The exhausting movie Gene Hackman hated making: “Wasn’t a lot of fun”
Gene Hackman was an unlikely candidate for Hollywood movie stardom. He was already in his 40s and had been relegated to character acting when he starred in his breakout lead role in William Friedkin’s 1971 masterpiece The French Connection. But his air of complete authority on screen was the result of decades of acting experience, and when he finally hit the big time, he was ready.
Hackman started his career in New York theatre, often sharing an apartment with fellow struggling actors Dustin Hoffman and Robert Duvall. Throughout the ‘60s, he took bit parts in television shows and starred in off-Broadway productions, eventually landing his first credited film role in the Jean Seberg, Warren Beatty romance Lilith, in 1964.
His first breakthrough in a film was in William Penn’s seminal crime thriller Bonnie and Clyde in 1967. As Clyde Barrow’s older brother Buck, he brought a well-meaning benevolence to the film that was otherwise populated with volatile young psychopaths. He earned his first Oscar nomination for the role and was set to be a reliable Hollywood character actor for the foreseeable future. But when he got the lead role in The French Connection, everything changed.
In the film, Hackman plays New York Police Department detective Jimmy ‘Popeye’ Doyle, who is trying to apprehend a notorious French heroin dealer. Many discussions about the film now focus on the famous chase sequence in which Popeye chases a train in his car with hair-raising recklessness. But it’s Hackman’s performance that carries the movie. As the narc, he is as unpredictable, obsessive, and cold-blooded as the criminals he’s chasing. There is nothing endearing about the character, but he is riveting. Far from simply being a distinctive supporting actor, Hackman proved with the film he could carry an entire movie on the strength of his own magnetism.
Before retiring from acting in 2004, Hackman continued to play complex lead roles, often in crime-adjacent dramas. One of his last was in David Mamet’s 2001 film Heist, which played on the actor’s famous persona. In it, he plays a retired jewel thief who was brought back out of retirement for one more job. It’s an enjoyable caper, and Hackman is just as mesmerising and crotchety as ever. But he reflected after the film was released that making it was not a good experience.
Speaking to The New York Times in 2001, he said, “Doing the Mamet thing wasn’t a lot of fun. It wasn’t necessarily David. There’s a lot of repetition in the lines and many times they’re misdirected or purposely obtuse, so that’s difficult for an actor to fill up both emotionally and intellectually. It was the toughest shoot I’ve had in quite a while. Emotionally. Not physically.”
Luckily, the experience didn’t prompt him to quit acting then and there. He went on to star as the patriarch in Wes Anderson’s most emotionally resonant film, The Royal Tenenbaums (which he later said was also a terrible experience), and play a supporting role in legal thriller Runaway Jury.
