Now three-time Oscar winner Meryl Streep can add successfully pulling off a rendition of Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance to her long, long list of accomplishments. In her latest film Ricki and the Flash, which depicts her as a mother who left her family behind to become a rock star, Streep turned the 2009 pop hit into a guitar-laden rock song. While Entertainment Weekly notes that only a few seconds of her rendition is featured in the film, the entire track is featured on the film’s soundtrack.
The film’s director Jonathan Demme told Entertainment Weekly that Streep took guitar lessons from Neil Young and rehearsed “for weeks” with co-star Rick Springfield. “All of that stuff is 100 percent pure Meryl Streep,” said Demme. “Meryl developed and created this character … her musical personality, the way she moves, the way she dances on the stage, the way she plays.”
Springfield notes that while she asked the guitarist a lot of questions about playing the guitar, she learned quickly. “She was amazing doing what she did from not being a guitar player and singer,” said Springfield to Billboard. “She would ask certain things about how to hold [the guitar], which moves looked better to end a song, stuff like that. She asked the whole band, hearing from the guys who had done it all their lives … It was an incredibly brave thing she did to play live in the movie — something that people work years and years to get down.
The 66 year-old actor also covers Tom Petty’s American Girl, Bruce Springsteen’s My Love Will Not Let You Down, Sam the Sham and the Pharaoh’s Wooly Bully, and Dobie Gray’s Drift Away for the film.
Ricki and the Flash is not the first movie in which Streep has sung, but it’s her most rockin’ performance by far.
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