The only characters Gene Hackman wouldn’t play: “They just don’t interest me”
When actors reach a certain age, they often find themselves faced with a new set of characters that they would never have been offered previously. Many stars also find themselves denied the kinds of roles that they used to take on with ease, reflecting the industry’s harsh standards when it comes to age.
If you’re over the age of 40 and you want to play a romantic lead, good luck. The chances are much slimmer, with most rom-coms focusing on younger actors (or at least younger female characters; male actors get away with being ‘old’ much more easily). It seems as though for many actors, the older you get, the less likely you are to be offered roles that are seen as truly challenging or desirable unless you’re already a huge star.
Still, some established stars will find themselves offered the kinds of roles they’re simply not interested in just because they reach a certain age, even if they’ve built up a career playing characters that are the complete opposite. Take Gene Hackman, for example, who earned his first Oscar nomination with a role as a gang member in Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde before winning one for William Friedkin’s The French Connection, playing a detective.
As his career progressed with continued successes, Hackman proved his versatility and penchant for complex, sometimes morally ambiguous characters. He is paranoid and suspicious in The Conversation, while he plays the terrifying villain Lex Luthor in Superman with precision, and the ruthless and violent sheriff in Unforgiven. He won another Oscar for his performance in the latter, emphasising his brilliance when it came to tricky characters.
Still, as he got older, Hackman started to get asked by various people to play different kinds of characters, but he simply didn’t care to stray away from what he was used to. “It’s always more fun to play heavy than it is to play a good guy,” he told NPR. “My kids are always asking me to play these things – grandfathers and kindly old gentlemen. And I just tell them that, you know, not that I dislike watching that kind of thing, but for me to play it is not as interesting.”
When asked if he had been offered these kinds of roles by interviewer Terry Gross, Hackman replied, “I have, yes. I have grandfathers and things like that that are all knowing, wise, and all that. And it – they just don’t interest me.”
Hackman never gave in to these kinds of grandfatherly roles; instead, he took his own slightly unconventional approach to these types of characters later in his career. Take 2001’s The Royal Tenenbaums, for example, in which he plays Royal, the patriarch of the Tenenbaum family, a chaotic, lying dad who proves to be just as childlike as his kids. Wes Anderson’s beloved film married the drama and humour that Hackman was so good at blending together, highlighting the fact that the star was never going to play your typical old man figure.
