MERYL Streep has revealed how her portrayal of Margaret Thatcher has turned her into a swivel-eyed maniac.
The Oscar-winner prepared for her role by spending six months in the gym beating up minors and losing 80 percent of her soul in a punishing regime of dehumanisation.
Famous for her level of preparation, she controversially had one of her children stolen by Neo-Nazis before working on Sophie’s Choice and still suffers from the raging syphilis she contracted prior to filming Out Of Africa.
Streep said: “We were filming a scene in Manchester where I’m driving around in a jeep choosing random Northerners for the firing squad when the director introduced me to a little creature called ‘Tevez’.
“When it opened what I presume was its mouth I heard the Argentinian accent and I just went proper mental.
“The next thing I knew it was two days later, I’m stood outside the gutted ruins of a children’s hospital being interviewed by a police officer and I stink of petrol.”
She added: “I think we all have a dark place inside us but making this film showed me somebody whose dark place was so big it had an airport at either end of it.”
Meanwhile the director of Long Black Tongue: The Margaret Thatcher Story said her biggest challenge was making a film with the least sympathetic protagonist in cinematic history.
Phyllida Lloyd added: “Forest Whitaker had a couple of scenes where Idi Amin was bullishly charismatic and at least Darth Vader had a light saber.
“But Meryl is so convincing that on several occasions we had to stop filming after I’d thrown a chair at her while shouting ‘that’s for the Poll Tax, you manky old c**t’.”
