20 Iconic Movie Scenes That Nearly Killed Their Stars
2. Meryl Streep: The River Wild
Meryl Streep doesn’t have many action-packed roles behind her, but she still somehow managed to get herself into some trouble on the set.
In 1994′s “The River Wild,” the good lady Streep almost drowned.
After an 18 hour day of filming rafting scenes, Streep was ready to collapse into her hotel bed and rest for a while, but in a classic case of directors not really having any sense of what’s going on around them, Curtis Hanson asked for one more shot of her in the raft.
Streep protested saying she really didn’t feel up to it – and let’s be honest, who could blame her – but Hanson pressured her into doing it, and she did.
Unfortunately however, she was thrown from the raft and almost drowned – saved only by her life jacket and Kevin Bacon, her co-star pulling her out of the freezing cold water and back into the raft.
Streep – showing a sign of her inner “iron lady” – calmly climbed out of the raft, walked over to the director and softly said: “Next time I say I can’t do something, I think we should believe me, don’t you?”
