Meryl Streep Opens Up About The 1 ‘Intimate’ Scene She ‘Didn’t Want To End’

Acting legend Meryl Streep has had her fair share of on-screen romances throughout her career, but there’s one particular moment she’s still thinking about even all these years later.

The three-time Oscar winner was speaking during an onstage appearance at Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday (15 May), when she recalled her 1985 role in Out Of Africa opposite Robert Redford.

One of the film’s most memorable scenes sees Robert’s character wash Meryl’s hair by a river – a sequence the Sophie’s Choice actor described as “a sex scene, in a way, because it’s so intimate”.

“We’ve seen so many scenes of people fucking, but we don’t see that love, touch, that care. Gorgeous. I didn’t want it to end that day,” she shared.

However, Meryl admitted that her co-star actually had some difficulty washing her long brown locks – at least at first.

“So Roy [Helland] comes up – my hair and makeup man – and he said, ‘Bob, go like this.’ And this is the best part of my day when he does that,” recalled the actor.

“And so Redford took the lesson and he just really got into it and he was great. By take five I [felt] so beloved.”

And that was “in spite of the hippos,” she added, which caused some apprehension in the moment.

“The animal that kills the most people in Africa is the hippopotamus,” she explained. “If you get between a hippopotamus and the water, they’ll charge you and they have these jaws. So we were shooting in the river and the hippopotamuses were right above it. I don’t know if they show that in the movie, I can’t remember. But I was aware of it.”

Elsewhere during her visit to the French film festival, where she was awarded an honorary Palme d’Or, Meryl had a very exciting update about a potential third Mamma Mia! Film, telling Deadline that a meeting about the project was “imminent”.