When Gene Hackman played a role that was written for Meryl Streep: “It’s very hard to create romance”
Trying to whittle the career of Gene Hackman down to just one movie is like trying to win a war against the tide. It ain’t fucking happening.
The late legend provided so many wonderful movie moments across his long career, from his early breakthrough with Bonnie & Clyde to one of his final outings in The Royal Tenenbaums. His filmography is a real goddamn treasure trove, but he actually could have been in even more iconic films had a few things gone differently.
He was Francis Ford Coppola’s first choice to play Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now, and while the director had clearly enjoyed working with him on The Conversation, the part went to Robert Duvall instead. He was one of the many names considered for the role of RP McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, before a young Jack Nicholson was chosen (and that was absolutely the right fucking call). Hackman eventually got his own back by replacing Nicholson in the cast of Hoosiers.
One role that was almost taken away from him was that of Avery Tolar in The Firm. Based on John Grisham’s novel of the same name, this legal thriller stars Tom Cruise as young lawyer Mitch McDeere and Hackman as his older mentor. According to director Sydney Pollack in the Los Angeles Times, he was having a hard time exploring McDeere’s relationship with his wife, Abby (Jeanne Tripplehorn).
“It’s very hard to create romance between a husband and wife on film,” the director stated. ”So we discussed making one of the lawyers a woman. That way, instead of the firm seducing him only spiritually, it would seduce him literally.”
This was when Pollack toyed with the idea of bringing in Meryl Streep. His plan was to make Avery’s character female and have her start a relationship with Mitch. This would have placed a strain on his marriage to Abby, which forms a central part of the story.
Alas, once word got out that this was the idea, fans of the book revolted. Even Grisham instead intervened, which is what completely shut this plan down. Hackman was brought in to play Avery relatively late in the day, and Pollack was forced to find another source of tension for his film’s main couple.
In the novel, the McDeeres’ marriage is compromised when Mitch sleeps with a sex worker in the Cayman Islands. On the page, he never tells Abby. On the screen, however, things went a little differently. “We decided to have Mitch confess his infidelity, which he didn’t do in the book,” Pollack continued. “Once we had that estrangement, we had a little more going on.”
In the end, The Firm turned out just fine without Streep’s involvement. Hackman hardly gives the performance of a lifetime, but sticking to the original story probably benefited the film overall. He would go on to appear in another movie based on Grisham’s work, The Chamber, just three years later. How did that one go? It’s probably best you don’t know…
