The only time Gene Hackman played two roles in the same movie: “An odd, late choice”
When Gene Hackman first played the iconic supervillain Lex Luthor in Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie, he wasn’t exactly passionate about the material. In fact, when he spoke to the Los Angeles Times, he was brutally honest about signing up for the movie because Warner Bros offered him a fat paycheque, and it took him a few weeks on-set to get into the swing of things. When he finally embraced the fun of the film’s comic book world, though, he had a blast and returned to play Luthor twice more.
However, the franchise was getting a little long in the tooth by the time Hackman returned for his third outing as the Last Son of Krypton’s arch-nemesis in Superman IV: The Quest For Peace. 1983’s Superman III was financially successful, if not to the same level as the first two films, but its critical reception was savage. Then, when the 1984 Supergirl spinoff was dead on arrival at the box office and received even more vitriolic reviews from critics and fans, it looked like the franchise had run out of steam.
Not wanting to admit defeat quite yet, Warner Bros made a Hail Mary play to get a fourth Superman picture into production. Star Christopher Reeve was tempted back by the prospect of creative control over the film’s script, which he fashioned into a parable about nuclear disarmament. However, the truckload of cash the studio paid him probably helped convince him the project was worthwhile, too. Hackman also chose to return as Luthor after sitting out Superman III, and much to his surprise, wound up playing two characters in the misbegotten film.
While Superman IV is a notoriously terrible film, which killed off the franchise once and for all, its biggest legacy in the minds of cinemagoers is the mindbogglingly lame villain known as the Nuclear Man. This blonde behemoth is created when Superman hurls a nuclear missile into the sun, not realising that his pesky rival Luthor has attached a genetic matrix developed from a strand of the hero’s hair to the weapon. Somehow, this causes a chemical reaction that births a new being who immediately aligns himself with Luthor – and, for some reason, speaks with a voice that sounds suspiciously like a digitally-altered Hackman.
It’s all very silly and nonsensical, naturally. However, even within the film’s warped sense of comic book logic, the Nuclear Man speaking with Hackman’s voice is a befuddling lapse that defies explanation. Amazingly, the choice also baffled Hackman and the English-born bodybuilder Mark Pillow, who played the radioactive fiend, because it was never the plan to begin with. Instead, the powers-that-be decided to have Hackman pull double duty late in the process, which left Pillow lip-syncing the lines on-set.
“That was an odd, late choice,” Pillow confessed to Yahoo Movies in 2013. “Gene didn’t expect that, and neither did I. It led to a very wooden performance, which made it a challenge. All I was doing was following Gene’s voice, which gave me very little scope to do anything. To this day, I’m not completely sure why they made that decision.”
In truth, Hackman voicing the Nuclear Man is probably the least of Superman IV’s many, many problems, but it’s a perfect microcosm of the film’s misguided creation process. After all, when you read about the troubled production, it becomes bitterly apparent that no one involved truly knew what they wanted the Nuclear Man to be.
First, director Sidney J Furie shot several scenes with a prototype Nuclear Man, played by Clive Mantle, who was more akin to the deformed comic book character Bizarro, but then cut the character from the movie entirely. Then, they cast a non-actor without a credit to his name as the second Nuclear Man, before seemingly deciding he wasn’t a strong enough actor to speak his own lines.
When making the call about who should give the Nuclear Man a voice, though, it again seems like the production made the most boneheaded choice imaginable. After all, if the catalyst for the character’s solar-powered creation was Superman’s DNA, wouldn’t it have made more sense for Reeve to provide the voice? Or is it a futile endeavour to try to make sense of any of this claptrap?
