The following article contains major spoilers for Hit Man.
Hit Man is about two things. In a literal sense, Richard Linklater's latest centers on Glen Powell's clean-cut college philosophy professor, Gary, who moonlights as a pretend assassin for police sting operations in New Orleans. He's a guy who wears many faces, adapting his contract killer persona to what he thinks each client wants, or at least expects, a hitman to be, predominantly based on the tropes and clichés they've picked up from movies like Léon: The Professional and In Bruges. Because hitmen obviously don't exist in real life, dummy.
Less literally, it is about a guy who makes a series of arguably poor decisions out of horniness. And compassion. But mostly horniness.
The object of his titillated desire is Madison, portrayed with a quiet devious streak by Adria Arjona. She's one of the would-be clients he meets on an op, where he takes on the guise of hot ‘n hunky smooth talker Ron. Madison wants her husband dead, but rather than haul her in front of a judge, Gary-Ron takes pity when it becomes apparent the guy might just deserve it: he’s a serial abuser, such is why she has arrived at such an extreme to escape the relationship that is crushing her like a cartoon anvil.
One thing leads to another; Gary starts dating Madison as Ron; zip forward an act, the husband is dead, and the eye of suspicion is squarely on Madison. All of this a bowed-up package of wit and ivory-toothed charm that obfuscates how dark the main premise really is, and how it cleverly subverts the rom-com after declaring its clear understanding of what makes the genre tick (Meet cutes! Sex! Credible chemistry between the leads!) It's a deceptively thoughtful film, too, playing with the idea that we're all playing characters, really, to get by in life—we wear masks to fit in, and more pertinently, to be the people we think we're expected to be.
The pièce de résistance comes in the exhilarating form of a one-two-three punch series of scenes in which Madison and Gary-Ron's delicate lies-based situationship falls apart, patches up, and then later the pair consummate with a bloody act of, as Gary puts it, commitment. Seriously, this is cinematic gold: if you're reading this, odds are you've seen the film, and I bet you were stood up or, like, clutching your partner's knee, or you had your hand over your mouth. Didn't you? Exactly.
Here, Arjona talks us through that huge last act, right through to Hit Man's killer finale.
After getting word of Madison's husband's death in an allegedly drug-related shooting, Ron goes to check in on her. In the following, immensely satisfying matryoshka doll of a scene, Madison reveals herself to be the killer and Ron comes out as a fake hit man whose name, as we already know, is actually Gary.
GQ: Why does Madison initially keep it to herself that she killed her husband?
Adria Arjona: We talked about that a lot. What I really love about Madison is that she's her own idea of a femme fatale; she's sort of created this character for Ron… this is Madison putting on an act, or her idea of a femme fatale, and it's so outrageous, and ridiculous, because she has no idea what a femme fatale is. She's trying to figure it out. She's like, ‘Oh, does this turn him on? Or does this?’ She's trying to fit into what she thinks the idea of a perfect woman for him is.
For Madison, in that moment, when she does hide it, it's her showing a little bit of her true self, and her fear. She's like, ‘Oh my god, what if I do get caught?’ She kind of clicks back to, ‘Oh wait, we could be partners in crime in this. I learned this from you…’ And then she turns into this sort of femme fatale for a glimpse of a second, and the truth comes out.
One of my favorite parts of the movie is like, “You've lied to me?” She has the audacity to be pissed at him, when she just killed somebody? I loved that about her.
She seems genuinely sad that her husband is dead. She cries, and says, “Everyone grieves in their own way.” Do you think that's an act?
I think she's putting on a mask for herself. Like, ‘Oh wait, maybe I should’ve been grieving a little more…' By saying “everyone grieves in their own way,” she's kind of protecting herself in a way, of going like, 'I didn't kill him!' You know, 'he wasn't a good guy!'
It's hard to mourn someone that's done so much damage to her, and it's quite truthful, what's she's saying; it's complicated. It's this person that I once loved, I once committed to, I married this person, and this person ended up turning out to be this monster, and destroyed me, and stripped me of all my womanhood, and I don't know who I am anymore, and because of that I'm creating all of these characters to kind of reinvent myself, or find myself again.
But those are alligator tears, for sure.
