The role that made Gene Hackman the most uncomfortable: “The movie was unrelenting”
Confidence and comfort are two key traits any actor needs to possess if they want to rise to the top of their profession, and they were a pair of characteristics that Gene Hackman possessed in abundance.
The legendary star always exuded a calm sense of dignity, grace, gravitas, and authority regardless of who he was playing, and he played an awful lot of different people. Real-life figures, supervillains, cops, submarine commanders, ruthless tyrants, hermits, recluses, mentors, and fathers were all in his wheelhouse, and rarely did he look out of place.
Miscasting is something that happens with a constant degree of regularity, but it’s hard to think of any performance where Hackman was blatantly the wrong guy for the part. Ironically, many decried him as being ill-suited for The French Connection‘s Popeye Doyle, which only went and won him his first Academy Award.
At a stretch, 1981’s All Night Long opposite Barbara Streisand hinted that Hackman perhaps wasn’t cut out for being the lead in a rom-com, but anybody would have been able to guess that by looking at his grizzled face. He still seemed comfortable, though, something that can’t be said of a performance that led to widespread acclaim.
It’s one of the best turns he’d ever give; it landed him on the shortlist for ‘Best Actor’ at the Oscars for the first time, and he really wishes his mother had been around to see it due to the family drama at the heart of the story, but Hackman has never been overly thrilled with his work in I Never Sang for My Father.
“I was uncomfortable doing the part,” he admitted to Roger Ebert. “In terms of drama, the movie was unrelenting. Every scene was a culmination scene, and we were always taking psychological last stands. Usually, an actor can find some way to play against a character to give him some additional dimension, but it was super difficult to find an area in this guy that was different. He was always whining.”
A fairly scathing appraisal of an Oscar-nominated outing, then, but Hackman wasn’t too keen on mining the depths of drama in virtually every single scene. He was always an actor who preferred having time to breathe and make the most of the spaces between dialogue, but in I Never Sang for My Father, he was forced to go full-pelt at all times.
As a college professor trying to work through long-standing issues with his father, Hackman was required to carry the daddy issues of protagonist Gene Garrison constantly. That was what defined the character, which, in his estimation, left him little to work with. “I kept working at it to find ways to release that,” he lamented. “But I never could”.
Of course, the fact Hackman secured an Oscar nod for a performance he was never wholly satisfied with and didn’t enjoy delivering is a testament to his abilities, placing him firmly in the minority of being left unimpressed by I Never Sang for My Father.
