The classic movie Gene Hackman wanted nothing to do with: “I swore I would never be involved”
Even though he built his career largely on the back of playing principled men with a strict moral code and an ironclad set of beliefs from which they would rarely – if ever – waver, Gene Hackman was surprisingly susceptible to persuasion when filmmakers and studio executives came knocking.
Then again, it’s often important to separate the artist from their art, so maybe it shouldn’t be a shock. On the other hand, Hackman always came across exactly like the people he played onscreen: he was a straight shooter, couldn’t stand Hollywood politics or bullshit, and never shied away from making life a misery for the creative collaborators he didn’t believe were on his level.
Seemingly born with gravitas and a weather-beaten face, Hackman seized the new opportunities the ‘New Hollywood’ era provided to become a leading man despite looking, sounding, and coming across like a character actor. That’s not a slight, though, because he’s one of American cinema’s all-time greats and used his inherent grizzled-ness to supreme effect.
However, he still chased the money on occasion. As gifted as he was and as seriously as he took his craft, Hackman still had bills to pay. The two-time Academy Award winner took several roles for no other reason but to enhance his bank balance, and he had no issues letting it be known.
Once he had a family, though, he sought to reappraise his trajectory. He’d played so many cops, military personnel, and authority figures and dished out so much onscreen violence that something needed to change, which placed him in a sticky situation when Clint Eastwood came calling with Unforgiven.
Hackman promised his children he wouldn’t appear in any more gratuitously violent or blood-spilling pictures, plunging him into a moral quandary. “I swore I would never be involved in a picture with his much violence in it,” he confessed. “But the more I read it, the more I came to understand the purpose of the film, the more fascinated I became.”
The movie business is a place where promises are frequently broken all the way from the boardroom to the living room, and Hackman had to break his vow that violence was in his filmic past because Unforgiven‘s ‘Little Bill’ was simply too juicy a part to turn down. He’s a cruel, sadistic, and sneering villain, with the icon firing on all cylinders in a turn that no less of an authority than Eastwood himself called perfection.
It also nabbed Hackman his second Oscar and won Eastwood the trophies for ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’, so it’s selling Unforgiven very short to say that the former signing on to star in a movie he actively swore he never wanted to be a part of worked out extremely well for everyone involved. Except maybe his kids, who’d been lied to.
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