Why Gene Hackman felt so uncomfortable about ‘The French Connection’: “He didn’t want to go there”
You could argue for hours about which Gene Hackman performance was his greatest. His subtle unravelling in The Conversation, his slow thawing in Night Moves, and his casual menace in Unforgiven all constitute some of his most impressive moments as an actor. You could even throw in his performance as the eccentric patriarch of a troubled family in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums. But no discussion would be complete without the film that announced his talents like no other – William Friedkin’s The French Connection.
The 1971 thriller sees Hackman play Popeye Doyle, a narcotics detective in New York who was based on the real-life lawman-turned-actor Eddie Egan. Doyle’s entire existence revolves around catching his quarry. His obsession is so intense that it blurs the line between hero and villain, and as he gets closer and closer to catching a gang of drug smugglers, he becomes more erratic, violent, and unhinged than ever.
Hackman won his first Oscar for the role and was instantly marked as one of Hollywood’s greatest actors. His ability to play an irredeemable character without completely losing the audience’s sympathy was a balancing act that almost no other movie star could have accomplished. Either they would have come across as loveable rogues, or they would have been all-out villains. Hackman found the in-between.
Although he seems so at one with the role that it’s hard to believe he was even acting, Hackman struggled with the brutality of the character. When Friedkin sent him out on patrol with Egan to see what the inspiration for Doyle was like, he wasn’t happy with what he witnessed and wanted to change things up a bit.
“He felt that Egan was just a racist,” Friedkin said in a 2016 interview, “And he didn’t want to go there.” The director acknowledged that this was a deeply held sentiment for Hackman. The actor had grown up in a small town where the Ku Klux Klan was prominent, and he despised racism. But the director wanted to get the full spectrum of the character that heenvisioned, and he was determined to win the day.
“I knew I had to get him angry,” Friedkin said, explaining that whenever they’d do a take and the actor “wouldn’t go the distance,” he’d berate him, saying, “‘Oh, Jesus Christ. Are you kidding me?! Pal, you better get a day job.'” It did the trick. In fact, it worked a little too well, because Hackman quit on the second day of shooting and had to be cajoled into continuing by his agent.
“I would get his anger to a point where he would finish a take filled with rage and then walk off the set for the rest of the day,” the director said. “And that’s exactly what I wanted.”
Eventually, he said, Hackman understood the level of anger that the character was meant to carry around with him into every interaction, which helped him accept Doyle’s racism as part of a larger pattern in the way he related to the people around him. It all added up to a fearsome and magnetic performance that was a high point of Hackman’s prolific career.
