Tom Hanks is thrilled at his latest Post alongside Meryl Streep

HOW many films have Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks made together?

Quite a few, would have been my guess, and that’s what Steven Spielberg thought, too.

So it came as a shock to the director to discover that his latest film The Post is, in fact, the first time that these two Tinseltown titans have appeared on screen together.

“Can you believe that?” asks an incredulous Steven. “I don’t believe it, either.

“I said to Tom: ‘I seem to remember you and Meryl being in movies together,’ but Tom said: ‘No, that was me and Meg Ryan!’”

The ever self-deprecating Tom insists: “I will say that I’ve never been actively involved in something that, quite frankly, warranted Meryl to be in the movie.”

Which is confirmation of the awe and status in which Meryl is held in Hollywood, considering her new co-star is one of the most well-respected leading men.

He’s got two Oscars, which is just one fewer than Meryl, though she’s racked up a total of 20 nominations to his five.

Tom adds: “The most exciting moments in a scene with Meryl are the pauses that she puts in, and you’re wondering what’s going to come out on the other side, and they’re never the same.”

For Meryl’s part, her co-star’s famous comic sensibility stood out during their scenes together, as she says: “Everything he does, even the most-serious things, there’s always a sense of something secretly funny.

“There’s always a possibility that his wit will direct you in a certain way.”

Set during the early 70s, The Post tells the story of the Washington Post’s publisher Katharine Graham (Meryl) and editor Ben Bradlee (Tom) as they risk their careers and possibly lives in a desperate bid to publish “the Pentagon Papers”, classified documents detailing a massive government conspiracy involving the Vietnam War.

Comparisons have inevitably been made with All The President’s Men, considered by many to be the definitive Washington Post — if not best-ever newspaper — movie.

It stared Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford as the newspaper journalists whose digging brought down President Nixon over the Watergate affair, with Jason Robards as their editor, the role Tom is filling this time round.

But Meryl says: “I didn’t think the definitive Washington Post story was made. It was a great movie, but it neglected to mention Katharine Graham, and her central position. She was glaringly there.”

As Steven says: “I thought it was a pretty-significant step forward in a story about women in the early 1970s and that it reflected and brought light and dignity to what women today are going through.”

It’s also a timely movie in that it’s the story of a President’s attempts to curb the freedom of the Press, just as Donald Trump and his harping on about “fake news” is today.

Says Steven: “We all felt this film was not going to fall on deaf ears.

“We thought that there was an audience that had been listening to this kind of discrimination against the free Press for long enough that they might want to see that it all began with Richard Nixon.”

The Post is in cinemas now.