Gene Hackman once named his favourite characters to play: “It’s the best kind of acting”
In his career, the late icon Gene Hackman played almost every kind of character you can think of. He played countless law enforcement characters, from renegade cops to crusading FBI agents and scuzzy Private Investigators; he played military men, lawyers, western gunslingers, and a couple of US Presidents; and he even played a handful of regular Joes struggling with father issues, dealing with grief, and trying to find love. However, there is one strain of character that Hackman is most associated with above all others – and they were always his favourite kinds of character to inhabit.
If there’s one thing that audiences always associated with Hackman, even when he played moralistic characters, it was intensity. The man was an expert at imbuing his characters with a fearsome dedication to their goals that often erupted into anger and intimidation, while ensuring that they also displayed some vulnerability or pathos.
Over the years, Hackman’s trademark ferocity wasn’t just reserved for his on-screen roles. His fierce adherence to the craft of acting meant he developed a reputation for intimidating his co-stars and directors, even if he didn’t set out to do that. It manifested in an aura that always surrounded him, such as when director James Foley admitted, “When he went to work, people would shut up. They didn’t speak. He feels he does his best work – whether it’s calm, sweet, raging – when he is as calm as he could possibly be. By creating a zone in the eye of a hurricane.”
Naturally, this innate intimidation factor came in handy when Hackman was hired to play villains – and boy oh boy, did he play a lot of villains. Hackman gave audiences the first iconic comic book supervillain when he played Lex Luthor in the Superman movies; he created a terrifyingly cold-blooded, murderous sheriff in Unforgiven; he went toe-to-toe with Denzel Washington as a racist submarine captain in Crimson Tide; portrayed a corrupt secretary of defence in No Way Out; and a Ku Klux Klansman on Death Row in The Chamber.
Fittingly, villains were the characters Hackman really enjoyed sinking his teeth into. In 1996, he told The Washington Post, “Villains are always the best roles. It’s the best kind of acting. The things you get to do. Some of it is painful.”
Indeed, Hackman revealed that his process for playing villains was always about finding the humanity buried underneath the morally repugnant, often terrifying exterior. “Someone who is just evil – a Jeffrey Dahmer – we don’t know anything about him, really,” Hackman mused. “But if we find out that he has a whole life, that makes him much more interesting. It’s even more appalling when you see someone who is diabolical, and then you find out how charming [and] how human they are. It makes it stronger, I think.”
Hackman then gave the example of Sam Cayhall, the KKK member he portrayed in The Chamber, who was sentenced to Death Row for masterminding the bombing of a Jewish civil rights lawyer’s office. Hackman admitted he was reticent to take on the role, and he claimed one of his Black friends joked, “If I did that film, I’d owe him a trip to Fiji.”
Hackman decided to tackle the part, though, because he wanted to explore the reality of how a human being could become so twisted as to commit such an atrocity. “What fascinated me about the role…was that many people would think he’s a monster,” Hackman explained. “I wanted to do him in a way that was not a monster; that was worse than that, as a human being who should know better. This guy was maybe uneducated, but he wasn’t totally ignorant. I didn’t want him to be sympathetic, but I wanted him, through his behaviour, to be seen as somebody.”