He's given the world Dazed and Confused, the Before trilogy, and School of Rock, and a streamer snapped up his latest, a comedy-noir with Glen Powell as a fake contract killer. But the director says every project is still a hustle: “It’s always a little bit of a miracle when it all comes together.”
One of my favorite line-reads in the movie—which got such a huge pop in my audience— is when you shout, “Who the fuck is Gary?” How many takes before you nailed it?
In rehearsal, when it came out, I'm like, “Who the fuck is Gary?” —[Arjona replicates the sound of the line perfectly.] — Glen and Rick started dying laughing. And I was like, ‘But it’s true you guys, like, she wouldn't know who the fuck Gary is.' And Rick is like, 'We're keeping that. We need to keep that.' On the day, I just really tried to recreate how I said it in rehearsal, because it worked.
Rick's approach to either comedy or acting [is that] if it works in rehearsal, it's because we're listening to it for the first time, but if we keep at it, the audience are going to be listening to it at the same time. So it's bullshit that the more you do it, the magic is lost.
Is it personally cathartic as an actor to play one of those big argument scenes?
Yeah, I think so, and I think it's a constant match of energy that me and Glen were going at ourselves, because [the characters] are in different places. But we really needed to lock that scene in, in order for the phone scene to work later, and then for the last scene to work.
It needed to feel like a breakup, so the phone scene felt like makeup sex, or they're falling in love with each other again, and the last scene is the marriage proposal. That was the breakdown of those scenes: the breakup, the makeup, and the engagement.
After bumping into the couple on an ice cream date a few nights prior, Gary's rival colleague Jasper, another undercover cop with a chip on his shoulder, catches onto Gary and Madison's affair.
With Madison now at the top of the suspect pile, Jasper sets a trap in the form of a rigged sting operation: Gary will visit Madison as Ron in the guise of a concerned check-in, but in reality, he'll wear a wire to wring out a confession… likely incriminating himself in the process. Thinking on his feet, Gary uses his phone to clue Madison in on what's really going on, and the two put on the radio performance of their lives.
Tell me about rehearsing that scene.
Oh man. There isn't a scene that we talked about more. It was one of those scenes that we couldn't crack, and it was frustrating at times. Because of the way Rick works, sort of like an athlete, we just never gave up on it.
We started with note cards; the note cards didn't work because the paper would make too much noise, and him writing would make too much noise, and they could hear that. We ended up at the phone scene, where Gary would write all of the questions before he walked in through the door, and that didn't feel organic, because how would they know what the people in the van were gonna ask? And then we went in on him silencing the phone, and him typing as it went.
Glen had to juggle in that scene, because he had to do that extra action. For me, it was really focusing on my voice work, so whatever they heard me say was believable, and then it became about me flirting; the physicality was like flirting, kind of getting back with him. All of that dynamic was spoken about during rehearsal, but we never really did it fully.
We knew the choreography perfectly. We knew every step of it. But we hadn't heard the music. So when we heard the music for the first time, it was kind of like magic.
We did that scene a couple of times; we did three more scenes that day. It was scary, we were like, ‘Oh my god…’ Rick is so chill as a director, he was like, ‘Yeah, we’ve got it.’
There is another twist in the reveal of a life insurance policy against Madison's husband that would be paid out to the tune of $1 million. Does she actually kill him in self-defense, or is the life insurance money another motive?
I don't think that question should be answered. I think that's very much to the interpretation of the audience. I definitely have mine, but I don't wanna ruin it for everybody else… Yeah.[Laughs.] Maybe it's a little bit of both.
I personally think that [the husband] coming out and being like, ‘I wanna kill her and her boyfriend,’ and her being in this fantasy of being the partner in crime of this hitman, and she's never felt safer… is this part of her fantasy of this femme fatale, this perfect woman for Ron? This is a question, I don't know. Could be, it just kind of backfired on her.
At the end of the movie, we see that they've stayed together, they have kids. In your imagination, how do you see their relationship panning out?
This is more than marriage, you know. They've committed for life. And I think at the core, they're good people. I think they have a really interesting, beautiful life.
I think now they're sort of playing the role of mom and dad, and [she's] playing the role of the housewife, he's playing the role of the father. How long that lasts for, I'm not sure. I would love to see their story continue, and see like: they got away with it, but for how long?