The true story behind Hit Man, Richard Linklater's new Netflix caper comedy

Richard Linklater’s acclaimed Netflix caper comedy Hit Man follows Gary Johnson (Glen Powell, also co-writer), a mild-mannered police staffer who goes undercover as a would-be assassin for some of the more unseemly characters in New Orleans. But when a young woman (Adria Arjona) wants to enlist his services against her abusive partner, Johnson finds himself torn between his professional duties and true love.

Though it sounds like a wild work of fiction, Linklater’s latest picture is nominally based on fact. A rousing Texas Monthly article by Skip Hollandsworth from October 2001 portrayed Johnson as a renegade law enforcement official with a knack for character work who, over 30 years, reportedly nabbed more than 60 people looking to procure a hit man. 

Linklater’s film spins a fictional plot out of Johnson’s life, but Powell’s character shares the real man’s name and some of his particular quirks. To unravel the larger-than-life story and unbelievable characters that inspired Hit Man, Entertainment Weekly looks into Gary Johnson’s life and compares it with Linklater’s stylish comic thriller, which is streaming on Netflix now.

Join EW as we explore the true story behind Hit Man.

Who was Gary Johnson?

Gary Johnson was a law enforcement official who enjoyed tending to his garden, listening to classical music, and meditating. Born in 1947, he was raised by his mother, a homemaker, and his father, a carpenter, in a tiny Louisiana burg where he was one of 12 students in his high school class.

Johnson was deployed to Vietnam as a military police officer before he headed back to Louisiana and found work with a sheriff’s office. After a few years, Johnson left that post for a police officer position in Port Arthur, Tex., playing a supposed drug addict who would try to score from street dealers.

“I don’t think the drug dealers ever suspected I might be a cop because my personality was so weird to begin with,” Johnson remarked to Texas Monthly.

After returning to school for a Master’s Degree in psychology, Johnson moved to Houston intending to get a PhD in psychology from the University of Houston. Johnson wasn’t admitted into the program but was soon hired as an investigator for the Houston District Attorney’s office.

When people asked Johnson what he did for a living, his answer was brief and vague: “human resources.” Though he taught human sexuality and general psych classes twice a week at the local community college, his full-time job consisted of reviewing tapes for Harris County prosecutors in dark, windowless rooms for hours at a time.

“If you saw Johnson at the district attorney’s office, you would probably mistake him for a low-level clerk,” the Texas Monthly article explains. “He spends most of his days in a little room filled with video- and audio-recording machinery, where he duplicates or enhances tapes (such as a videotape shot on a department store camera of a shoplifter or an audiotape made of a criminal’s confession) for prosecutors to use in their various court trials. He is a precise, fastidious man.”

What was Gary Johnson’s profession?

Neighbors, co-workers, and students alike agreed Johnson was the epitome of a normal, perhaps even slightly boring guy. However, he was known to Texas’ underworld as “the greatest professional hit man in Houston.” He was also “the Laurence Olivier” of undercover murder-for-hire cases. By all accounts, the investigator was uniquely suited to win over those looking to pay someone to snuff out their cheating wife, nagging husband, or greedy business partner. Johnson crafted multiple aliases and personas. While masquerading as a hardened biker to woo rough-hewn males seeking his services, he’d go by Mike Caine; assuming the identity of a “pleasant-looking” problem solver, he offered a listening ear and warm shoulder to society grand dame Lynn Kilroy when she wanted her husband whacked. He ended up busting her, and Killroy received probation for her dalliance with the so-called assassin.

“He’s the perfect chameleon,” lawyer Michael Hinton, who worked as one of Johnson’s supervisors, told Texas Monthly. “Gary is a truly great performer who can turn into whatever he needs to be in whatever situation he finds himself. He never gets flustered, and he never says the wrong thing. He’s somehow able to persuade people who are rich and not so rich, successful and not so successful, that he’s the real thing. He fools them every time.”

