oliver (Andrew Rannells), in boosting Emma Nolan (Jo Ellen Pellman), a high-school senior barred from bringing her girlfriend to the prom. Production was halted on the film on March 12, but resumed on July 23. The Broadway edition, with music by Matthew Sklar, lyrics by Chad Beguelin, and a book by Bob Martin and Beguelin, bowed in New York on October 2018 after launching in Atlanta in 2016. The musical was nominated for six Tony Awards in 2019, including Best Musical, though it didn’t win any of them. “The Prom” premieres on Netflix December 11. Screencaptures from the teaser trailer have been added as well.

Entertainment Tonight has a fantastic interview with Meryl Streep, Candice Bergen and Dianne Wiest for Steven Soderbergh’s December-confirmed HBO Max film “Let Them All Talk”: Dianne Wiest sits demurely, a bookshelf behind her, broadcasting from her computer. Meryl Streep leans against a white brick wall, her iPhone at arm’s length. Candice Bergen reclines on her couch, holding her iPad over her head. For his latest film Let Them All Talk, director Steven Soderbergh put the three acting legends on a ship and, well, let them all talk. So it only made sense for EW to do the same — albeit over Zoom, rather than at sea. The ensuing conversation will mark their first extended discussion of the mysterious movie, which arrives on HBO Max in December. Scripted (sort of; more on that in a minute) by beloved short-story writer Deborah Eisenberg, Let Them All Talk stars Streep as an acclaimed novelist who’s summoned to the U.K. to receive an award. She invites two of her oldest friends (Bergen and Wiest) and her nephew (Lucas Hedges) to join her on a voyage aboard the Queen Mary 2 ocean liner, setting up a gabfest filled with reminiscence, regret, and repartee. As it happens, that also describes EW’s roundtable with the actresses. But at first, they’re just giddy to see each other again, discussing vacation spots and the California wildfires before Bergen gets things back on track. “You’re trying to get things started here,” she says with a chuckle. And so we do.

Meryl, how does playing, for lack of a better word, a regular person like this character differ from some of your more transformative roles?
I didn’t think she was so regular. I mean, to me, she was a rara avis. She’s a really weird bird. A real intellectual, which I am not. People like that sort of intimidate me, and so it’s great fun to imagine what it’d be like to have those standards of thought, and those aspirations, and to have a poetic soul, which I think she did, and the selfishness of real, true artists. People that don’t have kids and concerns that pull them into the real world. People that have been able to just live in the sort of miasma of their own imagination and anxieties and terrors. That’s her, and at this particular moment of her life, especially so. Her regrets and her desires to figure things out — it’s stuff you can relate to after 70, certainly, if you’re lucky enough to get there.

The complete interview can be read over at Entertainment Weekly and in our press archive.

Netflix has released a first batch of production stills for the upcoming “The Prom”, and Entertainment Weekly has the accompanying story: The streaming service unveiled Wednesday several stills from Murphy’s adaptation of the popular stage production The Prom, starring Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, Kerry Washington, and more in a tale of a queer teenager, Emma (Jo Ellen Pellman), whose struggle with homophobia captures the attention of a fading Broadway quartet seeking a charity case to boost their careers back into the mainstream spotlight. Streep leads the film as Dee Dee, a Tony Award-winning actress who, along with her partner (James Corden) stars in a musical about Eleanor Roosevelt, endures a professional setback after their latest project flops. Teaming with veteran showgirl Angie (Kidman) and another actor, Trent (Andrew Rannells), the group travels to small-town Indiana to help Emma and her girlfriend (Ariana DeBose) push back against their high school’s controversial decision to bar them from attending their senior prom as a couple. Washington plays DeBose’s mother in the film, with Keegan-Michael Key, Mary Kay Place, and Tracey Ullman playing other supporting parts. The Prom — written by Chad Beguelin and Bob Martin, who devised the original 2016 stage production — dances to Netflix on Dec. 11. See the first-look photos above and below.

The Hollywood Reporter has put “The Prom” stars Meryl Streep, Kerry Washington, James Corden, Jo Ellen Pellman, Keegan-Michael Key and Nicole Kidman on their cover with a lenghty interview inside their October 07 issue: “Should I just drop Meryl?” Keegan-Michael Key is cradling Meryl Streep in a dip as the 21-time Oscar nominee, wearing a pink-sequin pantsuit and heels, gazes admiringly up at him. The two are dancing underneath the basketball hoops in the Helen Bernstein High School gym in Los Angeles, which is decorated with beaded curtains, white balloons, twinkly lights and vases of flowers. It’s March 6, 2020, and the let’s-put-on-a-show! energy is palpable on the set of the Ryan Murphy movie The Prom, where Murphy is shooting his dance number finale, an anthem of acceptance featuring some 300 young LGBTQ extras in formal wear. The real high school is still in session around the production, and occasionally the school PA crackles with an announcement, briefly puncturing the glamour of the moment. Inside the gym, Streep, Key, Nicole Kidman, James Corden, Kerry Washington, Andrew Rannells, Tracey Ullman and newcomers Jo Ellen Pellman and Ariana DeBose are dressed in coordinated shades of turquoise, pink and purple and gathered under bright lights to dance and lip-sync to the track they have already recorded of the film’s capper, “It’s Time to Dance.” The complete article can be read over at The Hollywood Reporter.

In a coming attractions trailer, HBO Max gives us a first look at “Let Them All Talk”, and Entertainmnent Weekly writes about it: Let them all talk… about Meryl Streep’s arrival on HBO Max. The streaming platform picked up the rights to the Oscar winner’s new movie with director Steven Soderbergh early in the shelf life of the service, and now the streamer has snuck in the first look at the actress’ latest eye-turning performance in Let Them All Talk. Tucked away around the 1:52 time stamp of the latest trailer for HBO Max’s upcoming offerings is a look at this gem, which also stars Dianne Wiest (Edward Scissorhands), Candice Bergen (Murphy Brown), Lucas Hedges (Manchester By the Sea), and Gemma Chan (Crazy Rich Asians). “Here’s to reconnecting the gang of three,” Streep says as her author character, who takes a cruise with her besties, played by Wiest and Bergen. Based on Bergen’s next line, it seems there’s a lot of self-reflection involved with this trip. “Who’s the real you?” she questions. “Does anybody trust you?” Meanwhile, off in the quiet corners of the film (and the trailer), there’s Hedges, playing Streep’s nephew, trying to romance Streep’s literary agent (Chan). The trailer briefly highlights a number of other programming, including Jude Law in HBO’s limited series The Third Day, Ridley Scott and Aaron Guzikowski’s Raised By Wolves sci-fi series for HBO Max, and The Big Bang Theory’s Kaley Cuoco in the series The Flight Attendant. Then there are the more heavily promoted shows like HBO’s Perry Mason and Lovecraft Country, and HBO Max’s Seth Rogen-led film American Pickle.