Gene Hackman holds up his hand to display the small scabs still evident on his knuckles three weeks after he was involved in a minor traffic accident in West Hollywood that escalated into a fistfight with two men in broad daylight.
“He brushed against me and I popped him,” Hackman recalls, slapping his open palm with his fist to illustrate. “Then the other guy jumped on me. We had this ugly wrestling match on the ground. The police came, I got a couple of good shots in. The guy had me around the neck. That’s the ugly part. When you’re down on the ground and you’re [nearly] 72 years old.” Hackman pauses. “I was as responsible as they were,” he says, looking as though he regrets the incident.
Whoever was at fault, the fight must have been a doozy. The actor — a former Marine — was kicked in the groin and flipped on his stomach. He remembers getting out of his car to apologize for “tapping” the other vehicle from behind and facing two young, “pretty good-size” men who were being “really intimidating.” But he said the only injuries he suffered were a few scratches on his forehead and a big black-and-blue mark on the back of his leg.
There was a moment, Hackman notes, when he could have backed off and the incident might have ended peacefully. So, why didn’t he?
” I was mad,” he says. “There were two of them and I felt threatened.”
And when Gene Hackman gets mad, watch out. As any filmmaker who’s worked with him during his 40-year career can attest, Hackman is not a guy to mess with.
With his nervous laugh, flinty persona, imposing physique and Everyman mug, Gene Hackman has come to embody the tough-guy image of the American male on screen, an icon with a hint of danger lurking somewhere behind those restless eyes.
“There’s something very charismatic in him, even when he’s being his worst,” says Wes Anderson, who directed Hackman in the new black comedy “The Royal Tenenbaums,” which opened Friday and has generated considerable Oscar buzz around Hollywood for the veteran actor.
At an age when acting careers are frequently ebbing, the 71-year-old Hackman remains as popular and busy as ever. He currently stars in three high-profile movies, each requiring a different, textured performance, yet each evoking the tough-guy persona he has perfected over his long career.
In David Mamet’s “Heist,” released last month, he plays the brilliant, no-nonsense leader of a gang of jewel thieves who’s willing to spill blood to get revenge on a double-cross. In first-time director John Moore’s “Behind Enemy Lines,” which also opened last month, he’s the gruff but patriotic U.S. Navy admiral determined to defy orders and risk his career if that’s what it takes to rescue an American flier whose plane has gone down in war-torn Bosnia.
And, in “The Royal Tenenbaums,” Hackman portrays Royal Tenenbaum, the eccentric, sharp-tongued patriarch of a family of geniuses who tries to con his way back into the good graces of his estranged wife (Anjelica Huston) and three grown children (Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow and Luke Wilson) by pretending to have cancer.
Hackman’s life, much like his screen roles, is one of contrasting images, from the product of a broken home whose happiness was ripped from him when his father left one day, to the grown man, an accomplished painter and late-blooming novelist who lives a life of refinement far from the madding crowd of Hollywood in art-friendly Santa Fe with his second wife, Betsy, a classical pianist.
A separate life
Although Hackman calls winning two Academy Awards “a great experience,” he can’t recall where he has put his golden statuettes.
“We don’t keep them out,” he says. “Maybe they’re packed somewhere. It’s not that I’m not proud of them. We don’t have anything in the house about show business — except I do have a poster of Errol Flynn.”
Hackman almost didn’t sign on to play Royal Tenenbaum when the role was broached by Anderson, the young director of “Rushmore.” “The script was difficult to read because it was so fragmented,” Hackman says. “And it isn’t really until you see 10 or 15 minutes of the film before you begin understanding. It wasn’t totally clear to me that this was a great role, but after I read the script three or four times, I finally figured out how I could play it.”
What appealed to him about the story was how it says something about family.
” We all have that thing in us where we want to be loved by our family and do the right thing,” Hackman says. “Many of us are weak and we can’t do the right thing because we’re just too selfish.”
Did he see anything of himself in the role? “I think so,” he replied. “I know myself well enough to know there are areas in me that are very selfish and insensitive. All of us have that. The job of an actor is to get to that. As an actor, I have to find ways to exploit all of that.”
Anderson says Hackman seemed uncomfortable if the director had a preconceived idea for a particular scene.
” He doesn’t really need a lot of direction,” Anderson says. “He shows up and he’s got a way of doing it that’s usually right. He has very good taste in the way he approaches the scene. Some actors like to have a lot of interaction with a director and talk about what they are doing. That is not how Gene works.”
A passion for painting
Hackman and his wife enjoy going on driving expeditions. But in addition to adventure, Hackman also enjoys a refined life. His love of painting dates to the early ’50s, when he studied at the Art Students League of New York. He modestly says that “I have too good an eye” to believe he is any good at it.
Politically, there was a time when Hackman was much more out front than he is these days. “I’m a longtime Democrat,” he said. “I think of myself, I guess, as a `limousine liberal,’ but I don’t involve myself a lot. Years ago, Warren [Beatty] asked me to campaign for [presidential candidate Sen. George] McGovern and I did that. Of course, that was a long time ago and so we both got our names on [Nixon’s] `enemies list.’ I was kind of proud of that.”
