Meryl Streep swam "a mile a day" to prepare for ‘Into The Woods’.
The 65-year-old actress knew she needed to work on her "lung capacity" to be able to sing for her role as the Witch in the new musical movie and found regular exercise was just the thing she needed to improve her vocals.
Asked what she had done to prepare, she said: "Well, I knew going in that I’d have to really work on my lung capacity and my ability to experiment with the sounds that I normally use when I’m yelling at people or singing and so I swam a mile a day in the summer time just before we went and it just gave me a lot of breath, that was good.!
Meryl – who has four children, Henry, 35, Marnie, 31, Grace, 28, and Louisa, 22, with husband Don Gummer – admitted she was terrified her youngest daughter "hated" the film when she first watched it but was relieved to find her fears were unfounded.
She said: "My daughter’s [Louisa] 22 and doesn’t really like musicals and I showed her the film and she watched it very seriously and I thought, ‘Oh, she hates it. She hates it’. But at the end she said, ‘I love everything in this movie’.
"She said, ‘It reminded me of when we lived in New York and I was in fifth grade and 9/11 happened’ … Children know bad stuff happens."
And the veteran star rejected the idea the dark tale isn’t a typical Disney movie.
She said: "It’s a Disney message because the film that marked my life as a seven year old was ‘Bambi’ and the mother dies in the first five minutes and yet life goes on."
Meryl Streep swam to sing
