Entertainment Weekly spills all the secrets on this month’s “Mary Poppins Returns” with the stars Emily Blunt and Lin-Manual Miranda gracing the cover. Here’s an excerpt from Meryl’s interview: As Topsy, the three-time Oscar winner has a scene-stealing supporting role in Walt Disney Pictures’ Mary Poppins Returns (in theaters Dec. 19). Streep’s character, who is a cousin to Mary Poppins, is an oddity who involuntarily spends every second Wednesday upside down. She visits to the Banks to fix family heirloom and sings the jazzy “Turning Turtle.” Streep took the role solely to work with Rob Marshall, who directed her in 2014’s Into the Woods. “Rob knew that I wanted in on whatever it was he did next. But I had no idea what he had in his head. And when he [and producer John DeLuca] invited me to talk through this idea, I thought, ‘They’re crazy, these two. They’re just insane. They’ve lost their minds,'” Streep, 69, says with a laugh in in Entertainment Weekly’s Nov. 16 issue (out now). “But It was such a big vision, and it was so ambitious that I said, ‘Oh, well, I want to be in it. Absolutely. Right away.'”

Working with the living legend was a dream come true for Lin-Manuel Miranda, who plays a lamplighter named Jack. “One of the greatest moments I experienced on set was Meryl. She was sort of in weird Mary Poppins aunt mode the whole time, and at one point she goes, ‘Hey, kids, wanna see a perfect pratfall?’ And just boom, face down, went from 90 degrees to flat. You haven’t seen Buster Keaton do a pratfall like this. Everyone rushed over like, ‘Meryl Streep has died!'” he recalls. “And then she just got up and was like, [wiping hands] ‘I learned that at Yale.'”

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