The only action movie of Meryl Streep’s career
With three Academy Award wins from a quite frankly ludicrous 21 nominations under her belt, Meryl Streep has understandably been held up as a bastion of cinematic excellence by her peers and contemporaries alike, to the extent it’s much more of a surprise when one of her performances doesn’t end up in the race for awards season glory.
During that time, the actor has lent her immense talents to nail-biting thrillers, hard-hitting dramas, tear-jerking romances, biopics, musical fantasies, political thrillers, hilarious comedies, heart-warming tales, and virtually every single genre under the sun. However, only once has Streep shown up in an action movie, although her experiences during the production of The River Wild may help illuminate why she hasn’t shown even the slightest inclination to return to that particular arena ever since.
Directed by Curtis Hanson, Streep and David Straithairn star as married couple Gail and Tom Hartman, who head off with their son on a white-water rafting vacation, only to end up being taken hostage. Kevin Bacon’s Wade and John C. Reilly’s Terry have very recently committed robbery and murder, leaving them with no option but to hold the Hartmans at gunpoint and use them as their means of escape based on Gail’s ability as an experienced rafter.
Being a film that stars Meryl Streep, she was inevitably recognised with a Golden Globe nomination for ‘Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama’, but the intensely physical shoot wasn’t without its challenges. In fact, there was even one very close call that could have ended disastrously for the star, which may help explain its unique status as her one and only fast-paced action adventure.
While Streep had a stunt double for the more difficult and dangerous scenes, she opted to do many of them herself. That backfired after Hanson urged her to complete one more take of a seemingly simple moment, only for exhaustion to get the better of her. Speaking to Orlando Sentinel, the star reflected on her hear-death moment: “The boat surfed down into the hole, rose, and flipped over. And I went into the river,” she said. “I remember sinking down to the bottom with this powerful and freezing water pulling me in deeper.”
Continuing, Streep admitted she was staring mortality square in the face: “My first thought was that if I died, my husband would come to the set with a machete”. Things thankfully didn’t quite come to that, but she was nonetheless so incensed that she warned her director to take her word at face value if she insisted she was too drained to carry on filming: “I said, ‘I really feel quite sure if I say that I’m too tired to do something, we have to assume I’m telling the truth.'”
It’s a loss to the art form that the era of Meryl Streep: Action Hero was so brief, but considering that she was almost swept to her demise in the middle of it, it makes sense that she wouldn’t be too sold on the prospect of doing it again.
