The origin story of Meryl Streep’s character in ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING is the same as hers in real life

Spoiler alert for the first two episodes of the third season.

Three-time Academy Award-winning actress Meryl Streep (Kramer versus Kramer, The mail, The devil wears Prada) joined the third season of Hulu’s explosive Emmy-winning series Only homicides in the building. It joins the stars of the show Steve Martin, Martin BriefAND Selena Gomezas well as a slew of other returning and guest stars, including this season’s newcomer Paul Ruddand her character got off to an intriguing start.

In last week’s first two episodes, we were introduced to Streep’s character Loretta Durkin, a lovely, warm-hearted actress who’s been ignored by Broadway and the like for decades, until she finally gets her big break in the new ( Short) by Oliver Putnam Broadway show. We’ve seen how she fell in love with theater as a child, and audiences have started to fall in love with her, but everything could be soured if/when we find out she killed off her co-star. While we wait, we have a fun behind-the-scenes story about Streep being cast as her and her mysterious connection to her character.

The creator of the show, John Hoffmann, wrote Loretta’s backstory, which takes place in the first episode, and when he met Streep to talk about the role, she told it to him as if it were her own story, without ever having read the script! Hoffman explained to The Playlist:

“I started telling her about the opening of our first episode of ‘No Strings,’ and this 10-year-old girl from St. Louis at her first Broadway show gets hit with the Broadway bug or the theater bug. And I said, “It was ‘No Strings’ or a Richard Rogers musical. And she cut me off right at the beginning, and she said, ‘I saw that.’ And she said, ‘Diahann Carroll, my mother took me there. when I was about 10.”

He continued:

I was like, ‘OK!’ And literally on Zoom she started singing the song that our lovely Rosharra Francis is singing at the beginning of Season 3. And I was like, ‘Meryl, you have to stop now because I’m going to lose it, because I’m going to send you the script after we hang up this Zoom, and you’ll see on page one that lyric that you just sang is on page one.’ And we were both like, ‘What the hell?’ So he had that kind of sweet, adorable, unpredictable fate around him.

It’s such a beautiful story! It had to be that Meryl Streep lived part of her life through this character, and it’s great that she can relate that memory of her and see him play on the show. Season 3 Episodes 1 and 2 are available to watch now on Hulu, with new episodes dropping every Tuesday.