Only Murders Boss Tells All! Inside Meryl Streep and Melissa McCarthy’s Epic ‘Catfight’ in Episode 7

Warning: The following contains spoilers from Season 4, Episode 7 of Hulu’ s Only Murders in the Building.

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Tuesday’s Only Murders in the Building enters the “Valley of the Dolls” — aka the Suffolk County home of Charles’ kid sister Doreen (played by Melissa McCarthy). The Long Island native quickly takes a liking to “Short King” Oliver — who, unlike her husband “Big Mike,” is emotionally available — and she’s flooded by jealousy when Loretta (Meryl Streep) pays Putnam a surprise visit.

In a pathetic attempt to win him over, Doreen does her hair up like Loretta, but Oliver is unfazed. His heart belongs to the Grey’s New Orleans: Family Burn Unit star — and soon after, Loretta asks Oliver for his hand in marriage. (That’s right, folks: Only Murders is headed for a wedding!) But before Loretta has a chance to propose, the newly rejected Doreen instigates a fight. Mabel tries (and fails) to break up their brawl, while Eva Longoria eggs them on. They ultimately call a truce… but not before Loretta beats Doreen with her own hair extensions.

Naturally, we needed to know how Streep and McCarthy felt about fighting each other, so we went to series boss John Hoffman for the inside scoop. As he tells it, Streep was ecstatic about the opportunity to get physical.

“Before the season began, I had dinner with Marty and Meryl, and I was just going to walk Meryl through her storyline for the season,” he recalls. “I teed all of that up, and then I said, ‘There’s going to be a catfight, basically over Oliver, between you and Melissa McCarthy.’ And literally, I watched her raise her hands over her head, and she went, ‘I bet on me .'”

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Next up was a phone call with McCarthy. “I was pitching her and I said, ‘So, your character’s name is Doreen,’ and she said, ‘I’m in!'” Hoffman tells us. “Then I went down the list of things — all of the dolls, the Charles relationship, the Oliver relationship… and when I got to that scene, she goes, ‘I’m going to hang up because I’m going to pass out. I’m so in love with everything you’re telling me.”

Initially, the plan was to let stuntwomen act out the big fight. “We knew we were going to be needing a lot of them,” the EP says. But once Streep and McCarthy were brought to set and shown how the scene would play out, the Emmy and Oscar winners insisted that the scene go even “bigger,” and that their scrimmage should be “much more expansive.” They insisted on working it out on their own, and “they totally took it over. We shot them doing it over and over again.

“It’s insane,” the Only Murders co-creator exclaims. “I was like, ‘Meryl’s gonna break her neck!’ She goes flying over that couch, and it’s them. There may be one shot of a stuntwoman at one point, but outside of that, it’s all them.” Once they took charge, he says, “we had to rethink how we were going to shoot it. We went handheld in that moment, let it go raw, and they were unbelievable.”

What did you think of Only Murders in the Building Episode 7? And how are you feeling about Season 4 as we head into the home stretch? Sound off in Comments.

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