Fresh Look At Meryl Streep's Into The Woods Witch

Somebody needs a hairbrush. Or possibly a hedge trimmer.

Continuing our sneak peek at the winter preview in the new issue of Empire, here's a fresh look at Meryl Streep in Rob Marshall's film adaptation of Into The Woods, the Stephen Sondheim musical that takes a whole lot of fairytales, smashes them together and then royally messes them up.{Into The Woods - Exclusive New Still}

This still clearly comes from the scene, glimpsed in the trailer below, where Streep bursts in on the baker (James Corden) and his wife (Emily Blunt - wait, does that make no sense as a pairing to anyone else?). They wished to have children, but a curse was laid on the baker's father by the witch decades before, and the only way she's willing to lift it is if they find her four ingredients for a potion. Cue a quest that brings them into conflict with other fairytale characters, some of them rather different to how you remember.

And despite what the trailer below would have you believe, it's a musical to boot. "After you do Sondheim," Kendrick told the magazine this month, "everything else literally seems like ABC. That shit was so hard. It was so wonderful, but really challenging in the most glorious way."

The film also stars Johnny Depp, Chris Pine, Anna Kendrick, Billy Magnussen, Lucy Punch, Christine Baranski, Tracey Ullman and Frances de la Tour. Into The Woods hits US screens on Christmas Day, and the UK on January 9. You can read more about it in, you guessed it, this month's Empire magazine, on sale now.

from Empire News