“Hollywood is full of little guys who act big; Gene Hackman was a big guy who knew how to be small. When the moment called for it, when he was playing a bullying cop or a football player turned private eye, he could bludgeon you with physicality every bit as much as Sean Connery could, but Connery was always larger-than-life, and Hackman was a genius at playing life-sized. With Connery, the essence of his charisma was that he always seemed two inches taller than anyone else on the screen. When he played a hapless professor, in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the effect was giddily comic, because you sensed deep down that Henry Jones could take Indiana, and probably all the Nazis, in a fight. When Hackman played a timid egghead—say, the surveillance expert in The Conversation, Francis Ford Coppola’s classic paranoid thriller from 1974—there was nothing funny about it unless Hackman wanted it to be. He knew how to pull back the boundaries of his own presence, like someone turning the dimmer on a light.”

https://www.theringer.com/2025/02/27/movies/gene-hackman-dead-obituary-movies-characters-legacy