Cover Story: Streep & Adams
All the Right Ingredients
Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, food, France, the mother of all cooking shows — Julie & Julia looks to be a tasty treat for anyone who likes to eat
By Bob Strauss
Amy Adams and Meryl Streep really enjoyed working together in Doubt.
So much so, they hope to do it again some day. In the meantime, there’s Julie & Julia.
The film is a combination of renowned food writer and TV cook Julia Child’s autobiography My Life in France and Julie Powell’s recent bestseller about trying to make all the recipes in Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 1. Writer-director Nora Ephron’s script depicts the goings on at Child’s (Streep) French residence of the 1950s, and Powell’s culinary experiments in her cramped New York apartment, which commenced in 2004, the year of Child’s death.
“I was really happy to have worked with Meryl on Doubt because in Julie & Julia we don’t share any scenes,” notes Adams who, like Streep, was Oscar-nominated for her performance in the earlier film. “It would have been a great heartbreak of my life to have done a movie with Meryl Streep and not shared a scene with her!”
Not that Julie & Julia was unfulfilling.
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Streep as Julia Child in Julie & Julia
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“It’s parallel stories,” Adams explains. “I’m reading her book, and it
goes back and forth between that and Julie & Julia written by Julie
Powell. It’s this beautiful parallel of these two women searching for
themselves and finding themselves through food and cooking, and finding
purpose.”
“It
follows a long time in her life,” Streep says of the towering (6’2”)
superchef with the distinctively trilling voice. “But it’s not about
her. It’s about a young woman in Queens who works at the Lower
Manhattan Development Project right after 9/11.”
During
separate interviews last fall, both actors wear their blond hair in
ponytails; Adams sporting a sharp, navy blue suit while Streep is
elegantly relaxed in an olive green silk smock over dark blue jeans and
high heels.
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Adams’ blue eyes sparkle as dazzlingly as they do onscreen, reinforcing the notion that she’s some version of the optimistic Pollyanna she played in Junebug, Enchanted and Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian. But the actor says Powell should leave quite a different impression.
“Our characters are polar opposites in Julie & Julia,” says Adams. “Meryl’s so fantastic as Julia Child, creates a humanity and a warmth. My character’s the complete opposite, frustrated and confused and questioning and grouchy.” Where did she find that kind of personality, we wonder.
“You know, I do not have an unflagging good spirit,” Adams says with a laugh. “It’s about a 75 to 25 ratio, I would say. And those who know me well are always, like, when it comes out, ‘Oh, here she is; here’s the other Amy.’ They can well attest.”
Streep, apparently, did not get that memo.
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Amy Adams as Julie Powell in Julie & Julia
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“Amy’s incredible. In-credible,” the acting legend gushes. “She just
seems so pure and guileless. And she’s very alive on set. Too bad we
never crossed paths on this one. It was like two different movies. We
got to shoot in Paris and she got to shoot in Queens!”
As for her own work on the film, Streep — who lets others claim she
can do anything, but has never said so herself — didn’t come away from
Julie & Julia with a new language or musical skill like she has in
films past. As for French cuisine… “Yeah, I learned to cook,” Streep
shrugs. “I’m not that good. But, y’know, you put butter on anything, it
really does taste better. That was her whole thing.”
Otherwise, the role had a very easy “in” for the record-holding, 15-time Academy Award nominee (and double winner).
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“You do immediately envision her by her voice, the way she talked,” Streep notes, adding that it’s too bad the movie didn’t go a little bit deeper into Child’s just-confirmed activities during World War II. “She’s a really interesting woman. It’s so weird, the whole thing about her working with the OSS [Office of Strategic Services] recently came out. I always said to Nora Ephron, ‘Y’know, she was a spy,’ and Nora said, ‘No, that’s just apocryphal, surmised by all of these people who have paranoid fantasies.’ Well, I called her the minute that it hit The New York Times!”
Speaking of paranoia, Amy couldn’t help but bring some of it to her first encounters with Meryl.
“I signed on to do both movies before we started Doubt, and she agreed to work with me,” Adams reveals.
“It’s the same attraction everybody has to working with Meryl. But I have to say, going into Doubt I did feel an extra, added sense of responsibility that she would have a good working experience with me. But Meryl’s not like that. I think people put on her that sense of perfectionism, that I would expect that Meryl would expect that I would be perfect. And that is not true at all. She is so open and embracing of the human experience that your flaws are just as good as your perfections in her eyes.”
“Do I have an A Game?” Streep responds to the question of just how she’s delivered so many outstanding performances. “I guess I try to clear away anything that’s going to inhibit me in my work. I have a very bad short-term memory, so that helps [laughs] — it really does! I clear away what isn’t going to be useful. You have to check your medals at the door. The whole job is to be as honest as you can to this person that you’re inhabiting. Their heart, their convictions, their needs and dilemma, all those things. So working is kind of a wonderful place to be.
“It’s only when I get out here in the marketing end of moviemaking that I feel those labels hurled at my feet. But I don’t normally feel that way.”
There is one new label, though, that pleases Streep, who’s been more admired for the quality of her work than its mass popularity for most of her career.
“Julie & Julia is coming out in what they now call The Mamma Mia! Slot,” she says with a delighted laugh.
“That’s because they put Mamma Mia! in The Devil Wears Prada Slot. Now they think I’m the Queen of Summer! All I can do now is fail.”
Bob Strauss lives in L.A. where he writes about movies and filmmakers.
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The Real Deal
Visitors to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History
in Washington, D.C., can get a peek inside the late Julia Child’s
charming kitchen.
In 2001, curators heard that Child was leaving her Cambridge,
Massachusetts, home and moving to a little place in California. She was
in her late 80s at the time. So they travelled to Cambridge to ask if
they could pick up the entire room, contents included, and move it en
masse to Washington.
A statement on the Smithsonian website says, “We could see that
the relationships between the parts and pieces, and the overall
organization of the space, told a bigger story about Julia’s philosophy
of cooking.” Child agreed, and the exhibit opened in August 2002, two
years before the famed chef’s death. A copy of Child’s seminal cookbook
Mastering the Art of French Cooking — which plays a huge role in Julie & Julia — is part of the display.
If a trip to Washington is not in your plans, you can explore the kitchen online at http://americanhistory.si.edu/juliachild — zooming in and out on baking sheets, oil and vinegar, and the unusually tall countertop built to accommodate Child’s height.
—Marni Weisz
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