Apparently, an actress can dodge a bullet by making an issue about conservative politics.
Actress Meryl Streep, interviewed by the New York Times along with her co-star in The Post, Tom Hanks, was asked by Cara Buckley about her silence on sex predator Harvey Weinstein, the producer Streep worked with for many years. She deflected the question by telling Buckley, “I don’t want to hear about the silence of me. I want to hear about the silence of Melania Trump. I want to hear from her. She has so much that’s valuable to say. And so does Ivanka. I want her to speak now.”
Streep also gave a (sort-of) explanation for her silence: “I don’t have Facebook. I really had to think. Because it really underlined my own sense of cluelessness, and also how evil, deeply evil, and duplicitous, a person he was, yet such a champion of really great work … and it’s a shock. Some of my favorite people have been brought down by this, and he’s not one of them.” However, in years past, Streep has referred to the producer as “God” for his role in producing her film, The Iron Lady.
Streep’s silence on Weinstein has been a point of contention in Hollywood, drawing the condemnation of alleged Weinstein victims like Rose McGowan, who called the actress a “lie” over Twitter.
In the same interview, Hanks reiterated a recent talking point of his, saying, “What’s happening now is this guerrilla war that is going on against the First Amendment. This idea now that has actually been verbalized by various people high up in the current administration, that there is such a thing as [an] ‘alternative fact.’ It gives validation to what is patently false, that the purveyors know is a lie, and worse, know that it is completely unconfirmed and is scurrilous. And in that realm comes some degree of the same message: ‘Don’t let them find out the truth, because if so we can’t stay in power.’”
Once you star in a film shifting the credit for publishing the Pentagon Papers from the New York Times to the Washington Post, apparently, you know it all.
