“I really feel confident in what I’m doing”: Gene Hackman explains why he got fired from ‘The Graduate’
Every actor is forced to deal with rejection on a regular basis throughout their careers, but Gene Hackman had to suffer the additional embarrassment of watching his close friend and former roommate become a star in the very same movie he’d been fired from.
After first moving to California to pursue acting, Hackman quickly befriended fellow thespian Dustin Hoffman after they both signed up with the Pasadena Playhouse performing arts venue, where their cohorts were so unconvinced by their potential that they were voted least likely to succeed.
Looking back at a duo who accrued a combined haul of four Academy Award wins from 12 nominations and ten Golden Globe victories from 23 nods and emerged as two of the most talented leading men of their era, it’s safe to say Hackman and Hoffman weren’t too disheartened by their peers’ lack of belief.
Even though they’d been firm friends for decades and lived together in both California and New York alongside fellow future legend Robert Duvall, it wasn’t until 2003’s John Grisham adaptation Runaway Jury they finally got to pit themselves opposite each other on-screen.
It could have happened a quarter of a century earlier, but Hackman ended up being fired from Mike Nichols’ The Graduate after being drafted in as Mr. Robinson and quickly replaced by Murray Hamilton. He was involved for less than a week, explaining to IGN that there were irreconcilable differences over how the character should be played.
“I got fired, I think, because I just didn’t fulfil the director’s and the writer’s idea of what the part should’ve been,” he mused. “In rehearsals, I do a lot of searching around, I try not to perform and I really feel confident in what I’m doing. I mean, you can go first day and perform and probably won’t go further than that. I was doing that, and they decided that I was just taking too much time.”
While he would have been proud of watching his buddy give a star-making performance that propelled his career to new heights, Hackman also would have had every reason to harbour feelings of jealousy when The Graduate ended up being shortlisted for seven Oscars, won Nichols a prize for ‘Best Director’, recouped its budget more than 30 times over in the United States alone, and became an instant classic.
Fortunately, his own breakthrough technically came first, with Bonnie and Clyde hitting cinemas four months before The Graduate and earning Hackman Oscars recognition for the first time, where he and Hoffman ended up competing in different categories. In the end, they both played a major part in two of the biggest and best films of 1967, which helped soften the blow of being given the boot.
