Meryl Streep might be considered the greatest Hollywood actress alive by many, but she admits being quite off colour on the first day of shoot of her new film.

Streep, who started filming for "Don't Look Up" recently, said in an interview with host Stephen Colbert, that she was commuting from her home in the Berkshires in Massachusetts to the Boston set of the film, which also stars Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio, reports people.com.

"It's about a global catastrophe but it's sort of funny like 'Dr. Strangelove' for 2020 about global warming, a metaphor of that," she said about her film, in which she plays the president of the United States.

Dr. Strangelove, one of the greatest films made by the legendary Stanley Kubrick, is a 1964 black comedy that follows an Air Force General as he orders a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. The US President and his advisors try to find a way to stop the Air Force crew from starting an atomic holocaust.

Streep said actor Jonah Hill played her son and chief of staff in the upcoming comedy.

"We recently had our first scene and I was so bad," the Oscar-winning actress said.

"I've been in this quarantine because they have to be very careful and I'm totally alone. My first scene was entering a stadium full of 20,000 people as the president, my big face on the jumbotron in front of me. And I completely lost it, I couldn't remember anything," she added.

Streep said that it was "not at all" normal.

"First of all, there weren't 20,000 people obviously," she said.

"They'll duplicate them (in editing). There were extras all around the stadium. Lonely people separated by 20 feet of air, wearing masks and visors that are clear," she added.

The extras were meant to have a "huzzah" moment where they cheered for her character but, while wearing masks, their cheers ended up sounding muffled.

"The whole thing is so eerie and odd and disconcerting," she said of filming during a pandemic.

Streep's upcoming film follows two astronomers who set out on a media tour to warn the public that a meteor will destroy Earth in just six months.