The role Gene Hackman thought was beneath him: “What in the world am I doing here?”
Every actor needs a little bit of ego to succeed, but Gene Hackman wasn’t being arrogant or bigheaded when he admitted that a role he took solely for the paycheque was something he viewed as beneath him.
After all, he was firmly established as one of Hollywood’s best actors and most recognisable stars by the late 1970s with three Academy Award nominations under his belt, including a ‘Best Actor’ win for William Friedkin’s classic crime thriller The French Connection.
However, he wasn’t immune to falling into the same traps as other breakout stars. Whenever a performer enjoys a breakthrough, star-making, or calling card moment in their career, offers to appear in expensive and effects-heavy blockbusters typically follow soon after.
On one hand, Hackman following The French Connection with The Poseidon Adventure hardly backfired when the disaster epic became the highest-grossing release of 1973, won two Oscars from nine nominations and took its place as one of the genre’s all-time greats, but he confessed that he felt like a sellout for agreeing to do it in the first place.
For the next few years, Hackman shied away from splashy mainstream pictures in favour of character-driven pieces, bar an against-type comedic turn in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein and reprising the role of ‘Popeye’ Doyle in The French Connection II. However, millions of dollars are hard to turn down, which convinced him to set aside his snobbery and sign up for Richard Donner’s Superman.
If it wasn’t for Marlon Brando making a ludicrous amount of money for a glorified cameo that he tried his hardest to get out of, Hackman’s $2 million salary for playing Lex Luthor in the comic book adaptation would have made him the highest-paid member of the cast by far.
Hamming it up, chewing on the scenery, and immersing himself in a garish world of special effects and superheroes wasn’t where he saw himself heading, leaving Hackman to confess that it took him a couple of weeks before he could acclimate to a far-flung and fantastical flick that he initially thought was miles below his station.
“The first time I went off to do Superman, I was a bit snobbish about the whole thing,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “I did it because the money was so good. And when Christopher Reeve came on the set that first day in his Superman costume, I stood there thinking: ‘What in the world am I doing here? What can I do with this role? It was a week or two before I got into the fun.”
Not only did he eventually get into the swing of things, but the sequel saw Luthor join Doyle as the only character Hackman played more than once. When he returned in the diabolical fourth instalment, The Quest for Peace, to pull double duty as Superman’s arch-nemesis and the voice of the laughable villain Nuclear Man, it became the only role he ever played three times.
The money definitely helped, but he wouldn’t have returned to the well so often if he hadn’t been enjoying it.
