Goldie Hawn addressed her Death Becomes Her costar Meryl Streep‘s revelation that they had “beef” on set due to Hawn’s frequent tardiness.
“I think I’m 15 minutes late to everything. … I mean, honestly, it’s unbelievable,” Hawn, 80, admitted to Entertainment Tonight on Wednesday, May 6. “But, I think we got through that. I mean, we’ve been such great friends for so long. But it is our joke.”
Streep, 76, recently looked back on the experience of filming director Robert Zemeckis’ 1992 cult classic, where she and Hawn played aging Hollywood actresses who take a magic potion to restore their youth. The three-time Oscar winner admitted to Vanity Fair that she and Hawn had two very different approaches to working on Death Becomes Her.
“Goldie, she was always late to set,” Streep recalled on Thursday, April 30. “But she was so adorable. And I’m always on time, you know, and annoying. But she’s late, and she had a red convertible, I remember, and she’d drive herself to set. So that was probably the problem.”
The Devil Wears Prada 2 star went on, “She’d drive herself to set. She had her hair all … ‘Oh, gosh, sorry!’ And everybody thought, ‘Oh, she’s so cute.’ Yeah. So I had a beef with her.”
Streep eventually clarified that she and Hawn got past any “beef” long ago and now both look back fondly on Death Becomes Her.
“I loved her. I love her,” Streep said of Hawn. “She’s one of my buddies, and over the years, we’ve had some laughs about that movie because people love it. I thought it was like a documentary on Beverly Hills.”
Speaking to ET on Wednesday, Hawn jokingly flipped the script by questioning whether Streep was simply “too early” on set.
“So, she said I was too late on the set. Maybe she’s too early, I don’t know,” she pointed out on Wednesday. “You know, sometimes when you’re too early, you’re still waiting for somebody and you think, ‘Oh god, where the hell is she?’”
Death Becomes Her was a financial success at the time but sharply divided critics. Over the years, the dark comedy has developed a cult following and even spawned a Broadway musical adaptation in 2024 that received 10 Tony Award nominations.
Zemeckis also pioneered computer-generated visual effects for Death Becomes Her’s gruesome scenes showcasing the grim physical side effects of Hollywood starlets Madeline Ashton (Streep) and Helen Sharp’s (Hawn) anti-aging potion. The movie won a Best Visual Effects Award at the 65th Academy Awards in March 1993.
Death Becomes Her continues to have a dedicated fanbase more than 30 years after its release. Drew Barrymore revealed on her daytime talk show in August 2025 that she was interested in remaking the 1992 hit with Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston. (Barrymore and Aniston worked together on He’s Just Not That Into You and have both played Sandler’s love interests on the big screen.)
“We’ve batted around some ideas,” Barrymore revealed on The Drew Barrymore Show. “As a joke, we say we’ll make the Three’s Company movie, but I’m really bullish on Death Becomes Her, a remake of that.”
She added, “Adam knows that I really want to work with him and Jennifer Aniston together. They both know that.”
