Meryl Streep is no stranger to making a powerful statement through her acceptance speeches. She’s given enough of them. But her speech at yesterday’s Golden Globes was one of her most powerful yet.
It will truly give you chills.
Taking to the stage to accept the Cecil B. Demille Award for her incredible body of work, the legendary actress used the moment to take aim at President elect Donald Trump (without ever actually saying who she was talking about – becasue she’s all class), as well as calling for freedom of the press – and even managed to honour her late friend Carrie Fisher.
“There was one performance this year that stunned me,” she said. “It sank its hooks in my heart. Not because it was good. There was nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job. It made its intended audience laugh and show their teeth. It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter, someone he outranked in privilege, power, and the capacity to fight back. It kind of broke my heart when I saw it. I still can’t get it out of my head because it wasn’t in a movie. It was real life.”
“And this instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life, because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing,” she continued.
“Disrespect invites disrespect. Violence incites violence. And the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose…This brings me to the press. We need the principled press to hold power to account, to call them on the carpet for every outrage. That’s why our founders enshrined the press and its freedoms in our constitution.
“So I only ask the famously well-heeled Hollywood foreign press and all of us in our community to join me in supporting the committee to protect journalists. Because we’re going to need them going forward. And they’ll need us to safeguard the truth.
“One more thing: Once, when I was standing around on the set one day whining about something—we were going to work through supper, or the long hours, or whatever—Tommy Lee Jones said to me, ‘Isn’t it such a privilege, Meryl, just to be an actor?’ Yeah, it is. And we have to remind each other of the privilege and the responsibility of the act of empathy. We should all be very proud of the work Hollywood honors here tonight. As my friend, the dear departed Princess Leia, said to me once, “Take your broken heart, make it into art. Thank you.”
However in true Donald Trump style, the US President elect took to Twitter to unleash a viscous tirade against the actress, calling her “overrated”.
Considering the 67-year-old actress was on stage to receive the Cecil B. DeMille Award for her ‘outstanding contributions to the world of entertainment’ we’re pretty sure that argument isn’t going to fly.
Also her three Oscars, 16 Oscar nominations, nine Golden Globes and 23 Golden Glob nominations would also suggest otherwise.
Trump has also previously claimed he was not aware that the reporter, Serge Kovaleski of the New York Times, was disabled when he signalled him out for ridicule during a rally in South Carolina — “You’ve got to see this guy,” he said, before jerking his arms around mocking him.
“I was never mocking anyone,” Trump told the NY Times on Monday.
“I was calling into question a reporter who had gotten nervous because he had changed his story. People keep saying I intended to mock the reporter’s disability, as if Meryl Streep and others could read my mind, and I did no such thing.”
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