“You can cut it off now, thank you,” Meryl Streep says with a laugh after revisiting the first of various clips from her five-decade career for Vanity Fair’s Scene Selection. She may feel discomfort watching her work, but the three-time Oscar winner is happy to dish behind-the-scenes stories—from starring opposite Robert De Niro and then boyfriend John Cazale in the 1978 Vietnam epic The Deer Hunter to her latest, the hotly anticipated The Devil Wears Prada 2.

Twenty years after the events of the original 2006 film, existing in a media landscape in which “everybody is destabilized,” Streep’s Runway magazine editor in chief Miranda Priestly’s “authority is slightly under siege,” says the 76-year-old actor. “Who takes charge of this movie? It’s not Miranda, clearly. Who takes charge is Emily Blunt,” says Streep. “So I felt like I could relax with my friends a little bit better. And also I’m older and I don’t probably give as many fucks as I used to.”

Elsewhere on her rewatch, Streep (or “Mimi,” as her grandchildren call her) recalls a particularly intimate moment on Out of Africa (1985) opposite Robert Redford, which required him to learn how to wash a woman’s hair. “Was he the most divine man in the world?” Streep wonders aloud. “It’s not a sex scene, it’s a love scene,” she tells VF of the sultry shampoo. “I didn’t want that scene to end, it felt so good.”

Things were, at times, less jovial on the set of Death Becomes Her, the 1992 body-horror comedy, recently adapted into a Broadway musical, that starred Streep and Goldie Hawn as image-obsessed frenemies. “Goldie, she was always late to set,” Streep recalls. “But she was so adorable.… The best laugher in America, really.… I’m always on time and annoying.” Hawn’s frequent late arrivals did cause tensions. “I had a beef with her, but I loved her. I love her,” Streep corrects herself. “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 a documentary on Beverly Hills.”