(Credits: Far Out / 20th Century Fox)
Tue 30 September 2025 16:15, UK
In his career, the late, great Gene Hackman turned down so many roles that became iconic for other actors that he could be forgiven for harbouring a few regrets.
Fascinatingly, though, despite saying no characters like Randall P McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Paul Sheldon in Misery, and Ellis ‘Red’ Redding in The Shawshank Redemption, Hackman was never one to have regrets for the paths not taken. If anything, he was more likely to be pained by the roles he did agree to play but, for one reason or another, didn’t work out as he’d hoped, or that rarest of breeds: a role he wasn’t sought for, but would have loved to have taken a crack at.
In the early 1970s, Hackman was launched from supporting actor status to leading man stardom with his Oscar-winning performance as ‘Popeye’ Doyle in The French Connection. As a renegade goddamn cop who played by his own rules, Hackman was scintillating, and that success quickly led to other box office triumphs like The Poseidon Adventure, Young Frankenstein, and French Connection II.
Along with this success came a feeling that Hackman could now finally fucking afford to make the kinds of intimate, personal pictures he was passionate about, and that his audience would follow him wherever he went. To his chagrin, though, he couldn’t have been more wrong, and movies like The Conversation, Scarecrow, and Night Moves all underperformed or outright died at the box office.
“I felt I could do anything I wanted to do,” Hackman admitted to the Chicago Tribune in 1985. “I had this great omnipotent feeling, and believe me, I haven’t had it since. So, I did all these films that meant something to me personally. And I was so disappointed – so crushed, really – at their receptions.”
The late Gene Hackman in the 1970s. (Credits: Far Out / TCM)
Left reeling from these failures, a disgruntled Hackman did what most actors in such a situation do: he made movies he thought would be successful, instead of listening to his creative instincts. Or, as he put it, “I started doing things that I didn’t want to do.”
In this mid-to-late 1970s period, the two worst offenders that Hackman signed up for were Lucky Lady, a comedy western co-starring Burt Reynolds, and March or Die, a drama about a First World War Major tasked with protecting a group of archaeologists under attack in Morocco from Bedouin revolutionaries. Hackman hated both pictures, grumbling, “I did Lucky Lady strictly for the money. I did a film called March or Die. To this day, I can’t really believe that I did a film called March or Die.”
In this period of uncertainty, Hackman’s next film was another one he admitted he initially wasn’t too enthused about. However, as he got into the role, he realised playing the villainous Lex Luthor in Richard Donner’s iconic Superman: The Movie wasn’t so bad, as he wound up having a ton of fun. Still, his commitment to Superman did perhaps disqualify him from starring in a 1979 thriller he once pinpointed as one of the few films he’d have loved to star in, even though he was never approached about it.
During a 2004 Larry King interview, the legendary host asked, “Have you seen films in which you say, I’d have loved to have done that?” to which Hackman immediately answered, “Yeah. China Syndrome. Do you remember that?” Naturally, King did remember the film, a nail-biting thriller about the cover-up of a nuclear meltdown that was both a box office smash and a hit at the Oscars.
It stands to reason that Hackman imagined himself in the Jack Lemmon role of power plant Shift Supervisor Jack Godell, which nabbed the veteran star a ‘Best Actor’ nomination. In that case, he’d have played opposite ‘Best Actress’ nominee Jane Fonda and a young buck named Michael Douglas, one of Hollywood’s finest nepo babies, who was making a name for himself as an actor and producer. Would Hackman have worked in the movie? Oh yes – and that’s probably why it nagged at him for years that he missed out on it.
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