Richard Linklater’s anticipated film Hit Man has officially arrived on Netflix. As you’re watching the romantic action comedy, you might be wondering whether Hit Man is based on a true story and whether Gary Johnson was a fake contract killer who existed in real life.
Starring and co-written by Glen Powell, the Top Gun: Maverick star portrays Gary Johnson, a psychology professor who discovers he has a hidden talent as a fake hitman, including theatrically imitating his suspects with humorous costumes, accents, and mannerisms. He starts to assume false identities to entrap criminals for the local police, but the situation becomes tricky after he meets a prospective client named Madison (Adria Arjona).
Madison wants to hire Johnson to kill her husband, but she ends up stealing his heart and igniting “a powder keg of deception, delight, and mixed-up identities,” according to Netflix’s Tudum. While talking to the streamer, Linklater described Hit Man as a movie about “identity and self and passion.”
The director continued, “But on a plot level, it’s just a guy who gets in a little too deep. His passions lead him in a direction where he’s deceiving someone he’s in love with, and being someone else. They have to deal with those repercussions.”
Is Hit Man On Netflix Based On A True Story?
Yes, Netflix’s Hit Man is loosely based on the true story of Gary Johnson, a man who posed as a contract killer for the Houston police during the late 1980s and 1990s. Linklater came across Johnson’s unbelievable story in a 2001 Texas Monthly article written by Skip Hollandsworth.
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