‘Don’t Look Up’: Meryl Streep’s Improv Led To That Absurd Brontaroc Mid-Credits Scene

Warning: Spoilers for Don’t Look Up follow.

Since it premiered on Netflix on Christmas Eve, Adam McKay‘s apocalyptic comedy Don’t Look Up has become the subject of fervent online discourse. But no matter what you thought of the film, I think we can all agree that the mid-credits scene is absolutely bonkers — and as it turns out, it’s all the result of Meryl Streep‘s improv skills.

For context: Late in the film, Streep’s conniving President Orlean asks unnervingly chipper billionaire tech mogul Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance) how she’s going to die. So he uses a predictive algorithm to look into the future and concludes that she will be eaten “by the brontaroc” but “we don’t know what that means.” She doesn’t have time to question that strange response, since the world’s wealthiest people all escape into space aboard a fancy space ship before the movie’s central planet-annihilating comet destroys Earth.

The mid-credits scene picks up 22,740 years later, when the ship lands on an unknown world and the ultra-rich emerge naked from their cryo-chambers. Everything is going great, until alien creatures suddenly eat Orlean alive and turn on the rest of the humans.

In a recent interview with Variety, McKay revealed that the cast actually came up with this scenario in the middle of filming.

“We were shooting the scene with Rylance, Meryl, and Jonah [Hill] in the BASH control room for the second launch,” McKay said. “I’m like, ‘We should play around. Why don’t you guys talk about something? You never know. It could show up.’ And Meryl, who’s such a great improviser, says, ‘I want to know how I’m gonna die!'”

McKay had a suggestion: “What if you’re eating by a creature?”

“Mark, Meryl, and I kind of cleaned it up a little bit,” he added. “I think every time we said the name of the creature, it changed — and the take we used was a brontaroc. And then after we shot it, I said, ‘That’s really funny. We should end with her getting eaten by a brontaroc!”

At this point, they had already filmed a different, ultimately scrapped mid-credits scene. “The original ending was, ‘Oh, let’s start building our houses.’ And then someone says, ‘Oh, the pod carrying all the workers blew up,'” McKay said. “And then it was Mark Rylance going, ‘I’ll give anyone who builds me a house a billion dollars.’ And then the guy next to him was like, ‘I’ll give $2 billion.’ And then you realize they’re all billionaires.”

Don’t Look Up is now streaming on Netflix.

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