“We couldn’t come to an agreement”: Why turning down ‘Ordinary People’ was Gene Hackman’s deepest regret
Every high-profile actor has turned down at least a handful of roles that became iconic in other hands, and there’s one that stung Gene Hackman more than the rest.
With two Academy Award wins to his name, a back catalogue filled to the brim with classics, and a fully deserved reputation as one of America’s greatest-ever actors, Hackman shouldn’t – and didn’t – harbour an awful lot of regrets from a career that ended by his own hand when he withdrew from the business in 2004.
Those aforementioned intangibles ensured that he was regularly at the top of many casting wish lists, and as a result, he knocked back more than a few offers. Hackman was originally supposed to direct The Silence of the Lambs and star as Hannibal Lecter, which must have stung when Jonathan Demme and Anthony Hopkins stepped up to the plate in a movie that won the ‘Big Five’ at the Oscars.
On the other hand, the star admitted that he only signed on for Hoosiers because he needed the money. Ironically, despite making life as miserable as possible for director David Anspaugh and keeping his eyes solely focused on the paycheque, it ended up being one of his most popular and beloved performances.
Hackman said no to Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Tommy Lee Jones’ Oscar-winning turn as Samuel Gerard in The Fugitive, the lead role of Roy Neary in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Shawshank Redemption‘s Ellis Redding, who was so memorably brought to life by Morgan Freeman, James Caan’s beleaguered Paul Sheldon in Stephen King adaptation Misery, and many more.
And yet, there was another part that he named as the biggest regret of his onscreen career. What makes it a real head-scratcher is that it was entirely his own fault. Hackman wasn’t overlooked in favour of somebody else, he wasn’t ruled out by the studio, and he wasn’t dismissed by the director: the only reason he didn’t get it was because he wanted too much money.
“In Ordinary People, I would have played the father, the Donald Sutherland part,” he told the Chicago Tribune. “I liked the script but couldn’t come to an agreement regarding the – how can I phrase it? – the compensation. If I thought about it, I supposed I would have to have some regrets. So the thing to do is not to think about it, don’t you think?”
Robert Redford’s feature-length debut from behind the camera won four Oscars from six nominations, including ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’. Sutherland may have been snubbed by the Academy for his work as Calvin Jarrett, but not only was it lauded as one of the finest performances of a stellar career, it’s not unreasonable to assume that Hackman could have ended up on the shortlist had he played the character instead.
The powerful tale of generational family trauma was tailor-made to be an Oscars contender, and while it might seem unfair to suggest that Hackman was a superior actor to Sutherland and would have been even better in the role, it’s not entirely without merit either. He wanted the part; the producers wanted him to have it too, only for the star to shoot himself in the foot by asking for too much money.
