Just by happenstance, I recently rewatched Michael Mann’s brilliant, but ill-fated, 2012 HBO drama Luck, starring Dustin Hoffman as a career criminal who falls in love with a race horse after several years in prison. Despite being a stunning depiction of the sport of kings, as a show, Luck had none.
Not only were the ratings soft during Luck’s one and only season, but any chance the show might have had to continue were quashed when multiple horses died during the making of the series’ nine episodes. Mann wanted the racing sequences to be authentic, so using fake horses wasn’t an option he was willing to entertain, and having a horse die every three episodes was both a moral and PR nightmare. HBO and Mann quite rightly decided to end the show just as it was on the way to becoming one of the great series of its era.
The racing scenes were pulse-pounding, the behind the scenes sequences of the horse racing life were so authentic you could practically smell the hay and horse apples through the screen. And my goodness, what a marvelous cast the show boasted.
Hoffman may have been the linchpin upon which the story turned, but in typical Mann fashion, the wide supporting cast was loaded with extraordinary character actors working at the top of their form: Dennis Farina as Hoffman’s right hand, Joan Allen as Hoffman’s possible love interest, John Ortiz as a genius horse trainer, Jill Hennessy as an equine veterinarian, Nick Nolte as a grizzled horse trainer and owner, Kerry Condon as a green but very talented young jockey, and Kevin Dunn, Ian Hart, Richie Coster, and Jason Gedrick as four degenerate gamblers who hit it big at the track and try to quell their worst instincts so as to not piss it all away.
And then there was Michael Gambon as Hoffman’s malevolent adversary. Gambon only appears in five of the series’ nine episodes, but as a man pretending to want to partner with Hoffman on buying a race track that he, to Hoffman’s significant chagrin, has designs on turning into a casino, Gambon is a sneering, duplicitous terror. Hoffman and Gambon are brilliantly matched as two men who have a pretty good idea that each man knows that the other is not trustworthy, and it’s merely a matter of time before one attempts to pull the rug out from under, with the only question being who will outwit the other first.
While Hoffman plays his character with a certain reserve (while still somehow being method-y as all get out), Gambon’s performance is a textbook delivery on how to play a man for whom the only rules that apply to him are the ones he creates for himself.
Just past the midpoint of the season there is a stunner of a sequence where Gambon suddenly and viciously beats Hoffman’s double agent (sent in to infiltrate Gambon’s methods and madness) to death with a whiskey tumbler. The violence in the scene is severely rendered and staged in such a brutal fashion that one would have to be devoid of emotion to not be shaken by it.
Even more disturbing is the sense of entitlement that Gambon gives off after beating the young man to death. It’s not just that he lacks the slightest shred of remorse, it’s that Gambon’s demeanor, both self-righteous and casual, chills the viewer to the marrow. While his partners look on in shock at his brutality, Gambon simply moves on to the clean up crew, who are charged with cutting the young man up into pieces, with each individual body part packed into plastic bags that are then wrapped in chains, and dropped to the floor of the ocean.
It is a moment that robs you of your breath, and reveals that Gambon’s character is capable of absolutely anything. Of course, Gambon spent a large portion of his career playing men who specialized in venality. I first encountered him as the wicked husband of Helen Mirren in Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, who receives his comeuppance in grand guignol fashion.
Many other villains and unscrupulous types dot his resume. Among his most notable on screen morally flexible creations can be viewed in such fine films as Mann’s The Insider, Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow, Kevin Costner’s terrific western Open Range, Layer Cake, and The Book of Eli, just to name a few.
And yet somehow, despite specializing in characters who could make you shudder with just a raise of the eyebrow, he was also the choice to take over for Richard Harris after his untimely death to play the kindly wizard Dumbledore in the final six Harry Potter films—a role he played with great empathy and charm.
While “good guy” roles were not by any means Gambon’s stock and trade, the ease with which Gambon slid into the part of Dumbledore speaks volumes to the range of this magnificent actor, even if sweetness was an attribute he was seldom asked to showcase in front of the camera.
Over the course of Gambon’s lengthy (nearly seven decades) and prolific (171 film and TV credits), he did one thing consistently and without fail: make everything he was in better than it would otherwise be—often much better.
Even though Gambon was reliably excellent throughout his career, and often exceptional in films of high merit, the Oscar voters never once put him on their shortlist of nominees. I don’t know whether that long-running oversight of Gambon’s many exceptional performances bothered Gambon in the least. Something tells me it didn’t. I suspect that for Gambon, the work was the thing.
And man was he ever good at that thing. While the fascinating multi-layered Luck may have fallen short of the show’s title, we who lived during the time of Michael Gambon, didn’t. We got to see Gambon run the table with one great performance in project after project, year after year.
As it turns out, the “luck” was all ours.
Michael Gambon died on September 27, 2023. He was 82 years old.
