Tom Holland entering the "John Grisham protagonist" phase of his career
Holland's ongoing effort to star in adult movies for grown-ups will see him play the morally complex hero of Grisham's The Partner
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If there’s one thing that unites the protagonists of the many movies based on the works of John Grisham—your various Matts (Damon or McConaughey), your Julia Roberts or Tom Cruises, it’s that none of them are little boys. (Okay, Brad Renfro was just 11 in The Client, but he had Tommy Lee Jones to help balance things out.) And so it inevitably feels like there’s a certain reach for maturity happening when we learn that Tom Holland is now aspiring to join the ranks of these various, very mature legal eagles, taking on a starring role in an adaptation of Grisham’s 1997 novel The Partner.
Holland’s efforts to not be seen as simply the world’s most boyish superhero have been ongoing and somewhat arduous of late: Over the last five years, he’s appeared in theaters or on streaming screens as a drug-addicted criminal, a man suffering from dissociative identity disorder, and a very baby-faced version of Uncharted protagonist Nathan Drake, all apparently in an effort to de-“Mr. Stark I don’t feel so good”-ify his movie-making image. Recently, he took the biggest swing of all, signing on to co-star in Christopher Nolan’s star-studded adaptation of The Odyssey, and now he’s tackling one of Grisham’s morally complicated protagonists.
In the case of The Partner, that means playing Patrick Lanigan, a junior attorney who faked his own death as part of a scheme to defraud his employers, who were engaged in a much nastier scheme to defraud the U.S. government. This makes for a much more complicated hero than even some of Grisham’s other legal protagonists, notably the hero of the 7-book Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer series, a YA franchise we swear we are not making up, even though we’re having a lot of fun right now imagining Holland starring in an adaptation of it. (“‘Congratulations, Theodore Boone, Kid Lawyer,’ the Supreme Justice said, a twinkle in his eye. ‘The Supreme Court agrees with you that this grounding was unconstitutional.'”) (Please do not sue us, John Grisham.)
Anyway: Per Deadline, Holland is also producing the film, which is being written by The Imitation Game‘s Graham Moore.