Gene Hackman Almost Played the Dad on ‘The Brady Bunch’

As fans celebrated the film mastery of the late Gene Hackman over the past week, some pondered the sliding-door moment that could have changed his acting career forever. After all, if sitcom producer Sherwood Schwartz had his way, the unknown Broadway actor would have been cast as Mike Brady, patriarch of The Brady Bunch. 

Hackman was Schwartz’s first choice for the role, but ABC executives rejected the idea. Who had heard of Gene Hackman? They wanted someone with more experience like Robert Reed, who TV viewers knew well from several seasons starring in ‘60s legal drama The Defenders. Hackman, on the other hand, only had one-shot appearances on shows like I Spy, The FBI and Route 66. Ironically, he also guested twice on The Defenders. 

Lucky for everyone, Hackman didn’t get the part, clearing the way for an Academy Award just a couple of years later for The French Connection. But in the 1970s, the actor did make another sitcom connection. 

Howard Stern and Robin Quivers boggled over the near-miss Brady Bunch casting this week — “WHAT??” was Quivers’ reaction upon hearing the revelation — then remembered the time ‘70s sitcom star Cloris Leachman visited the Stern show and bragged about her torrid one-night stand with Hackman.

“We just tore upstairs, we were so excited,” the Mary Tyler Moore Show star told Stern a few years back. “Tore off our clothes, slammed the door and he just slid his hands up underneath me, and then I don’t remember one thing after that.” Not remembering was a good thing, she said, as she was too overwhelmed by passion to recall anything but generalized lust.

Both stars appeared in Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein, but that wasn’t the origin of the 1970s tryst, according to Leachman’s memoir, Cloris. The two actors were staying at the same hotel while making separate movies and decided to have dinner. “As we moved into the main course, it was as if a cosmic wind enveloped us,” she wrote. “Some giant space magnet was pulling us together.”

They didn’t finish the meal. “We went upstairs, flew into bed and made love,” she said, describing their rendezvous as “epic.”

Steamy! 

Maybe Hackman was too randy to play a sitcom dad, but don’t tell Schwartz. He was not happy that “Paramount wouldn’t even okay Gene Hackman for an interview because he had a very low TVQ,” he said. (TVQ was a statistical rating based on surveying viewers about how much they liked certain TV actors.) “Unknown Gene Hackman with no TVQ,” lamented Schwartz, “has been a major star ever since.”