Meryl Streep hails murdered Panama Papers reporter

Meryl Streep has praised an investigative reporter who exposed the shady dealings depicted in her new movie The Laundromat.
Steven Soderbergh’s new film, which also stars Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas, is a comic telling of the 2016 Panama Papers scandal, when powerful individuals across the world were found to have engaged in tax avoidance schemes.
Although The Laundromat is a comedy, Meryl told The Guardian ahead of the film’s premiere at the Venice Film Festival on Sunday (01Sep19), that it had a serious message, and hailed Daphne Caruana Galizia, the Maltese reporter working on the story, who was killed in a car bombing in 2017.
The three-time Oscar winner said the film “is an entertaining, flash, funny way of telling a very, very dark joke that’s being played on all of us. And many of the victims are journalists who got the word out.”
Hailing Daphne, who exposed government corruption in her homeland, the 70-year-old actress added: “People died and people die still to get the word out. This movie is fun and it’s funny but it’s really, really, really important.”
Meryl plays Ellen Martin in the film, a fictional widow whose digging in the film helps journalists expose the scandal.
Asked about her character’s motivations, she said grief is a huge motivator to anyone who has been the victim of injustice or a tragedy.
“The parents of the children shot at Parkland high school, the parents of the children shot at Newtown, Connecticut – those people don’t stop; they don’t stop in trying to change the world. If it’s personal, you don’t stop, and we rely on those people, for whom it really counts, to save us all.”
The Laundromat hits cinemas on 27 September (19).