The late actor made his bones playing ordinary men placed in extraordinary circumstances, pushed to the limits of decency or their own fortitude. Though he started his film career later than most, he drew praise early on for the authenticity and dimension that he brought to familiar character types, like the dogged detective in The French Connectionor the aimless vagabond in Scarecrow. But he was just as adept at imbuing authority figures and dastardly villains with humanity in movies like Crimson Tide and Unforgiven. There’s enough variety among these and his other prominent roles—including the withdrawn surveillance expert in The Conversation, hepcat preacher in The Poseidon Adventure, and small-town coach in Hoosiers—to make you question just how apt that everyman label was. Hackman wasn’t just a great everyman; he proved he could be any man. He did so by homing in on his characters’ desires, and determining just how much they were ruled by them.
Desire isn’t a word often associated with Hackman, possibly because he was rarely cast as a romantic lead (though he nailed it whenever the opportunity did come around). But his remarkable body of work courses with it, along with drive, ambition, want, and desire’s other siblings. Certainly, his own passion came into play—Hackman cared deeply about his profession, which eventually earned him a reputation for being exacting and a little mean. At the outset, that passion helped him endure setbacks and work all manner of jobs in order to stay in New York to try to land roles: “All I wanted to do was work.” Later, it acted as his muse, inspiring him to take his first break from acting, which resulted in more of a forced vacation, as he told Terry Wogan in 1986.
When Wogan cited a “double-edged quality” in Hackman’s performances, which made him convincing as both someone willing to kill and die for a belief, the actor noted that “[W]e’re all capable, under certain circumstances, of doing very vile acts and being also very loving.” Revealing the heart and the darkness—or the “heart with threat,” as Roger Ebert put it—in the common man was a hallmark of Hackman’s oeuvre, and many of his best performances bridged the gap between the two. Just as essential was his ability to go beyond what was written on the page and trace the root of a character’s motivation. Mississippi Burning director Alan Parker described his one-time leading man as a “very intuitive and instinctive actor,” noting that “The brilliance of Gene Hackman is that he can look at a scene, and he can cut through to what is necessary, and he does it with extraordinary economy.” That “necessary” element was an appetite—in the case of FBI Agent Rupert Anderson, an appetite for justice; for someone like Buck Barrow (whose very name connotes sex), it’s a hankering for a life less ordinary. His Lex Luthor was ambition incarnate, which made him smart and foolhardy enough to regularly tussle with the Man Of Steel.
Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle, the tenacious detective of The French Connection, never stops wanting. He cuts the stress of trying to make the biggest bust of his career with drinking and anonymous sex (as neo-noir detectives are wont to do). His pursuit of a suspect who’s fleeing by train leads to one of the greatest car chases of all time, not to mention one of the greatest moments in Hackman’s career. Doyle’s relentlessness eventually ends in death and disgrace, and a criminal mastermind on the lam. (He shows more forbearance in The French Connection II, but that’s the only instance of the sequel outdoing the original.)
Many of Hackman’s most famous roles are rooted in appetite, leading to jealousy, corruption, and of course, murder. As Secretary Of Defense David Brice in No Way Out, Hackman is distracted from his work at the Pentagon by the love triangle involving himself, his lover (Sean Young), and her lover (Kevin Costner, in one of his earliest roles). “She was with some man and I must have gone crazy,” a dazed Brice tells his general counsel (Will Patton) after murdering her in a fit of passion. It wouldn’t be the last time that Hackman played a government official acting in a manner not befitting his office: Absolute Power saw him in similar straits, though much more cold-blooded, as the fictional President Of The United States going head-of-state-to-head with a cat burglar (Clint Eastwood, who was also Hackman’s director and co-star in Unforgiven), while Senator Kevin Keeley’s impeachable offense is played for laughs in The Birdcage.
