STREEP Measure for Measure. Great play.
EW Were you nervous meeting Al?
STREEP Yeah! I remember the old ''Godfather'' days, walking around with you downtown. It was horrible. People would scream at you. I determined I was never going to get famous.
PACINO People relate to you because of the attending celebrity baggage --
STREEP No, it isn't about your baggage -- it's about the fact that your face is 40 feet big on the screen!
PACINO Right.
STREEP It's like the ancient Greek actors who made shoes so that they would get bigger on stage -- you're sort of the modern-day gods or something. And you can't help it; you can't help making that assumption that the person is bigger than who they are.
PACINO I remember a woman grabbing my hand, an elderly Italian woman, and she kissed it, as if to say ''Godfather.'' But I don't know if that's the way it is anymore.
STREEP Now everybody is famous. It's a little bit easier.
EW What's your favorite Pacino performance?
STREEP I probably haven't seen everything you've done.
PACINO Excuse me?
STREEP I know. He wouldn't have let me work on this picture if he'd known that. I'm not pumping you, but this [''Angels''] is one of my favorites. The one where you couldn't go to sleep? ''Insomnia?'' I just thought, ''How can this man surprise me again and again?'' But ''Dog Day Afternoon'' is one of my favorite movies in the world.
PACINO And if you're talking about Meryl, I've seen them all over and over again.... I was just watching the one where she played the Australian --''A Cry in the Dark.'' I watch ''Out of Africa'' all the time.
EW ''Angels in America.'' Why did you want to participate in this project?
STREEP There are certain things that come along that you just don't even get a vote on. This material, its ambition, the people involved -- irresistible. Irresistible. This is a rare artist, Tony Kushner, and that his work would be lifted out of a context where a limited number of people could see it, into a sort of amplification -- that's why I wanted to do it.
PACINO I agree completely. It's in the pantheon of Great Things.
EW Do you find that the politics of the play, which are very much steeped in the Reagan era, are still relevant today?
PACINO I feel it sort of resonates more. It's almost like a painting. When we saw it 10, 12 years ago, we were in the painting --
STREEP Yeah yeah yeah --
PACINO -- and now we're able to back away from it, take a look at it, and we see more, and experience it in another way.
EW The scenes that you have together --
STREEP [in her Ethel Rosenberg Noo Yawk accent] He took forever to die.
PACINO Oh, yeah. [Laughs] It was a complicated scene from a technical standpoint --
STREEP But it was fun. All the scenes were shot in a little room, so the intensity of the scene was built-in --
