Mamma Meryl!

Great article in the TimesOnline about the upcoming Mamma Mia! I didn't recognize that Stellan Skarsgard of Beowulf is in Mamma Mia!!

Reports from early test screenings are universally positive - the audiences who have seen it at a secret showing in San Diego came out raving about the transfer of the musical to the big screen.

The surprise?

That Meryl Streep, at 58, is athletic, has a big voice - clear, true and strong - and delivers the goods on Abba's classics without a trace of embarrassment. It is, obviously, her first musical, and the deep thinkers in Hollywood are amazed by the way she is apparently happy to demolish her reputation as a serious-minded Oscar-winning grande dame.

And yet Streep, who is known for her hard-to-live-with perfectionism and love of tricky bits of acting technique and odd accents, emerges from this film as a woman who is accomplished at physical comedy and actually funny when the occasion demands.

'Meryl is very good - it's a revelation,' says one who has seen the film, in which she plays Donna, the mother of a bride-to-be who is confronted by three potential fathers on the eve of her nuptials.

It transpires that Streep saw the stage show in New York with her daughter as a birthday treat and wrote a fan letter to the producers afterwards.

When it came to casting the movie, the letter was remembered and she was approached.
They called and said: "You probably won't be interested, but…"

I said: "Are you crazy? I would love to do this." It was a done deal,' said Streep.

There seems to have been a little on-set rivalry and tension between the men - not to mention anxiety - about how they were doing so far out of their usual leading-man comfort zones. It's a long way from playing Darcy to belting out Dancing Queen.

Brosnan, who, of course, played James Bond, was discomfited to be filming musical numbers at Pinewood directly after Daniel Craig's Casino Royale wrapped.

'I looked in the mirror and there was 007, and he was getting ready to expose himself to possible ridicule.
'One of my fears was that I'd be strutting across the carpark in sequined tights and I would bump into Daniel looking very Bond-like. It never happened, I'm pleased to say, but it was a recurring nightmare.'

Firth, though, seems to be the most embarrassed of all of them by the undignified performance he has given.

Firth said his singing voice was 'somewhere between a drunken apology and a plumbing problem'.

He added that the scene in which the three men appear in Lycra catsuits was particularly mortifying.

'There are bulges where there should not be bulges and no bulges where you wish there were.'

Read the rest here!