Desires and wants are often used to propel stories, but Hackman’s ordinariness helped him to be extraordinary. A lot of actors work regular jobs to make ends meet, but Hackman threw himself into those gigs, the better to observe the people around him. He could distinguish between an itch and an ache; hunger or a yen. His appearance, that of a hardy Midwesterner, only heightened the sense of universality in these desires, whether they were political aspirations or the demands of a sweet tooth. This was how Hackman was able to create three distinct flavors of establishment politician by identifying their wants and their reactions to being thwarted (though Senator Keeley was the only one left with a future in politics).
It also lent greater resonance to one of his signature moves: a quick smile that he used to charming effect in comedies like Postcards From The Edge and Get Shorty. More often than not, that smile was a warning, the streak of lightning across the sky before the ground-shaking boom of thunder and downpour. When deployed by the likes of The Quick And The Dead‘s John Herod or Unforgiven‘s Little Bill Daggett, it was the smile of a carnivore.
Herod, the dissolute ruler of the town in Sam Raimi’s 1995 film, has gorged himself for so long—on women, whiskey, money, power—that he no longer knows satiety. He enters his own shootout tournament in part to feel something. Even when faced with a real threat in the form of Russell Crowe’s Cort, the only other man who can beat him (spoiler for the Return Of The King-like ending), Herod practically licks his chops at the prospect of something cutting through his hedonistic haze. “It takes a lot to scare me,” he rasps to Cort on the day of their duel. “I love the sensation.” Hackman shades Herod’s depravity, gradually turning up the pitch in his voice to take the tyrant from commanding to petulant as he faces challenger after challenger, including his son (Leonardo DiCaprio) and—gasp—a woman (Sharon Stone as The Lady). There’s also a telling scene before his duel with the Lady, where he sits in his long underwear, anxiously cleaning his gun until dawn. Hackman made sure to show Herod losing his teeth just before losing his life.
Little Bill is a tad more humane than Herod; he doesn’t expect the town’s residents to fight each other to the death on a yearly basis, but he’s still vicious and misogynistic. He’s also smart enough to recognize the threat that every man riding into town, but especially William Munny (Eastwood), to take vengeance for the women in Big Whiskey, poses. But Little Bill actually believes he’s a fair ruler; like Will, he’s left his outlaw days behind and is now trying to lead a life that’s a little more ordinary. Even if his carpentry skills were up to snuff, Little Bill wouldn’t really be satisfied by this way of life. He’s practically champing at the bit to get into a fight with another old saw (Richard Harris) or round up a posse. He doesn’t just want more, he feels entitled to it. When Will exacts revenge for Ned (Morgan Freeman), Little Bill fairly whines, “I don’t deserve this, to die like this. I was building a house.” “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it,” the aptly named Will growls in response, demonstrating both the righteousness and cruelty of Old West justice (which Little Bill had, up until recently, been doling out).
For all his everyman qualities, Hackman knew how to play hedonistic, and, in the case of Royal Tenenbaum, remain likable. But arguably his greatest performance was one of abstention, of removing all signifiers of a life until what was left could hardly be described that way. In The Conversation, wiretapper extraordinaire Harry Caul fervently guards his privacy because he knows what men like him are capable of discovering. He refuses to inquire about his client’s motives or even acknowledge that they exist, focusing instead on delivering high-quality results. His latest case, gathering surveillance on a couple (Cindy Williams and Frederic Forrest), puts the lie to that belief. At one point, seeing that he’s become overly invested, a character admonishes him about his work: “You’re not supposed to feel anything about it. You’re just supposed to do it.” Harry’s avoided cultivating a life that someone might want or be able to take away. He fails to understand the real intent of the conversation he captures because he can’t identify with their desires, their wants. In the end, it’s a fatal misinterpretation. This seeming antithesis of characters with appetites only illustrates the relationship between Hackman’s performances and his character’s wants—Harry’s existence may just be a vague outline, but he willed it so.
Hackman understood desire, but he also knew when to say when, retiring from acting in 2009 and finding new life as an author. He knew better than most how to channel his passion without falling into the maw of ambition. And yet, he leaves a legacy of cinematic grasping—his final film role was as a former POTUS who can’t leave the limelight in Welcome To Mooseport—of striving for more. What’s more common—or more American—than that?
