How Richard Linklater, Glen Powell's Hit Man deconstructs assassin movies — watch the first trailer

One of the coolest character archetypes in cinema is that of the professional assassin. Whether sporting a finely tailored suit like Alain Delon in Le Samorai or a goofy bucket hat like Michael Fassbender in The Killer, these hitmen always come off as enviably cool dispensers of death. Even if the idea of trained killers roaming the streets of the globe for their targets is scary, you still want to see it on screen. 

But the thing is…these kinds of people are not real. The professional assassin, who accepts monetary payments in return for ruthlessly executing specific targets, is not a real job. That’s what separates Richard Linklater’s new movie from The Killer and others like it. Despite its title, Hit Man is a film that knows hitmen are fake. Instead of a dark drama, it’s a funny, sexy comedy about two people who meet through the strangest circumstances.

EW can exclusively reveal the first trailer and confirm Hit Man will premiere on Netflix in select countries on Friday, June 7 after a limited theatrical release. The film will first screen at the Sundance Film Festival as a Spotlight Premiere tonight.

Hit Man is based on a 2001 Texas Monthly article by Skip Hollandsworth, whose journalism previously inspired another Linklater movie, Bernie. It stars Glen Powell as Gary Johnson, a Houston teacher who works with police on sting operations to entrap wannabe killers. By posing as a professional hitman, Gary catches people on a wire admitting that they want to kill someone, whether it’s their spouse, their boss, or an ex-business partner. That’s the closest that reality ever comes to a hitman scenario. 

“I asked Skip, ‘Is it true?’ And he goes, 'There's never been a case of someone arrested for being a hitman,'” Linklater tells EW. “That was 2001, so I have followed really closely over the years. Whenever I see an article about someone getting arrested for taking out a hit, I check it, and it’s always another person getting arrested by an undercover officer. But no one ever figures out from there that hitmen don't exist.” 

Linklater remembers when his film first premiered at the Venice Film Festival last year. While there were three other movies about hitmen that screened at the time, "We deconstruct the hitman film. Isn't that funny?" he continues. "Those films are basically crime dramas, but we’re the one based on real events — and we’re a comedy!” 

Powell has worked with Linklater multiple times now. As a teenager, he had a bit part in 2006’s Fast Food Nation, but then had a larger role in 2016's Everybody Wants Some!! and a cameo voiceover appearance in 2022's animated Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood. Now he’s credited as a co-writer on Hit Man, following in the footsteps of previous Linklater collaborators like Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, who have screenwriting credits on Before Sunset and Before Midnight in addition to starring in them. 

It was Powell who figured out the angle for adapting the Texas Monthly article, which Linklater had been considering for years but hadn’t found a way in. Once they had that starting point, they broke the story together. 

“We talked about this one little paragraph [in the article] about how Gary Johnson had met this woman who came to him for help and said, ‘I want to take out my husband,'" Powell recalls. "It turns out she was actually in danger, and Gary befriended her. So I told Rick, ‘I think that's the movie. Let's follow that breadcrumb trail.’ We took this fascinating character and made it a really compelling love story that explored the essence of passion, identity, and humanity.”  

That woman is Madison (Adria Arjona), and her arrival in the movie convinces Gary that maybe being a professional hitman would be pretty cool after all. Although Arjona joined the project after Linklater and Powell, she still had a lot of input into her character and scenes. 

“We meet her at such a weak point,” Arjona says of Madison. “She chooses to reinvent herself through this guy. Whatever he finds cool, she finds cool. Whatever he likes, she likes. That’s her way of becoming another person and burying the person that she was with her ex. The more we spoke about it, Rick and Glen gave me an open floor to pitch all my ideas. Some were good and landed in the movie, others were awful and I was made fun of for them for a minute. But it was a really cool process."

Watch the first trailer above.

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