Meryl Streep has something she needs to say.
At the end of her appearance on The Late Show on Wednesday, Stephen Colbert asked the Oscar-winning actress if there was anything that she’d wished he had asked her about “the world of entertainment or movies, or the world in general.”
The Devil Wears Prada 2 star had a very specific thought to share. “Yes,” she told Colbert, “I hope that the SAVE America Act, if that passes, all the married women that have changed their names are going to have to go to the registrar and prove that they are who they are.”
“This is what I understand,” she continued, “Otherwise, when you get to the voting booth in November, you might be disqualified because your name on your birth certificate doesn’t match your name on the voting rolls. Everybody has to get…”
The studio audience erupted in “boos,” briefly interrupting her point as she looked out at them mischievously.
Streep did not reference MAGA, Donald Trump, or any other right-wing keywords, but her message was clear. “This is such a pain in the neck because you have to go, but do it,” she said, “because otherwise you’ll be turned away. And I think that women need to be heard, especially in this moment.”
The SAVE Act, which passed the House of Representatives in February, would replace the self-attestation of U.S. citizenship with documentation requirements. Any prospective voter without a valid U.S. passport would be asked to provide a birth certificate with a matching ID, which married individuals who have changed their last name would not have. Only about half of all Americans have a valid U.S. passport.
The bill has stalled in the Senate, where it requires 60 votes to move forward. Revisions to obtain enough Senate Democratic support for the bill are ongoing—as are Trump’s threats to Republican lawmakers if they can’t get it done.
On Wednesday, Trump, a frequent mail-in voter himself, waged a war on “mail-in cheating” and signed an executive order to limit mail-in ballots only to those who have been “verified” by his Department of Homeland Security.
Trump’s latest move is far from the first time that Streep has used her platform to call him out. Streep dressed up as Trump to troll him in June of 2016, donning a wig and fat suit to sing an altered version of a song from the musical Kiss Me Kate.
She slammed Trump the following year while accepting her Lifetime Achievement at the Golden Globes, where she shared that she was “heartbroken” about Trump having still won the presidential election after mocking a disabled reporter on the campaign trail.
“It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter, someone he outranked in privilege, power, and the capacity to fight back,” she said on stage at the time. “It kind of broke my heart when I saw it. I still can’t get it out of my head because it wasn’t in a movie. It was real life.”
