“I was like, ‘O.K!'” Hoffman continued, “And she literally on the Zoom started to sing the song that our lovely Rosharra Francis is singing in the opening of Season Three … And I was like, ‘Meryl, you have to stop right 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’re going to see on page one that lyric you just sang is on page one.'”
It was a fun, bizarre connection, one that seemed to all but ensure Streep would be joining the show for its third season. (And possibly for even longer, depending on how this potential romance with Oliver pans out.) In addition to the award-winning actress wanting “a moment of levity in her life” when reaching out to the show, Streep’s addition is also fun purely due to the meta joke of it all: The idea of Streep playing a down-on-her-luck actress who’s never been cast in a role before is very funny. Whereas Streep got her first acting gig as a teenager, poor Loretta has to wait until her seventies to get her breakout role. (Which is interrupted by the lead actor’s untimely death, then his subsequent revival, then his untimely death again.)
But while Loretta’s and Meryl Streep’s lives clearly diverged shortly after that first trip to Broadway, that moment shared between them is still a sweet, special surprise. “We were both like, ‘What the hell?'” Hoffman said about the coincidence. “So it had that kind of lovely, unpredictable sort of sweet fate around it.”
New episodes of “Only Murders in the Building” season 3 premiere every Tuesday on Hulu.