Donald Trump and Meryl Streep are connected through 'The Manchurian Candidate'
As we mortals tend to think all celebrities know each other, the Donald Trump/Meryl Streep dust-up heard 'round the world got me thinking: Have these two ever been in a movie together?
The answer is not really, but their associations are a lot closer -- and in one case, way more on the nose -- than you might think.
Streep took a flame-thrower to Trump on Sunday night during her speech at the Golden Globes, and she did it without once mentioning his name. It was a delicious dish of subtle shade, the kind of thing Streep -- a fierce awards competitor who, make no mistake, is campaigning hard for a Florence Foster Jenkins Oscar nomination right now -- is known around Hollywood for serving up particularly well.
In the least surprising news ever, Trump reacted Monday on Twitter. Bigly.
It goes on, but the thing that piqued my interest was his "who doesn't know me" line. And while it's probably true that they've never actually met, Hollywood is a small town, after all.
We consulted the Oracle of Bacon -- a cheat-site for anyone playing "six degrees from Kevin Bacon," that pre-internet game where you'd trip through your mental movies database to connect any given actor to Bacon via as few links as possible. As it works for any combination of actors, I ran Trump and Streep to see what I got.
Whoa, could that be right? The Manchurian Candidate?
I checked it through and sure enough: In the 2004 remake of the 1962 classic (which starred Laurence Harvey, Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury), Streep plays Sen. Eleanor Shaw, a machiavellian politician with a mean streak who pushes her son (Liev Schreiber) to become president.
The remake (which also stars Denzel Washington) doesn't deviate much from the original premise: the son of a prominent political family is brainwashed by Communists to be an internal operative and assassin.
In this case, their common connection is Željko Ivanek, the Emmy-winning Slovenian-American actor who plays the Communist operative in the Manchurian remake, and also plays a Securities and Exchange Commission agent in the 1996 film The Associate -- in which Trump makes a cameo.
And there you have it: The two degrees of separation between Trump and Streep runs through The Manchurian Candidate, which is the kind of thing you just can't make up.
Topics Golden Globes Donald Trump
Josh Dickey is Mashable's Entertainment Editor, leading Mashable's TV, music, gaming and sports reporters as well as writing movie features and reviews.Josh has been the Film Editor at Variety, Entertainment Editor at The Associated Press and Managing Editor at TheWrap.com.A finalist for the Los Angeles Press Club's Best Entertainment Feature in 2015 for "Everyone is Altered: The Secret Hollywood Procedure that Fooled Us for Years," Josh received his BA in Journalism from The University of Minnesota.In between screenings, he can be found skating longboards, shredding guitar and wandering the streets of his beloved downtown Los Angeles.
