The role that terrified Gene Hackman the most: “That was frightening”
Gene Hackman never played it safe as an actor.
Perhaps it was the fact that he didn’t have the looks to play a classic matinee idol like Warren Beatty or Paul Newman, or maybe it was just the tenor of the 1970s movie scene.
Either way, his career was dominated by gritty films about anti-heroes who were tough to love. In the process, he won two Oscars and the adulation of just about every actor who saw his performances.
Hackman’s body of work might lead you to assume that he gravitated towards playing tough guys, but in reality, he took on the mantle reluctantly. In fact, he was so reluctant at one point that, if he’d followed his instincts and backed out, he almost certainly wouldn’t have become the paragon of the acting profession that he is today.
In the late 1960s, he was knocking around as a supporting actor when he got the chance to play the corrupt NYPD detective Jimmy ‘Popeye’ Doyle in William Friedkin’s The French Connection. The director had wanted Newman for the role, but when the star demanded too high a price, Friedkin approached Hackman. Despite the major career opportunity, the actor didn’t leap at the idea. He had played unlikable characters before, but he felt that the brutality and racism of Doyle was beyond the pale.
In a 1974 interview with Film Comment, the actor said that the thing that scared him the most about the script was the fact that the film opened with Doyle beating up a Black man and using the worst racial slurs in the English language. He was shocked that the film threw that at the audience within the first five minutes and then asked them to stay with the character and eventually gain a certain level of respect for him by the end.
“That was frightening to me,” he said, “And yet it was challenging.”
Neither he nor Friedkin wanted him in the role initially, but it’s hard to imagine anyone else doing it. Hackman didn’t try to soften Doyle’s barbarity, which makes the character feel chillingly real. “One thing you must do if you’re gonna play a character like that is you gotta play him absolutely fucking full,” Hackman noted. “So full that there’s never any doubt that what you’re saying is what you believe.”
He did that so completely that he earned an Oscar for his efforts and carved a new path in Hollywood as a leading man, and there is no way that Newman, for all his theatrical brilliance, could have brought the same level of bitterness and cruelty to the part, because he would inevitably have injected it with a hint of charm, whether he meant to or not, whereas Hackman was pure, unadulterated coldness. You believe that his character is a bad guy, and his only saving grace is that the enemies he’s fighting are even worse.
The French Connection is one of the definitive films of the New Hollywood era, thanks in large part to Hackman’s willingness to make his character such an irredeemable bully. It’s all the more impressive that he had to overcome misgivings to do it.
