MERYL STREEP'S FULL SPEECH: THE GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS
2017
Thank you, thank you. I lost my voice in
screaming and lamentation this week. I've 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 segment of American society right now. Think about it: Hollywood,
foreigners, and the press.
But who are we? What is Hollywood, anyway? It's just a bunch of different places. I was born and raised and educated in the public schools of New Jersey, Viola was born in a sharecroppers 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 from Ohio. Amy Adams was born in Vicenzia, Italy, and Natalie Portman was born in Jerusalem. Where are their birth certificates? And the beautiful Ruth Negga was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and was raised in Ireland and she's here nominated - for playing a small-town girl from Virginia. Ryan Gosling, like all the nicest people is Canadian. And Dev Patel was born in Kenya, raised in London, is here playing an Indian, raised in Tasmania.
But who are we? What is Hollywood, anyway? It's just a bunch of different places. I was born and raised and educated in the public schools of New Jersey, Viola was born in a sharecroppers 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 from Ohio. Amy Adams was born in Vicenzia, Italy, and Natalie Portman was born in Jerusalem. Where are their birth certificates? And the beautiful Ruth Negga was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and was raised in Ireland and she's here nominated - for playing a small-town girl from Virginia. Ryan Gosling, like all the nicest people is Canadian. And Dev Patel was born in Kenya, raised in London, is here playing an Indian, raised in Tasmania.
So Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and
foreigners, and if you kick 'em all out, you'll have nothing else to watch but
football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts. They gave me three
seconds to say that.
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 that did exactly that -
breathtaking, compassionate work. But there was one performances 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. This instinct to humiliate,
when it's modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful,
filters down into everybody's life because it kind of gives permission for
other people to do the same thing.
Disrespect invites disrespect, violence
incites violence. When the powerful use their position to bully others, we all
lose.
Okay, this brings me to the press. We need
the principled press to hold power to account, to call them them on the carpet
for every outrage - that's why our founders enshrine the press and its freedoms
in our constitution. So I only asked 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, 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.
.
