Meryl Streep once collaborated with one of her children for a small independent feature. But while working alongside her daughter in the film, she refused to speak to her. Which later made for an awkward interaction.
Mamie Gummer and Meryl Streep once starred in ‘Ricki and the Flash’
Ricki and the Flash was a 2015 musical comedy directed by Jonathan Demme. In the movie, Streep played a mother and wife who once left her family in order to become a music star. Streep’s real-life daughter, Mamie Gummer, would also play her onscreen daughter in the flick. Like Streep, Gummer has always had an affinity for acting, having dedicated much of her focus towards the craft.
“I loved acting because it’s really fun,” she once said in an interview with Glamour. “There are other things that are challenging and strange, but when you do get to do it and someone pays you to do it – even if just a little – well that’s amazing.”
The actor had been steadily building her filmography in films like Twelve Thirty, Side Effects, and Cake. But both Streep and Gummer felt like Ricki and the Flash was the perfect film for them to do a full collaboration on.
“She and the producer read the script and she thought that, ‘It’s time and this is it.’ Everything aligned in the right way,” Gummer said.
Meryl Streep didn’t speak to her daughter in ‘Ricki and the Flash’
In the film, Streep and Gummer’s characters are somewhat at odds with each other because of Streep’s onscreen lifestyle. Their relationship in the movie is the complete opposite of their relationship in real life, with the two naturally being extremely close. The director, however, wanted the pair to be as close to their characters as possible. So he requested Streep to avoid speaking to Gummer.
“I talked to Meryl and to Mamie,” Demme once said in an interview with USA Today. “It was like, ‘Please don’t be Mommy and Daughter for the next six weeks. Please. You be Julie who hates her mom. You be Ricki, who left her kids behind and you have that guilt.’”
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Streep understood Demme’s worries about their relationship, and agreed to the filmmaker’s request. But Streep wasn’t aware that Demme actually might not have let Gummer know what they were doing.
“The dynamic, he wasn’t sure how it would play out and he asked me not to speak to her. But [Mamie Gummer] told me two days ago, he never told her that he had said that to me,” Streep once said according to Contact Music. “So she said, ‘Why is my mom being so weird?’”
Being Streep’s daughter may have benefitted Gummer’s acting ambitions. In some cases, the Oscar-winner has even helped Gummer star in certain projects. But Gummer confided that becoming an actor herself wasn’t always the easy choice. Especially after Gummer experienced firsthand what it was like to be the daughter of a celebrity.
“It was hard in some ways,” Gummer once said in an interview with Vogue. “Because of my background, I received a lot of attention that I had to learn to be comfortable with.”
But Gummer felt all the attention that came with fame was balanced out by being able to do her dream job.
“There’s definitely a conflict of interest but it’s worth it – the trauma of self-promotion is completely undone when you get the job and do the work,” she said in a 2016 interview with Radio Times.
