Thirty years of carefully maintained mutual admiration, thirty years of the press tour version of the story — two legends, one iconic film, nothing but warmth and laughter and the professional courtesy of women who respect each other too much to say anything that might complicate the myth — and then Meryl Streep, the woman who has spent her entire career saying exactly what she means with exactly the precision the moment requires, sat down and said the thing about Death Becomes Her that nobody in Hollywood had yet been willing to put into actual words.

The set of that film was not, it turns out, the seamless collaboration of two perfectly matched comic geniuses that the official narrative has been presenting for three decades — it was something messier and more honest and considerably more interesting than that, a creative environment shaped by two women of completely different temperaments, completely different working methods, and completely different ideas about what the job required of them, who were simultaneously trying to outdo each other, genuinely unsure whether they liked each other, and producing in the friction between those two realities some of the most explosively funny and most perfectly committed work that either of them has ever put on screen. What Meryl Streep just exposed about what Goldie Hawn actually did on that set — not the version Goldie tells, not the version the studio told, but the version that Meryl Streep witnessed firsthand and has apparently decided, thirty years on, she is finally allowed to share — has landed on the film’s enormous and devoted fanbase with the particular delight of people who loved something for decades and are finding out that the reality behind it was even more entertaining than the movie itself.