“She’s just talking, being regular old Streep, and I’m like, ‘No, I can’t, I don’t know.’ I couldn’t talk. I just lurked. I was weird. I was a creeper,” admitted Brown.

At the premiere of his latest film, Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction, Brown had a new story to tell.

Brown was fresh from the Academy Museum’s annual gala where he’d met his icon. “Fucking fantastic,” he said of the night. “To be in the presence of one of your heroes, oftentimes you’re disappointed, but she exceeded expectations. She told me she was a fan which almost made me pee on myself. I was like, ‘You don’t know who I am!’ And she said, ‘Of course I do.’ Then, she touched me and held my hand, and I was like, ‘Oh my God — Meryl actually knows who I am.’”

Brown seemed equally stoked about his role in Jefferson’s critically acclaimed film which has already earned Brown a Spirit Award nomination for outstanding supporting performance.

“It’s kind of fun to be a hot mess,” he said of playing the brother of Jeffrey Wright’s character, a seemingly out-of-control plastic surgeon who has recently come out of the closet. “I’m normally the guy that everybody expects to hold things together while they deal with the person who is being a hot mess. It’s nice to be the hot mess that has to be dealt with. But it’s also sort of an interesting thing because [my character] is funny, and the funny comes out of a place of pain because he just doesn’t want to be told what to do anymore after having to sort of self-impose closet himself. When it’s all said and done, Clilff will find his way back to a place of calm. But you kind of have to go through that when you have such a major upheaval in life. Things will be messy until they’re not.”