Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn spent the better part of Death Becomes Her in 1992 doing something that neither of them had much experience with and both of them turned out to be extraordinary at — playing absolute, operatic, gloriously unhinged comic villains opposite each other with a commitment and a physical fearlessness that left Robert Zemeckis directing two of the finest actresses of their generation and apparently wondering on a daily basis how he had gotten this lucky.

The film became a cult classic, a camp touchstone, a movie that people who saw it in 1992 have been quoting and rewatching and pressing on other people ever since, and the chemistry between Streep and Hawn — the specific, crackling, mutually combustible energy of two world-class talents who had never really played in this register before and discovered simultaneously that they were both completely magnificent at it — has been one of the most discussed and most mythologized behind-the-scenes dynamics in Hollywood comedy history. What Meryl Streep has just revealed about what actually happened between them on that set — the real dynamic beneath the polished anecdotes and the press tour laughter and the thirty years of carefully maintained mutual admiration — is not a scandal and not a falling out and not the kind of revelation that damages anyone, but something more interesting and more human than any of those things, the honest account of what it is actually like to work at the absolute peak of your craft alongside someone equally brilliant who approaches everything about the process completely differently than you do, and what that friction and that difference and that occasional genuine tension produced when it was channeled into two women trying to kill each other on screen.