On 20 October 2023, at the Teatro Campoamor in Oviedo, Meryl Streep received the Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts. In her speech, she tried to put words on what actors actually do, and argued that empathy, the core of her craft, is a skill the whole world needs.
The mystery of acting
Streep began with humour: having played extraordinary people all her life, part of her suspects she is now being taken for one of them. She thanked the jury for recognising the art of acting, whose essence, she said, remains a mystery even to her. An actor’s gift of transformation is hard to measure, yet a performance that moves her can stay with her for days, sometimes decades. When she feels someone else’s pain or joy, she feels more alive and connected: to other people, and to the experience of being someone else.
Empathy as a current
Empathy, she said, is the beating heart of the actor’s gift. It is the current that links her pulse to a fictional character’s, and then carries it to the person in the audience, to the woman sitting next to them and to her friend, so that everyone feels it at the same time. It is easier to connect with people who resemble us, but she has always been drawn to the opposite instinct: our capacity to follow the stories of strangers as if they were our own.
She has been criticised for straying too far from her own experience: all those accents, nationalities, even men. Who is a middle-class girl from New Jersey to play the first woman Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, a Polish Holocaust survivor, a rabbi or the arbiter of taste in the fashion world? She answered with Pablo Picasso, for whom imitating others is necessary but imitating oneself is pathetic, and with Penélope Cruz, who said you cannot live your life looking at yourself from someone else’s point of view. She perseveres, because an actor’s job is to inhabit lives unlike their own and make them felt by audiences, whether in a small theatre in Málaga or streaming anywhere in the world. Actors are taught not to judge their characters: the audience will judge, the actor argues their case.
A warning from Lorca
Babies cry at the sight of someone else’s tears, she reminded the audience, but as we grow up we suppress that shared humanity in favour of self-protection or ideology, and grow suspicious of those who are not like us. In college she designed the costumes for Federico García Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba, where one of the sisters, Martirio, cries out that history repeats itself. Lorca wrote the play two months before his own murder. Performing such a work, she said, is lending the dead a voice the living can hear.
The ability to sit together in the dark and feel what strangers feel is something we should carry back into daylight. In an increasingly hostile and volatile world, empathy can be a radical form of diplomacy. She closed with another rule taught to every actor: what matters is listening.