“It negates your craft”: the element of acting Gene Hackman said was always hard
It’s been more than 20 years since Gene Hackman made his final on-screen appearance before retiring from acting, but the fact it was terrible has done nothing to dampen his status as one of the silver screen’s greatest-ever talents.
Rounding out one of the most storied careers in Hollywood history by sparring with Ray Romano in the unanimously-panned satirical flop Welcome to Mooseport was far from being the perfect way to bid farewell to cinema, but at least Hackman had delivered decades of top-notch performances to ensure his underwhelming swansong was quickly swept under the rug and forgotten.
John Wayne thought he was one of the worst actors he’d ever laid eyes on, but that puts ‘The Duke’ squarely in the minority when everybody else with two eyes and half a brain could see for themselves that Hackman was among the finest purveyors of his craft, and a pair of Academy Awards are just the tip of an iceberg that begs to disagree.
Whether it was the iconic Popeye Doyle from The French Connection, the ruthless Bill Daggett in Unforgiven, the maniacal Lex Luthor in the Superman franchise, gun-toting western Bite the Bullet, political thriller Under Fire, or societally-conscious crime story Mississippi Burning, Hackman regularly encountered on-screen violence during his time at the top.
And yet, it was something that he was never entirely comfortable with despite it being such a fixture of so many films he appeared in, and his reticence began with The French Connection. “I’d done my share of fighting as a kid and I’d been in the Marine Corps, but as an actor I’d been taught that relaxation was of utmost importance, and I was not relaxing,” he said to Film Comment. “In fact, I felt terrible.”
Hackman even told director William Friedkin that he should consider replacing him in the lead role, but after discussing his issues with the filmmaker, the star eventually overcame his problems with fictional brawling by the last week of shooting. “By then I understood my character and could do the action with a certain fullness,” he explained, and “it was like magic” when he managed to reconcile his performance with the notion of violence.
Even then, it became a career-long bugbear for Hackman, who insisted that “it’s always hard for me” to get into the required zone. “Perhaps because there’s such a contradiction between fighting and the craft of acting,” he pondered. “If you really fight somebody in a scene, it negates your craft. And since I’m only interested in my craft, it has to be resolved anew each time.”
The legendary star engaged in his fair share of fisticuffs when the cameras were rolling, but unbeknownst to the audience, it was a struggle for Hackman to adopt the correct mindset each and every time.