What was claimed
A photograph shows Meryl Streep on the New York subway shortly after an unsuccessful audition for a role in King Kong.
Our verdict
This is not true. The photograph was taken years later, when Ms Streep was a successful actress.
Photo of Meryl Streep on the subway is not after King Kong audition
10 February 2022
A misleading meme about the actressMeryl Streep is being shared again on Facebook.
The post shows a picture of Ms Streep on the New York subway many years ago beside a story she supposedly told about it.
The photograph is real, but the story, which is an altered version of a story Ms Streep once told on the Graham Norton Show, does not relate to it.
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Where did the meme come from?
The story and photograph were first shared together by a Facebook account in the name of “Meryl L Streep” in November 2015. The post spread very widely and was quickly debunked by Buzzfeed and the Daily Mail (although the Telegraph website still carries an incorrect report about it). Shortly afterwards, the Facebook account was deleted. The post was also debunked in 2019 by the US fact checking site Snopes.
The story in the post appears to be told in the words of Ms Streep herself, and explains the rejection she experienced during an audition for a remake of the film King Kong.
The basis of the story—Ms Streep being told that she was too ugly for the part—is very similar to an anecdote Ms Streep told on the Graham Norton Show. However, the Facebook post also claims that this was “a pivotal moment” in Streep’s career, when she was still dreaming of “becoming an actress”, and adds more comments that Streep supposedly made.
In fact the photograph does not show Ms Streep after her audition for King Kong. It was taken in August 1981, five years after the King Kong remake was released. At the time it was taken, she was already an Academy Award-winning actress.
The Facebook version of the story says that Ms Streep has won 18 Academy Awards. In fact, by 2015, she had won three and been nominated 19 times. She has since been nominated two further times.
Photo by Jack Mitchell, CC BY-SA 4.0
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as partly false because this photograph was not taken shortly after Meryl Streep’s audition for King Kong. The story appears to be an altered version of one she told on television.