NBC is busily firming up the cast for their TV adaptation of the John Grisham legal thriller The Firm. Last month the network announced that The Lincoln Lawyer co-star Josh Lucas would tackle the role originated by Tom Cruise in the 1993 movie. Now, the network has tapped Juliette Lewis and Callum Keith Rennie to pick up the roles played by Holly Hunter and David Straithairn.
The series The Firm picks up the story from the film 10 years later. Attorney Mitch McDeere (Lucas) emerges from witness protection with his family, his brother, Ray McDeere (Rennie) and loyal secretary Tammy (Lewis) only to find that the danger they thought they had left behind has been waiting for them all along.
The Firm was based on a bestselling novel by John Grisham and grossed more than 150 million dollars in the U.S.
NBC will premiere The Firm with a two hour movie in January, following the end of the network’s football coverage. The Firm will then air 22 uninterrupted episodes on Sunday nights opposite Fox’s Family Guy, ABC’s Desperate Housewives and CBS’s The Good Wife.
For Juliette Lewis, this is her first regular TV gig since co-starring with Robert Mitchum in the short lived 1990 series A Family For Joe. She’s best known for her movie roles including Cape Fear, for which she was Oscar nominated, and Oliver Stone‘s controversial Natural Born Killers. Most recently Lewis co-starred in the Jason Bateman/Jennifer Aniston romantic comedy The Switch.
Callum Keith Rennie is an actor many people recognize although his name isn’t familiar. Rennie’s biggest role to date was a season long role on the David Duchovny Showtime series Californication, where he played a rock legend who hired Duchovny’s debauched writer Hank Moody to write his biography. More recently, Rennie appeared in a handful of episodes of the AMC mystery series The Killing.
No word yet on the casting of Mrs. Mitch McDeere but expect an announcement from NBC any day now, production on The Firm is set to begin in August with the premiere coming in January.
