The following article contains major spoilers for Hit Man.
Richard Linklater's new Netflix rom-com, Hit Man, was inspired by a 2001 Skip Hollandsworth article in Texas Monthly, which opens as follows: “On a nice, quiet street in a nice, quiet neighborhood just north of Houston lives a nice, quiet man."
The piece goes on to establish the banal little details of this nice, quiet man's nice, quiet life. He likes to zen out in his Japanese garden; he has a sweet tooth for the classics, psychology and philosophy; Gandhi is his main guy. He has a bunch of cats, and a pond full of goldfish in his backyard. Hardly the sort of stuff you'd expect of a cold-blooded assassin. But perhaps it's more credible of a man who pretends to be one.
This will all be familiar if you've seen Hit Man, in which Glen Powell portrays a fictionalized version of Johnson as a mild-mannered cat-dad with an unfashionable head of curtains, bookish wire-framed specs, and disinterest in all of the girls—and hey, a lot of the guys — in his psychology class wanting to fuck him, recalling that scene with the girl who blinks “love you” for Doctor Jones in The Last Crusade. Linklater and Powell, who tag-teamed on the script, stick close to the original text for this stuff. But that's before it starts getting…bizarre.
Johnson is recruited by the local police to perform sting operations for them, in the course of which he discovers a knack for pretending to be an assassin, playing dress-up for unknowing perps putting cash on the heads of their wives, husbands, and terrible bosses.
The Gary Johnson secret sauce? His disguises are bespoke for each client: the gun-toting redneck gets a MAGA wannabe; the guy who has watched too many Cold War movies gets a Dolph Lundgren-type Russkie (wearing a full leather trench coat in the middle of a piping-hot New Orleans summer! Such gullibility deserves jail time, really); and Madison (Adria Arjona) gets a hot, mysterious hunk named Ron. Later, he and Madison fall in love, she kills her husband, Gary covers it up, they murder the rival cop who cottons on, and they live happily ever after.
So yeah. There's gotta be a gun bag's worth of invention, right? Let's put our crosshairs over the facts.
Isn't Gary Johnson's whole thing, y'know, entrapment?
Not according to Texas law. But, the ethics of the whole thing did come up in court quite a bit, apparently. According to Hollandsworth, defense attorneys would suggest that their clients would not have followed up on their murderous tendencies had Johnson not wound up at their doors. But Johnson – who was interviewed for the piece—said that he fully believed that they would have found another means to the same end. “They were not going to back down,” he said. Still, many ended up with only light sentences or probation.
Johnson really did change up his hitman fits
“Johnson is the Laurence Olivier of his field,” Hollandsworth writes. It turns out that the real-life Gary Johnson was every bit the killer chameleon we see in Powell's version for the screen: the article details no end of ruses and disguises he adopted to con his cons, adapting them for what he thought his would-be clients expected.
He'd be a sleek high roller for Houston's high-society; for the working classes he would adopt the persona of a “wily country boy” ready to snipe your biggest foe for half a Twix and the loose change in your jacket pocket. Whether or not a tween with the glazed-over eyes of a Columbine wannabe actually asked Johnson to snuff out his mum remains unknown.
In reality, he was a cop who moonlighted as a teacher
While Hit Man depicts Johnson as a teacher who found himself working for the cops, in truth, he was a cop who taught biweekly courses at a community college: one on human sexuality, and the other on general psychology. “His students, no doubt, think of him as just another mild-mannered professor,” Hollandsworth writes, detailing how Johnson would drone on tiresomely in his lectures. While Powell's Johnson does tend to go on a bit, his students are depicted as nothing less than enrapt, which they kind of have to be to sell him as a coveted, sexy rom-com hero.
The real-life Johnson became a minor local celebrity
Olivier indeed. Like any actor building up a reputation for his craft, Johnson's canny character-led setups won a fair bit of press in the papers. As the article details, it had surprisingly little impact on Johnson's take up among local wannabe accomplices to murder. “The clients kept arriving,” Hollandsworth writes, despite Johnson's rise to local stardom.
Yes, someone really did offer him a boat
During one of Hit Man's client montages, a woman living in the sticks with little by way of traditional currency barters with Johnson instead, offering a beautifully polished speedboat in exchange for a hit. Per Hollandsworth, this actually happened. “A bookkeeper met with Johnson to outline her plan to have him blow up the home of her employer, a well-known Houston surgeon, with the surgeon in it,” he writes. “For her down payment, she offered Johnson a luxury motorboat.”
But Madison, the murdered husband, the drugged-and-murdered cop, the fairy tale rom-com romance… they're mostly fiction
Right at the end of Hollandsworth's article, he details the story of the single time “the greatest hit man in Houston… turned soft.” It was a client who had recently approached Johnson: a woman who frequented a local Starbucks and told one of the baristas about her abusive boyfriend, and how she felt that her only way out of the relationship was to see him deleted. Johnson's services were sought by the police for what would've likely been a fairly open-and-shut case of attempted solicitation for murder, had his unassailable charm and wit worked their usual magic.
He researched her case, however, and found all that she'd told the Starbucks employee to be true; she was really locked into a physically abusive relationship that she was too terrified of the consequences to leave. “Instead of setting up a sting to catch the woman and send her off to jail, he decided to help her,” Hollandsworth writes, involving social services and the help of a therapist.
It's this concluding anecdote that seemingly forms the basis for the second half of Hit Man, though Linklater and Powell obviously let their imaginations run wild as to what would've happened had Johnson fallen in love with the one client he sympathetically let off. And it goes without saying, then, that no abusive husbands actually met their deathly comeuppance, nor did a rival cop actually meet a fate of death by Walmart bag, and nor did Johnson and Madison— a character largely invented for the film—live happily ever after.
Well, as far as we know.