‘Hit Man’ True Story: What to Know About the Real Gary Johnson Who Inspired Glen Powell’s Movie

Hit Man on Netflix—the new Glen Powell movie that began streaming today—tells the true story of a fake hit man. But a lot of parts of this “fake hit man true story” movie are also fake.

“I felt we had this permission to just go with it. It’s in keeping with this story that’s all based on BS and people’s belief,” said director and co-writer Richard Linklater in a recent interview with Decider, when asked about his decision to deviate so much from the true story. “It’s in a world of fake. These are fake hitmen. They don’t exist. It’s all myth, largely created by movies and pop culture.”

The story is based on a 2001 Texas Monthly profile from journalist Skip Hollandsworth, with whom Linklater had co-written another adapted-from-an-article film, 2011’s Bernie. Powell stars as Gary Johnson, the real-life undercover cop from Houston, Texas, who regularly posed as a hit man in sting operations to convict would-be killers in murder-for-hire cases.

Linklater moved the story from Texas to New Orleans (because of the better tax cut benefits, he told Decider), and made quite a few other changes to the real Johnson’s story, too. Read on to learn more about the Hit Man true story and the real Gary Johnson.

Is Hit Man based on a true story?

Yes, Hit Man is based on the true story of Gary Johnson, a Houston cop who worked undercover as “a hit man,” to help convict would-be killers in murder-for-hire cases. The script was adapted from a 2001 Texas Monthly article of the same name by Skip Hollandsworth.

“When the story came out in 2001, I talked to Rick Linklater about it,” Hollandsworth said in a recent Texas Monthly video, looking back at the article in anticipation of the film’s release. “He was hesitant. Every story kind of ends the same, an arrest was made.” But years later, Powell came to Linklater with the story, and together, they found a new way in.

How accurate is Hit Man to the true story of Gary Johnson?

Hit Man takes quite a few liberties with the true story that it is based on, and the vast majority of the plot is entirely made-up. The true parts are this: The real Gary Johnson was a full-time undercover cop (not part-time, as he is in the movie) who worked in Houston, Texas (and not New Orleans, where the movie is set). He had two cats named Id and Ego (a detail that makes it into the film), liked reading the works of psychiatrist Carl Jung and Gandhi, and taught psychology and human sexuality part-time at a local community college. And, before he died at the age of 77 in 2022, he was widely respected in the Texas law enforcement community as one of the best actors around. His undercover work as a fake hitman led to over 60 arrests by the time of his 2001 Texas Monthly profile. (According to the coda at the end of the Hit Man movie, that number went up to over 70.)

In that profile, Houston lawyer Michael Hinton, who was also Johnson’s former boss, told Hollandsworth, “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.”

In his article, Hollandsworth details several examples of Johnson doing just that, including a 30-something oil rig worker who paid Johnson $100 down payment on a $2500 fee to kill his wife; a teenager who paid Johnson three dollar bills and $2.30 in nickels and dimes to kill his classmate; and a wealthy socialite woman who paid Johnson about $200,000 in jewelry to kill her husband.

The last example in the article details a client that Johnson let off the hook: A young woman that told Johnson that she was being physically abused by her boyfriend. After verifying that she was telling the truth, Johnson forwent his usual sting operation, and instead referred the woman to social services and a therapist. When Hollandsworth told Johnson he was turning soft, he replied, “Just this once.” That’s where the true story ends. But for the movie, it was the beginning.

As Linklater explained to Decider, “The story Skip writes pretty much ends when [the real Gary Johnson] doesn’t arrest this young woman. Our leaping off point was: ‘What if she got back in touch with them? What if they started hanging out? Dating?'”

All of the plot that you see play out in the movie after Powell’s first meeting with Arjona is entirely made up. That said, Linklater did work in some real-life details as a nod to the real Johnson. For example, Powell’s cheeky catchphrase in the film, “All pie is good pie,” came from a detail in Hollandsworth article. The real Johnson liked to meet his clients at Denny’s (which was changed to New Orleans’ beloved Please U Cafe in the movie), and one of those clients requested Johnson use a secret code to verify the client had the right guy. Johnson would be eating pie at the counter when the client would approach him to say, “That looks like good pie. To which Johnson would respond, “All pie is good pie.”

Linklater also drew inspiration from some of Johnson’s real-life clients. The teenager in the movie who wants Powell to kill his mother was inspired by the real-life Houston teenager named Shawn Quinn, who, according to Hollandsworth’s article, paid Johnson with “seven Atari computer games, three dollar bills, and $2.30 in nickels and dimes to kill a male classmate he thought was trying to win the affection of a girl he liked.”

Then there’s the wealthy society lady in the movie who wants her husband killed so she can get his house, and also strongly indicates she’d like to have sex with Powell. She’s based on a real woman named Patsy Haggard, who, when she was 61, hired Johnson to kill her husband. Hollandsworth’s reports that she would pat the real Johnson down, looking for a wire, but also molesting him. Wrote Hollandsworth, “She never found the wire—it was hidden in his clothes—but she did eventually become so infatuated with Johnson that she suggested they perform a certain sex act on the hood of her Cadillac.”

For Powell’s part, even though much of the film was made up, he still made an effort to get to know the real Gary Johnson before he stepped into the role. Though he never spoke to Johnson before his death in 2022, Powell said in an interview for the Hit Man productions notes, “I listened to him a lot in old recordings and read a lot of what he did in police debriefs, but purposefully, Rick [Linklater] wanted to be the only one who was actually interfacing with Gary. We were creating a moment in time for Gary, not 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.”

Linklater, who did talk to Johnson before his death, told Decider that the real Johnson really was, as Linklater dubs him at the end of the movie, the “chillest dude imaginable.” Said Linklater, “He was so nonplussed. You would think when someone’s making a film, with your name on it, about your life, your occupations—but he was like, ‘Yup. Sounds good.’ I thought I had to, like, impress him or sell him on letting us do it. He was like, ‘Well, Skip says you’re a good guy. Fine with me.'”

Linklater concluded, “He really was beautifully detached from it. It was that Zen master in him. He had a Buddhist service after he passed away. I think he was that Vietnam vet who—aloneness was okay with him. You know? He was married a couple of times, and was very close to his exes, which we tried to portray in the movie. They like him. He was a really good person. No one ever say anything bad about him. But he’s a complex guy. He contained the multitudes, let’s say.”