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.
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.”
Powell as a disguised Johnson in Hit Man.Brian Roedel / Netflix
Linklater, who previously adapted another Hollandsworth piece to film—2011’s Bernie, starring Jack Black—had long been drawn to Johnson’s stranger-than-fiction story. At the same time, he was unclear whether it would work as a film. “I love this character, but I wasn’t sure of the movie,” the filmmaker previously told Vanity Fair. “We’ve got a great character, great incidents, great moments, all these great characters, but I didn’t know if it really went anywhere.”
That changed when Powell, who starred in Linklater’s 2016 film Everybody Wants Some!!, figured out how to crack the film’s tricky third act. His pitch hinged on Johnson experiencing what is described as an “out of character” moment at the tail end of Hollandsworth’s piece. When alerted to a woman who wished her abusive boyfriend dead, Johnson did some digging and discovered that his would-be client was “regularly battered by her boyfriend, too terrified to leave him because of her fear of what he might do if he found her,” as Hollandsworth writes. Rather than orchestrating a sting to entrap the woman, Johnson instead put her in contact with social service agencies and a therapist so that she could safely leave her relationship.