I’m not an actor, but I’ve worked with them and been married to one and was the child of one, so I’ve absorbed a lot of attitudes about it. I’ve also listened to many Orson Welles interviews about the subject. Welles was quite obsessed with theatricality and the idea that what was unreal could also be true. (He was mostly talking about James Cagney.) When I think about Gene Hackman, I ask a different question, “How can someone so real be so interesting?” By real, I mean he doesn’t seem to be acting at all, and yet he’s obviously doing something extremely subtle and magnificent or he’d be boring to watch. He’s not miming. He’s not pandering. He doesn’t use funny voices. When he plays a bad guy, he reminds you of what Welles said: “He’s just a guy who has his reasons.”
One Hackman moment I loved was in “Bonnie and Clyde,” where he played Buck Barrow. Reunited with his brother after a long separation, he tries to incite a party atmosphere but it goes nowhere and he kind of awkwardly slumps and the awkward moment is documented in a long take. Or I think of the moment in “The Royal Tenenbaums” when Royal tells his ex-wife he’s dying, then admits he isn’t after she starts crying and that it was basically a ploy to get her attention. This would come off as extremely silly in a lot of hands, yet Hackman made it real and touching and you almost forgave him the psycho ploy. Again, he was just a real guy who had his reasons.
The actors in my life tell me that real acting is listening, not miming or hamming or practicing moves in a mirror that you plan to repeat later. I think that has something to do with Hackman’s appeal. Real behavior, if you trust it and have insight into it, is always fun to watch. We’re built to put ourselves into the narratives we’re receiving (it’s part of the way we animals survive) and when you have someone who is so good at being so true to the behavior of the character, you must have magic.
I’m very sad to hear of the way Hackman died and sorry for his wife as well, and will like everyone else sit patiently for unhappy details. But I’m not too worried that the horrible nature of his death will overshadow his body of work–because his work was just that powerful.
You can read his obituary at the New York Times here:
Beauty is Imperfection 