Why Gene Hackman’s penultimate movie was the perfect swansong: “How fucking nervous we were”
A legendary actor or director doesn’t need to end their career with a bang, and many of the all-time greats ended theirs on a whimper. Gene Hackman certainly did, which stings even more when his penultimate performance was the perfect way to bow out.
Nothing will be able to detract from the two-time Academy Award winner’s status as a titan of American cinema and one of his era’s most gifted performers, who elevated everything he appeared in with natural gravitas, grit, and commitment to giving his all, regardless of whether he was in a classic or a crock.
Hackman would have known the end was near, especially when he confirmed the reason he retired from the business in the early 2000s was health-related, but he was convinced he had one more left in the tank. Unfortunately, that swansong was the dire comedy Welcome to Mooseport with Ray Romano.
As he was wont to do, the famously confrontational star had no issues telling director Donald Petrie how to do his job, not that the film was salvageable. A by-the-numbers farce about an everyman going head-to-head with a former United States president in the titular town’s local elections, it was hardly a fond farewell to an icon.
Welcome to Mooseport tanked at the box office after failing to recoup even half of its production costs, and Hackman bowed out with one of the worst-reviewed entries in his filmography. It didn’t have to be like that, and with the benefit of hindsight, Runaway Jury was the perfect place to call it quits.
Gary Fleder’s adaptation of the eponymous John Grisham novel wasn’t a masterpiece by any means, even if Hackman had a previous with the short-lived subgenre after starring in The Firm and The Chamber. However, it would have been a full-circle moment nonetheless, because it united him onscreen for the first and only time with his longtime friend and former roommate, Dustin Hoffman.
They met as jobbing theatrical actors in the mid-1950s, moved to New York together to break into the industry, and remained close until Hackman’s death in 2025. Despite the pair becoming leading lights of ‘New Hollywood’, it wasn’t until 2003 that they finally got the chance to spar with each other in a movie.
Incredibly, the script didn’t originally have a scene where the two of them went toe-to-toe, something Fleder quickly rectified when he realised he had two best friends who’d known each other for 50 years in the same cast for the first time. It was a big deal, and they were equally trepidatious.
Hackman had already finished shooting his scenes weeks beforehand, but he agreed to return for one more day on set to film alongside Hoffman. “We admit to each other we hadn’t slept the night before,” the latter admitted to IGN. “How fucking nervous we were. And it’s like eight pages.”
“We did the first take, and we were terrible, both of us,” he continued. “And yet we embraced each other because we got through it. It was intimidating.” Hackman’s second-last movie saw him share the screen with his oldest and closest friend in Hollywood, which would have been the perfect farewell. Instead, it was Welcome to Mooseport, which doesn’t seem fair.
