Meryl Streep's Golden Globes Speech (2017)

Ms. Streep’s speech:

Please sit down. Thank you. I love you all. You’ll have to forgive me. I’ve lost my voice in screaming and lamentation this weekend. And I have lost my mind sometime earlier this year, so I have to read.

Thank you, Hollywood Foreign Press. Just to pick up on what Hugh Laurie said: You and all of us in this room really belong to the most vilified segments in American society right now. Think about it: Hollywood, foreigners and the press.

But who are we, and what is Hollywood anyway? It’s just a bunch of people from other places. I was born and raised and educated in the public schools of New Jersey. Viola was born in a sharecropper’s cabin in South Carolina, came up in Central Falls, Rhode Island; Sarah Paulson was born in Florida, raised by a single mom in Brooklyn. Sarah Jessica Parker was one of seven or eight kids in Ohio. Amy Adams was born in Vicenza, Italy. And Natalie Portman was born in Jerusalem. Where are their birth certificates? And the beautiful Ruth Negga was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, raised in London — no, in Ireland I do believe, and she’s here nominated for playing a girl in small-town Virginia.

Ryan Gosling, like all of the nicest people, is Canadian, and Dev Patel was born in Kenya, raised in London, and is here playing an Indian raised in Tasmania. So Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners. And if we kick them all out you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.

They gave me three seconds to say this, so: An actor’s only job is to enter the lives of people who are different from us, and let you feel what that feels like. And there were many, many, many powerful performances this year that did exactly that. Breathtaking, compassionate work.

배우가 해야 할 유일한 일은, 우리와 다른 사람의 삶에 들어가 관객들에게 그 느낌이 어떤건지 느끼게 해주는 겁니다. 그리고 올해 그렇게 해 낸 대단한 연기들이 정말 정말 많았습니다. 숨막힐 듯 아름답고, 함께 연민하는 연기들이었죠.

But there was one performance this year that stunned me. It sank its hooks in my heart. Not because it was good; there was nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job. It made its intended audience laugh, and show their teeth. It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter. Someone he outranked in privilege, power and the capacity to fight back. It kind of broke my heart when I saw it, and I still can’t get it out of my head, because it wasn’t in a movie. It was real life. 

하지만 올해 저를 가장 놀라게 한 연기가 하나 있었죠. 제 가슴에 완전히 사무친 연기였는데요. 연잘해서가 아니라, 훌륭한 점이 있어서도 아닙니다. 그것이 효과적으로 목적을 이뤘기 때문이에요. 그 연기는 표적으로 삼은 청중들이 가짜 웃음을 짓게 만들었습니다. 미국에서 가장 존경받는 자리를 원하는 한 남성이, 장애인 기자를 흉내내는 순간이었습니다. 그는 그 기자에 비해 특권, 권력, 맞서 싸울 능력을 더 가지고 있었어요. 그걸 본 순간 저는 가슴이 무너졌고, 아직도 머리에서 지울 수가 없어요. 왜냐하면 그건 영화가 아니었기 때문입니다. 그건 현실이었어요. 

And this instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life, because it kinda gives permission for other people to do the same thing. Disrespect invites disrespect, violence incites violence. And when the powerful use their position to bully others we all lose. O.K., go on with it.

이렇게 공적인 자리에서 힘을 가진이가 남에게 굴욕감을 주려는 본능을 드러내면 다른 모든 이의 삶에 퍼져 나갈 겁니다. 마치 다른 사람들도 그런 행동을 해도 된다고 승인하는 것과 같기 때문이죠. 혐오는 혐오를 부르고, 폭력은 폭력을 낳습니다. 권력을 가진 사람들이 약자를 괴롭히기 위해 자신의 위치를 이용한다면 우리는 모두 패배할 거예요.

O.K., this brings me to the press. We need the principled press to hold power to account, to call him on the carpet for every outrage. 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.

One more thing: Once, when I was standing around on the set one day, whining about something — you know we were gonna work through supper or the long hours or whatever, Tommy Lee Jones said to me, “Isn’t it such a privilege, Meryl, just to be an actor?” Yeah, it is, and we have to remind each other of the privilege and the responsibility of the act of empathy. We should all be proud of the work Hollywood honors here tonight.

"메릴, 배우로 산다는 건 참 특권이지 않아?" 

네 맞아요. 그래서 우리는 공감을 부르는 연기를 할 수 있는 특권과 그 책임감에 대해서 서로에게 계속 상기시켜줘야 합니다. 우리는 오늘 밤 이 곳에서 할리우드가 기리고 있는 일들을 아주 자랑스럽게 여겨야 합니다.

As my friend, the dear departed Princess Leia, said to me once, take your broken heart, make it into art.

세상을 떠난 사랑하는 제 친구, 레아 공주가 제게 이런 말을 했었습니다.

"부서진 마음을 추스르고, 예술로 승화시키세요."

<Golden Globes 2017>

Meryl Streep