Meryl Streep’s Golden Globes Speech
Please
sit down. Thank you. I love you all. You’ll have to forgive me. I’ve
lost my voice in screaming and lamentation this weekend. And I have lost
my mind sometime earlier this year, so I have to read.Thank you, Hollywood Foreign Press. Just to pick up on what Hugh
Laurie said: You and all of us in this room really belong to the most
vilified segments in American society right now. Think about it:
Hollywood, foreigners and the press.But who are we, and what is Hollywood anyway? It’s just a bunch of
people from other places. I was born and raised and educated in the
public schools of New Jersey. Viola was born in a sharecropper’s cabin
in South Carolina, came up in Central Falls, Rhode Island; Sarah Paulson
was born in Florida, raised by a single mom in Brooklyn. Sarah Jessica
Parker was one of seven or eight kids in Ohio. Amy Adams was born in
Vicenza, Italy. And Natalie Portman was born in Jerusalem. Where are
their birth certificates? And the beautiful Ruth Negga was born in Addis
Ababa, Ethiopia, raised in London — no, in Ireland I do believe, and
she’s here nominated for playing a girl in small-town Virginia.Ryan Gosling, like all of the nicest people, is Canadian, and Dev
Patel was born in Kenya, raised in London, and is here playing an Indian
raised in Tasmania. So Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and
foreigners. And if we kick them all out you’ll have nothing to watch but
football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.They gave me three seconds to say this, so: An actor’s only job is to
enter the lives of people who are different from us, and let you feel
what that feels like. And there were many, many, many powerful
performances this year that did exactly that. Breathtaking,
compassionate work.But there was one performance this year that stunned me. 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, and 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 kinda gives permission for other people to
do the same thing. Disrespect invites disrespect, violence incites
violence. And when the powerful use their position to bully others we
all lose. O.K., go on with it.O.K., this brings me to the press. We need the principled press to
hold power to account, to call him on the carpet for every outrage.
That’s why our founders enshrined the press and its freedoms in the
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 gonna 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 — you know we were gonna 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 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.