Breaking news: Meryl Streep is good at acting. 

You’d think we’d all have learned this by now, but somehow, Streep manages to one-up herself with every new performance, perfecting new genres and techniques along the way. With Sophie’s Choice (1982), she invented the art of the accent. With Doubt (2008), she invented Boston. And was there even such a thing as dancing before Mamma Mia (2008)? There’s good, and there’s Meryl good. 

As President Janie Orlean in Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up, Streep conquers yet another genre: improv. ”Meryl Streep floored me,” McKay tells Netflix. “She has serious improv game. All day long, she can improvise, and really cogent, sharp, for-the-story improv, not meandering [or] breaking reality.” Our first glimpse of Streep as president of the United States in the film comes when astronomers Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) come to the White House to warn her that they’ve discovered a deadly comet headed straight toward Earth. She handles the situation in the worst possible way, downplaying the threat to make it sound more palatable for the upcoming midterm election. 

According to McKay, the scene was scripted, but Streep and Jonah Hill, who plays her son and chief of staff Jason Orlean, kept the zingers flying throughout, leading to one of the funniest sequences in the entire movie. But as an upcoming episode of The Last Movie Ever Made, a Netflix original podcast about the making of Don’t Look Up, reveals, Streep’s real tour-de-force improv had to be cut for time. Originally, President Orlean was supposed to be on the phone when Mindy and Dibiasky walk in — a power move signaling just how low on the priority list they are. There was no scripted dialogue for the call, so Streep made it up. Over and over again. 

“[Adam McKay] just says, ‘Okay, just say anything. Pick up the phone and then you start the meeting,” Streep tells the podcast. 

“Every single take we did with Meryl, she improvised a different phone call at the head of the scene that she was hanging up on,” associate producer Staci Roberts Steele adds. “Every single time, she had this whole story, where one of them started out like, ‘I don’t think you should get the implants. No, I had implants, I got them taken out.’ And it goes through this whole thing. And then at the end, she says, ‘I love you, goodbye,’ and it’s like, ‘Who is she talking to?’”

Streep ended up improvising between 25 and 30 distinctly absurd phone calls in a row, a fact that McKay still can’t quite believe. “I was in Chicago and did improv pretty much full time for five to six years, and I don’t think I could do that,” he says in the podcast. Eventually, though, the scene was cut after he and editor Hank Corwin decided that it interfered with the rhythm of the story. Streep, for one, is grateful. “Oh God,'' she tells the podcast. “Those might be my worst nightmare.”

Blooper reel? Not for this queen of the craft!