Johnson took on his first undercover assassin assignment in 1989 and proceeded to seek wetwork for the next three decades, putting more than 60 criminals behind bars in the process, according to All That’s Interesting. Despite his high-pressure job, Johnson was reportedly “the chillest dude imaginable,” according to a note in the film, and he shared an equal love for his cats (named Id and Ego, respectively), the words of Gandhi, and Buddhist teachings.

He was also a confirmed loner, having been married and divorced three times. His second wife, Sunny, told Texas Monthly she was astonished he could switch personas for his job. “He’ll show up at parties and have a good time, and he’s always friendly, but he likes being alone, being quiet. It’s still amazing to me that he can turn on this other personality that makes people think he is a vicious killer,” she mused.

Is Adria Arjona’s character based on a real person?

Arjona’s character Maddy is inspired by a real individual who is introduced at the end of the Texas Monthly article. In the source, Johnson was tipped off to an unnamed woman who felt she had no choice but to kill her violent boyfriend.

While researching the suspect before making contact, Johnson “learned that she really was the victim of abuse, regularly battered by her boyfriend, too terrified to leave him because of her fear of what he might do if he found her.”

Instead of setting up a sting to catch the woman, Johnson “referred her to social service agencies and a therapist to make sure she got proper help so she could leave her boyfriend and get into a women’s shelter.”

It was a change of heart that was highly unusual for the regimented professional, one which prompted Hollandsworth to tell Johnson, “The greatest hit man in Houston has just turned soft.”

“Just this once,” Johnson shot back, which is where the article ends.

The exchange was Linklater’s spark of inspiration, crafting his semi-fictional opus around an invented relationship between Johnson and the young woman. What really tickled the director, though, was the idea of Arjona’s character falling in love with one of Powell’s alter egos rather than the real man himself, laying the groundwork for a classic screwball comedy.

“He’s trapped in his hit man persona, which is fine because he’s finding it much more of a fun way to go through the world, particularly in relation to her,” Linklater explained in a Netflix interview. “So it becomes a body-switch comedy in a weird, strange way.”

How much of Hit Man is based on Johnson’s real life?

Linklater’s film is largely rooted in the facts of Johnson’s career, though it predictably takes creative liberties. Most of Hit Man takes place after the point where the Texas Monthly article ended, with Powell’s Johnson meeting Arjona’s Maddy. Linklater told Netflix that this was a rather obvious choice, as he’d long been fascinated with the article but was unsure what the central relationship should be.

“What would happen if a woman got back in touch with him, even went so far as to thank him?” the director queried. “What if she asked him out? What if they got together?”

The movie offers an alternate version of Johnson’s life, keeping many of the article’s facts to structure the narrative's spine while spinning a plot, which suggests the investigator’s life took a very different turn after he met the mysterious young woman.

The movie’s primary embellishment involves Powell’s character actually killing someone in the third act, which the real Gary Johnson certainly never did. Linklater makes this clear in a postscript at the end of the film, but the choice is indicative of the surrealistic spin Linklater gave Johnson’s life story.

Was Gary Johnson involved with Hit Man’s production?

Johnson, who died in 2022, was not directly involved in Hit Man’s production, despite Powell saying Linklater had “a lot of reverence” for the law enforcement official and his colorful life. 

However, Linklater and Powell did plenty of research into both the hitman profession and Johnson’s peculiar niche before heading to set. “I never got a chance to talk to the real Gary Johnson,” Powell told Netflix. “I listened to him a lot in old recordings and read a lot of what he did in police debriefs.”

Powell explained the process was easier without involving Johnson because the film was “creating a moment in time for Gary” that was a snapshot of the article rather than “where he is now. Sometimes when you meet the real-life people, you meet them in a different phase of their life and it can taint who they used to be,” the Anyone but You star considered. 

Although Johnson never got to see the film, Powell believes Johnson would have “really appreciated the story.”

“I’m really glad we have that tribute to him at the end of the movie,” Powell added.