Hit Man has one of those stories you would never have believed were true if the film hadn’t let you know from the jump.
In the action rom-com, Glen Powell plays Gary Johnson, a fake hitman hired by police to catch solicitors in the act. That man really existed, and all the eccentric meetings with eccentric clients often played for laughs in the film really happened.
The one major aspect of Hit Man that co-writers Powell and Richard Linklater (who also directed the film) completely fabricated was the romance between Powell’s Johnson and Adria Arjona’s desperate housewife Madison Masters.
Who was the real Gary Johnson and which aspects of his life carried onto Hit Man?
The real Gary Johnson worked out of Houston and not New Orleans like Powell’s character. He was however raised in Louisiana before he moved to the Texas state capital to pursue an academic career in psychology. When his application for a doctoral program at the University of Houston was rejected, he became an investigator for the district attorney’s office.
Johnson, who like his movie version fostered a fascination for the human psyche, had worked as a military policeman in Vietnam, as an officer in a Louisiana parish sheriff’s deputy, and as an undercover drug addict on the hunt for drug dealers for the Port Arthur police department. What he really wanted, however, was to be a psychology professor, which led him to night university classes until he received a master’s degree in the field.
Like Powell’s fictionalized version, the real Gary Johnson also worked as a college professor, two nights a week. Per the 2001 Texas Monthly article that inspired Linklater and Powell to write Hit Man during the pandemic, “On Mondays he [taught] human sexuality and on Tuesdays, he [taught] general psychology. “
He first became a hitman when the police called the DA’s office to ask for a murder-for-hire specialist, and Gary was picked. Just like in the film, he took to the job instantly, dedicating his time to craft the perfect persona for each “client.”
One particular line in the article written by Skip Hollandsworth seems to have been the catalyst for the Hollywoodian twist that Linklater’s movie brings to the real story. After years of working as a mole for the police, Gary Johnson became so good at his job that the officers in charge of listening to the tapes he would make of his clients no longer recognized him.
‘It got to a point where I would be transcribing a tape of one of his murder-for-hire conversations, and I could not tell it was Gary on the tape,’ says Esmeralda Noyola, a secretary in the DA’s special-crimes division.”
The real Gary never really morphed into one of his characters the way Glen Powell’s version does in the film. But the fascination with that side of the job is easy to understand.
There were also a number of details from Hollandsworth’s article that found their way into Powell and Linklater’s script. Gary’s cats were indeed called Id and Ego, and he did love to tend to his plants, even if there’s no mention of his love of birds in the source material. He loved to read books about and written by Carl Jung, and he did have “All pie is good pie” as a code phrase to meet a client. Like in the film, he was offered a luxury motorboat as payment once, and he did have a teenager attempt to hire him with video games and nickels.
And yes. The falling in love with a client bit was made up. The real Gary Johnson also had trouble forming long-lasting romantic relationships, but he was married and divorced three times, with one of his ex-wives saying he just enjoys his alone time too much. And, although there was one woman whom the real Gary Johnson dissuaded from hiring a hit job on her abusive husband in real life, it never evolved into anything else.
Hollandsworth’s article finds Gary Johnson in his 50s and he’s still very much living the life his fictional counterpart has at the beginning of the film. He tells his neighbors and the women he sometimes dates that he works in human resources. That’s one way to put it.
Hit Man arrives on Netflix June 7.
