The two performances Gene Hackman knew were terrible: “I can’t say I was any good”
In the early days of his career, it would be an enormous understatement to say Gene Hackman had a chip on his shoulder. However, when your acting school awards you the worst score ever bestowed upon a student, being angry at the world sounds like a perfectly rational response.
Hackman joined the Pasadena Playhouse in 1956 to study his craft and was immediately marked as an outsider by his classmates. He was much older than most of them, for one thing, was already married, and had previously served four years in the Marines. The only friend he was able to make at the school was a young Angelino named Dustin Hoffman, and preposterously, the two were voted by their peers as the “least likely to succeed”.
After leaving the institution, which clearly didn’t value him at all, Hackman moved with Hoffman to New York City to pursue a career. He carried the hurt from his experiences at the Pasadena Playhouse, the Marines, and a broken childhood with him, turning it all into fuel for the fire of ambition within him. He desperately wanted to prove people wrong, and once admitted his mindset was more like “psychological warfare” than anything else.
“I wasn’t going to let those fuckers get me down,” Hackman once stated in no uncertain terms. “I insisted with myself that I would continue to do whatever it took to get a job. It was like me against them…In acting, there is a part of you that relishes the struggle”.
In those early days, Hackman was willing to do “whatever it takes” to land an audition, let alone a job.
In the early ‘60s, Hackman was vindicated when he began landing small roles in Off-Broadway plays, before he began appearing in a host of the day’s television shows. In 1964, he landed his first big-screen role, and three years later, he had a breakthrough with four movies seeing release in one calendar year.
The first, a drama entitled Banning, didn’t make much of an impact, while the last, Bonnie & Clyde, changed his career forever. In between, though, Hackman toiled away in small parts in the legal drama A Covenant with Death and the war epic First to Fight. Suddenly, Hackman was building a very solid CV as a character actor who could be relied on to turn his hand to many different kinds of characters, each one infused with his trademark intensity.
Maybe he was still carrying a chip on his shoulder about that stretch of his career, because even though those films did the job of getting his name out there in Hollywood, Hackman never really rated his own performances. Worse, he didn’t think much of the movies themselves, either.
“I can’t say I was any good in those films because I hadn’t learned how to do movie acting,” he commiserated in an autobiography by Michael Munn. “But it didn’t matter because the films were not much better than my acting. My main function in A Covenant with Death was to find a suicide note from the real murderer, so that didn’t take much emoting.”
In Hackman’s mind, First to Fight at least required him to tap into his previous military experience, but once again, it wasn’t anything to write home about. Amusingly, he claimed he didn’t have to mine too many emotional depths to play the role, because all he did was “pretend” he was “very brave.”
