It’s hard to believe that an actor like Gene Hackman could ever be worried about ruining his career. The same actor who won an Oscar for his roles in The French Connection and Clint Eastwood‘s Unforgiven, the same man who dazzled audiences in Bonnie & Clyde and Enemy of the State. But that’s exactly how he felt about taking a certain part in a certain 1978 blockbuster. That’s right, Hackman was worried that his role as Lex Luthor, “the greatest criminal mind of our time,” in Superman would nuke his entire career. In fact, he nearly quit acting as a result, not believing the same way director Richard Donner did that a man (or in this case, a superhero movie) really could fly. Thankfully, he was mistaken.
Gene Hackman Almost Quit Acting After ‘Superman’
Gene Hackman famously refused to shave his head to play the bald villain Lex Luthor in Superman: The Movie, but most don’t know that Hackman struggled to accept the role in the first place. Even after he did, he still didn’t feel confident about it. “‘It scared me when I accepted the role,” he told The New York Times a decade later in 1989. ”I walked on the set in London the first day of filming and there was [Christopher Reeve] in this skin-tight blue suit and red cape. I looked at him and thought I had really done the ultimate act and committed suicide.” It’s hard to imagine anyone else but Hackman playing Lex Luthor opposite Reeve’s Man of Steel, and yet, the actor was sure he made a mistake.
Nevertheless, Superman was praised powerfully by critics, who, according to the NYT, “applauded [Hackman’s] comic portrayal of the maniacal cartoon villain, Lex Luthor.” While we might know Lex Luthor today as more of a serious villain, whose hatred for Superman is as polished as his bald head, the version Hackman — who received second billing after Marlon Brando and before Reeve — played back in 1978 was a bit more comedic in nature. At the start, Luthor didn’t hate Superman, he simply wanted to work around the Man of Steel in order to enact his own get-rich-quick real estate scheme. And it would’ve worked too, if it hadn’t been for that meddling superhero…
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Gene Hackman Returned as Lex Luthor For Two ‘Superman’ Sequels
Hackman decided to leave acting behind after Superman. “I was tired. I couldn’t get myself motivated to work,” he explained. “I wanted to do repertory theater. There wasn’t a repertory theater in my town. It was a lot of fantasy.” So he spent a few years doing nothing. Between Superman‘s release in 1978 and the 1981 comedy All Night Long, the actor did nothing but play tennis and dabble in oil painting. But while on the set of the original Superman, Hackman began enjoying the Lex Luthor character, and so he returned for the sequel in the interim (which was largely filmed back-to-back with the original).
It turned out that Gene Hackman hadn’t flushed his career away after all. Reprising his role in Richard Donner’s sequel Superman II, which was later remade with Richard Lester in the director’s chair after producers Ilya and Alexander Salkind fired Donner. This left a bad taste in Hackman’s mouth, and he refused to return for the next Lester-helmed sequel. But that wasn’t the end of his tenure as Lex Luthor. After Lester and the Salkinds’ exit, Hackman agreed to reprise his role in Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, this time with Lex’s nephew Lenny (Jon Cryer) in tow as his new sidekick. Ironically, Cryer would later follow in Hackman’s footsteps when he was cast as Lex Luthor in the CW series Supergirl decades later.
As for the rest of Hackman’s career, it was filled with incredible hits like Mississippi Burning, The Royal Tenenbaums, and Unforgiven, challenging the actor as he got back to more dramatic (and less fantastical) work. He officially retired in 2004 after one final comedic picture, Welcome to Mooseport. Still, nobody has even played the Lex Luthor role quite like Gene Hackman did, and many have certainly tried.
Superman
- Release Date
- December 13, 1978
- Runtime
- 143 Minutes
- Writers
- Jerry Siegel , Joe Shuster , Mario Puzo , David Newman , Leslie Newman , Robert Benton
- Studio
- Warner Bros.
Superman: The Movie is available to stream on Max in the U.S.
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