The 1994 movie that almost killed Meryl Streep: “My heart was just pounding”
When the average moviegoer thinks of the actors they most associate with action movies, a few familiar names will spring to mind. Arnold Schwarzenegger? Of course. Sylvester Stallone? Definitely. Bruce Willis? For sure. Keanu Reeves? Certainly.
There’s one name that will almost certainly not spring to mind, though – Meryl Streep – and that’s probably because she only ever made one action movie. And it almost killed her.
Back in 1994, Streep starred in The River Wild, a white-knuckle thriller about a family who is taken hostage by armed fugitives while on a white-water rafting vacation. It was a real change of pace for Streep, the most acclaimed actress in Hollywood—but an actress who had never made a movie with anything even approaching an action sequence.
For someone so closely associated with emotionally rich dramas and character-driven performances, stepping into an action-heavy role was a significant departure from her usual territory. Streep had built her reputation on precision and control, carefully crafting performances that relied on nuance rather than physical risk, making The River Wild an unusual and ambitious pivot.
It also highlighted a lesser-seen aspect of her approach to acting: a willingness to challenge herself, even when it meant venturing far outside her comfort zone. While audiences rarely associate her with high-adrenaline filmmaking, the project demonstrated that her commitment to authenticity extended beyond dialogue and emotion, reaching into the physical demands of storytelling in ways few might have expected.
During an interview with the Orlando Sentinel, Streep revealed that she was convinced to sign up for the picture by her children. She explained: “They’re reckless and they’re fearless. They just go out and careen through the day. I thought that maybe I was missing out on something since they’re having more fun. My kids live for the thrill.”
As Streep got into the shoot with director Curtis Hanson, she found herself enjoying the physically demanding rafting sequences. She gushed, “I’d be on that river at eight in the morning. At night, I would fall into bed. It was the kind of tired that you couldn’t even get up to go to the bathroom. And then the alarm would go off the next morning and I couldn’t wait to get back outside and do it again.”
Now, while Streep was determined to do as much of her own rafting as possible, there were obviously certain stunts which were too dangerous for her to attempt. In these situations, expert river guide Kelley Kalafatich was drafted in to double for the Oscar-winning star. However, at the end of one particularly taxing day of filming, Hanson asked a fatigued Streep to perform one more take of a seemingly easy stunt herself. She complained of exhaustion, but he wound up talking her into it. He would quickly come to regret that decision.
Streep was supposed to guide her raft toward a small hole with river water surging up between the rocks, but everything went south. Streep explained, “The boat surfed down into the hole, rose, and flipped over. And I went into the river. I remember sinking down to the bottom with this powerful and freezing water pulling me in deeper.”
Amazingly, Streep claimed she didn’t feel scared while she struggled beneath the raging waves. Instead, she couldn’t help thinking, “If I died my husband would come to the set with a machete.” In the end, the need for a vengeful, knife-wielding Don Gummer was avoided, because Streep washed ashore 500 yards away from where she went into the drink. She was pulled out of the water by a kayaker, in front of the panicking film crew – and made sure to find Hanson immediately.
Streep admitted: “When I got to the shore my legs actually went out from under me, but I still managed to get to Curtis. My heart was just pounding and I tried to be calm when I said, ‘I really feel quite sure, if I say that I’m too tired to do something, then we have to assume I’m telling the truth.'” Yikes.
