Big Little Lies: Why Meryl Streep didn't even need a script
- Oscar-winning actress loved first season of the series – ‘the greatest thing on TV’ – featuring a large female ensemble cast
Meryl Streep has the ability to make “ordinary” female characters seem just as extraordinary as the exceptional real-life women (Karen Blixen, Margaret Thatcher, et al) she has played during her brilliant career.
Never has this been more true than in her latest performance as the mother of a slain son in HBO’s American television series, Big Little Lies, season two.
What’s been the incredible virtue of this series … is you don’t get six women in a show … It’s so rare … The beauty of television is you do have seven hours, and so you do have the chance to delve deeply into six women’s lives
Although Alexander Skarsgard’s Perry, the demonic wife-beating husband of Nicole Kidman’s Celeste, deserved to be pushed to his death at the conclusion of season one, Streep invests her grieving, sceptical mother with enough gravitas and menace to make audiences once again marvel at her acting gifts.
This highly anticipated sequel was willed into being by series co-stars and producers Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman after they and their fellow female cast members experienced an epiphany during the course of filming the first seven episodes of Big Little Lies in 2017.
“Laura [Dern], Nicole and I would look around and go, ‘I can't believe we have so many scenes together, that we have so many lines with each other, that we’re exploring our relationships,” Witherspoon said.
“You rarely see films or TV series which [do that] – it was a revelation for all of us.”
The only problem was that Australian author Liane Moriarty had never written a follow-up to her original eponymous novel, leaving Witherspoon and series writer/showrunner David E. Kelley without any source material.
Yet after prevailing upon Moriarty, the author came up with a 200-page novella that was the basis for a second season. There was also one interesting twist – Moriarty had written a part for Perry’s mother – with Meryl Streep in mind – whom she named Mary Louise, which she knew was the Oscar-winning actress' real first name.
Streep didn’t even read the script when she agreed to sign on for the role. “[My agent] said, ‘There’s a part that they wrote with you in mind because they called her Mary Louise’ – Mary Louise is my actual legal name,” Streep said.