Only Murders In The Building Season 3 Opening Is A True Story From Meryl Streep's Childhood

This post contains spoilers for "Only Murders in the Building."

Of the main additions to the cast of "Only Murders in the Building" season 3, Loretta (Meryl Streep) is perhaps the most compelling. She's a talented actress who has nevertheless gone her whole life without booking a part, not until Oliver (Martin Short) notices her for his new play. When Oliver asks her that long-awaited question, "Where have you been?" her reaction is one of the show's most heartwarming, beautiful moments. Throughout the first two episodes, Streep is deeply sympathetic in her role as an underdog actress trying desperately not to blow her first big shot; it's just a shame she might have killed a dude.

But regardless of whether adult Loretta is a murderer, we at least know child Loretta was innocent. The opening scene where child Loretta goes to a Broadway musical and falls in love with the theater is still pure and wholesome, regardless of what unflattering revelations might be in store for the character. What makes it even better is the unplanned connection it has to Meryl Streep's childhood. Streep had a near-identical experience as a kid, something the writers apparently didn't even know about as they were writing the script. 

"I started to tell her the opening of our first episode for 'No Strings,' and this little 10-year-old girl from St. Louis at her first Broadway show gets smitten by the Broadway bug or the theater bug," the show's creator John Hoffman explained to The Playlist. "And I said, 'It was 'No Strings' or a Richard Rogers musical.' And she cut me off right at the beginning, and she said, 'I saw that.' And she said, 'Diahann Carroll, my mother took me to it when I was about 10.'"

"I was like, 'O.K!'" Hoffman continued, "And she literally on the Zoom started to sing the song that our lovely Rosharra Francis is singing in the opening of Season Three ... And I was like, 'Meryl, you have to stop right now because I'm going to lose it, because I'm going to send you the script after we hang up this Zoom, and you're going to see on page one that lyric you just sang is on page one.'"

It was a fun, bizarre connection, one that seemed to all but ensure Streep would be joining the show for its third season. (And possibly for even longer, depending on how this potential romance with Oliver pans out.) In addition to the award-winning actress wanting "a moment of levity in her life" when reaching out to the show, Streep's addition is also fun purely due to the meta joke of it all: The idea of Streep playing a down-on-her-luck actress who's never been cast in a role before is very funny. Whereas Streep got her first acting gig as a teenager, poor Loretta has to wait until her seventies to get her breakout role. (Which is interrupted by the lead actor's untimely death, then his subsequent revival, then his untimely death again.)

But while Loretta's and Meryl Streep's lives clearly diverged shortly after that first trip to Broadway, that moment shared between them is still a sweet, special surprise. "We were both like, 'What the hell?'" Hoffman said about the coincidence. "So it had that kind of lovely, unpredictable sort of sweet fate around it."

New episodes of "Only Murders in the Building" season 3 premiere every Tuesday on Hulu.