Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks are teaming up! The legendary actors will appear in their first movie together, Steven Spielberg’s The Post, Deadline reported Monday, March 6.
The drama will focus on the role the Washington Post played in unveiling the Pentagon Papers in 1971. Streep, 67, will star as the newspaper’s publisher Kay Graham, and Hanks, 60, will play its editor Ben Bradlee, both of whom fought the federal government over the Post’s right to publish the leaked documents.
The casting news comes at an interesting time, as the press is currently fighting a different battle with President Donald Trump. Both Hanks and Streep have lent their voices to the debate in recent months. Last week, Hanks sent an espresso machine to the White House Press Corps, with a note encouraging the journalists to “keep up the good fight for Truth, Justice and the American Way. Especially the Truth part.”
BREAKING: White House press corps receives brand-new espresso machine from @tomhanks. Come for the coffee… stay for his note. ? pic.twitter.com/cirbLKHEt0
— Peter Alexander (@PeterAlexander) March 2, 2017
Earlier this year, the Florence Foster Jenkins star used her Golden Globes acceptance speech to criticize the commander in chief’s treatment of a disabled reporter while on the campaign trail in November 2015.
“We need the principled press to hold power to account, to call him on the carpet for every outrage,” she urged after receiving the Cecil B. DeMille Award January 8. “That’s why our founders enshrined the press and its freedoms in the Constitution. So I only ask the famously well-heeled Hollywood Foreign Press and all of us in our community to join me in supporting the Committee to Protect Journalists, because we’re gonna need them going forward, and they’ll need us to safeguard the truth.”
A release date for The Post has not yet been announced.
