Before Gene Hackman, THE FIRM Nearly Cast Meryl Streep in The Unsavory Role of Avery Toler

I thought the The Firm movie was a great book-to-screen adaptation. As with all adaptations, changes were made, some worse than others, but one thing I think the movie nailed was the casting.

That’s especially true when it comes to Gene Hackman as Avery Toler, the grizzled senior partner at the Memphis law firm where Mitch McDeere, played by Tom Cruise, lands his dream job.

Hackman brings a slimy charm to the role that makes Avery equal parts magnetic and repulsive. It’s one of those performances where you’re drawn in even as every instinct tells you to back away.

Well, I recently learned that Hackman wasn’t the original plan for that casting. Early on, the idea was to change the character’s gender entirely and cast Meryl Streep as Avery Toler. Now, I love Streep as much as anyone, but I’m glad that idea didn’t stick.

This isn’t going to be an article discrediting the great Meryl Streep. No one is that insane. I’m sure she would have been incredible in a re-written role, but Avery Toler is a philandering lawyer with a weak sense of morality.

This is not to say that a female character couldn’t have the same dubious morality, but it would have changed everything about the story, and more specifically, the discussion around the movie.

Instead of being a simple legal thriller, the cultural conversation would have been all about a female character with “male characteristics.” Remember, this was in 1993.

Context matters, and the early ‘90s weren’t exactly subtle when it came to gender politics in mainstream thrillers. Just a year after The Firm hit theaters, another Grisham adaptation arrived with Disclosure.

The movie, which was a bigger hit than people remember, flipped expectations by casting Demi Moore as a powerful executive who sexually harasses a male employee played by Michael Douglas. The entire hook of that story was the reversal of traditional gender roles, and that’s what audiences talked about.

Had The Firm gone the same route with Avery Toler, that conversation would have swallowed the movie whole. It would have pulled attention away from what The Firm does best as a tense, propulsive legal thriller.

I love that The Firm is a straightforward story that isn’t trying to be political or culturally groundbreaking. Not that there is anything wrong with either, because art in all its forms should push the cultural narrative, but not every movie or book has to make a statement.

Swapping the role from man to woman would have absolutely opened up that conversation and allowed it to dominate. We got that conversation with Disclosure, and I’m happy we didn’t with The Firm.

Hackman, who was wonderful in basically everything he did, is pitch-perfect here. For me, he’s one of the great American actors. So is Streep, of course, but it’s not like Hackman was bad in The Firm. He was awesome in the movie. He was perfect as the slimiest among the attorneys at a firm full of sketchy lawyers. He plays the role with such believability that you are charmed and disgusted at the same time.

I’m not sure a female character would have had the same effect on audiences, especially at the time. Like most people back then, I’d be asking how believable it was that a woman could get seduced and distracted by someone like Toler was by Mitch’s wife, played by Jeanne Tripplehorn, and that wouldn’t be fair to the movie, the book, or audiences.

In the end, the decision to stick with Hackman gave The Firm exactly the kind of edge it needed, and it’s a big reason the film still works so well today.