“Ben Bradlee loved Katharine Graham. He loved her deeply,” said Tom Hanks about his on-screen relationship with Meryl Streep in “The Post.” He and Streep discussed their roles as real-life Washington Post editor Bradlee and publisher Graham when they unveiled the film to press and industry in New York City on November 19 (watch above). Hanks added, “It was a love that came from a deep, deep respect and understanding of all she’d been through and all she’d accomplished, and the burden of being the owner of what had been her father’s and her husband’s newspaper. He viewed her as this magnificent example that if she had been a man it just would have been a different contest, and so every time he came to loggerheads with her — and they fought quite a bit — it was from a place beyond respect for your boss.”
“The Post,” directed by Steven Spielberg, tells the true story of the Pentagon Papers that exposed decades of the government misleading the American public about the Vietnam War. Those documents were leaked to the New York Times, which was blocked from publishing further material by Richard Nixon‘s justice department, and then the Washington Post, which decided to publish anyway despite the looming legal threat.
“I really thought what was most interesting is that it was respect,” said Streep about the rapport between Bradlee and Graham. “It was a relationship between a man and a woman that wasn’t based on any kind of other feelings. It was a friendship that was so deep it was like family … His bravado and her bravery, it’s just kind of gorgeous.”
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