Meryl Streep wants to make a comedy with Tom Hanks.

Steven Spielberg, Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks

Steven Spielberg, Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks

The award-winning stars have been friends for years but appear on the big screen together for the first time in Steven Spielberg's journalistic drama 'The Post' - which chronicles the Washington Post newspaper's decision to defy threats from then-President Richard Nixon to publish the Pentagon Papers stories in 1971 - but the 68-year-old actress would also like to do something lighter with her pal.

She told him: "It is funny. I would have loved to have done something funny with you. Because you're really funny."

Meryl's experience making 'The Post' was very different to Tom's because as publisher Katharine Graham, she was more isolated from the rest of the actors playing the staff of the newspaper than her co-star, who appears as executive editor Ben Bradlee determined to unveil the US government's lies over the Vietnam War.

Speaking to Empire magazine, Tom said: "I love the hang more than ever. The atmosphere of making a movie, the creativity of a big ensemble like this. I had a bunch of great people. We had the newsroom. There was no reason to linger in the trailer on this because in the newsroom we had a great place to lie down, we had food. I got to pretend to smoke cigarettes so I always had something to do. And the scenes in Bradlee's house were the same thing. We all just sat around in the living room between shots."

Meryl replied: "You were lucky. You had the hang. I did not have the hang. All I did was sit in my trailer. Anxiety, anxiety, anxiety. That's sort of who I was in the film. It's interesting I've had this experience on a number of movies now. 'The Devil Wears Prada', the Margaret Thatcher movie and now this. The woman who is the boss and a kind of solitary, isolated figure. On 'The Devil Wears Prada', Stanley Tucci had the great hang with Emily Blunt. All lots of fun. I walk in and there's like a..."