Buyer beware: Hit men do not exist. But for brief moments in time, they feel as if they could, thanks to the performances of men like Glen Powell and Gary Johnson—the real undercover operative Powell plays in Netflix’s Hit Man, which is now streaming. 444444
Richard Linklater’s new film stars Powell as a version of Johnson—an actual college professor who posed as “the most sought-after professional killer in Houston” while working for the city’s police, as recounted in a very entertaining 2001 Texas Monthly article by Skip Hollandsworth. Hollandsworth recounts how Johnson moved to Houston to obtain a doctorate in psychology. But when he wasn’t admitted to the University of Houston’s program, Johnson accepted a job as an investigator for the Harris County district attorney’s office. Several years into his relatively humdrum post, Johnson was plucked from his desk and thrown into the field as a faux contract killer.
The ruse went something like this: A police informant would introduce Johnson to a potential client in need of a hit man. Then Johnson, wearing a wire and often sporting an outlandish disguise, would coax the desperate person into incriminating themselves on tape by recruiting Johnson’s services. He’d assist in over 70 arrests as an undercover agent, according to the film’s credits, and be immortalized as “the Laurence Olivier” of murder-for-hire investigations, as Hollandsworth put it.
“He’s the perfect chameleon,” Michael Hinton, a Harris County prosecutor who was one of Johnson’s supervisors, told Texas Monthly in 2001. “Gary is a truly great performer who can turn into whatever he needs to be in whatever situation he finds himself.”
There’s no indication that the real Johnson forged a romantic relationship with the abuse victim he aided. But like Powell’s onscreen version, Gary Johnson struggled in his love life. He was thrice married and described as “a loner” by his second wife in the Texas Monthly piece. (Molly Bernard plays Johnson’s ex-wife in the film.) “He’ll show up at parties and have a good time, and he’s always friendly, but he likes being alone, being quiet,” said Sunny, Johnson’s second wife—with whom he remained on good terms—in the story. “It’s still amazing to me that he can turn on this other personality that makes people think he is a vicious killer.”
Other elements of Johnson’s life were lifted directly from the article and into the screenplay. His two cats were really named Id and Ego. The code phrase he used with clientele to confirm that they planned to enlist his special set of skills was, in fact, “All pie is good pie.” And Johnson made enemies of many a defense attorney, who argued in court that he “cleverly twist[ed] the conversation” so that their clients have no choice but to request a killing. “What I’m really there to do is assist people in their communication skills,” Johnson told Hollandsworth. “That’s all my job is—to help people open up, to get them to say what they really want, to reveal to me their deepest desires.”
For film research, Hollandsworth gifted Linklater “boxes full of interview transcripts and a lot of shitty VHS tapes of bad surveillance camera footage…showing a society lady in a nice hotel room, talking to the real Gary and trying to hire him to kill someone,” he told THR. “The recordings were bad, but you watch these moments and it’s just unbelievable. I was really amazed by just the banality of the way they discuss it all. Chatting about how they would like it done. It was like someone purchasing any other service in our consumer society.”
The director also spent time with Johnson himself, whom Linklater described as “the chillest dude imaginable” to Vanity Fair. “He was just the most nonplussed guy,” Linklater continued. “We would talk about baseball or something, but he was a man of few words actually.” As production on the film neared, Linklater said he attempted to contact Johnson again in 2022. When he heard no response, he learned from Hollandsworth that Johnson had died.
The end of Hit Man includes photos of the actual Gary Johnson. It also makes sure to note that unlike the film character—spoiler alert!—in real life, Johnson never killed anyone.
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