"Could I squeal like a pig? I would learn, I said."Īfter a bit of nail-biting, the big man with the big feet got the gig. "He didn't really talk, though he did grunt and squeal like a pig at times," Hansen said he was told of the character. In his first meeting with Hansen, director and future horror master Tobe Hooper explained that Leatherface was not all there - that he was mentally challenged, and, though he could wield a chainsaw viciously, he actually got a lot of abuse from the rest of his crazed family.
#Gunnar hansen the texas chain saw massacre serial#
Hansen would take the role of Leatherface, so named for his penchant for wearing masks of human skin, a la notorious serial murderer and frequent horror-movie inspiration Ed Gein. The plot of "Texas Chainsaw" - later called an allegory for everything from the Vietnam War to the Manson family to the OPEC oil crisis - is, at least on the surface, pretty straightforward: A family of flesh-eating crazies terrorize youths stranded in rural Texas, particularly the scantily clad women among them. "How many people can tell their friends that they were once in a horror movie, even some obscure thing no one ever heard of?" "I needed a job and I thought this would be an interesting one," Hansen wrote. One of his few prior roles - that of doomed lug Lennie in a campus production of "Of Mice and Men" - at least proved he could play looming and large. Out of school and "freshly fired" as a bartender, as he wrote in the memoir "Chain Saw Confidential," he wanted to "do a little acting and see how movies are made" despite his fear of public speaking. Hansen, a native of Iceland who moved to Maine as a child and ended up writing poetry as a graduate student at the University of Texas, was there on little more than a lark. Leatherface was created in the boiling hot summer Texas summer of 1973, when a group of mostly young, mostly inexperienced filmmakers and actors gathered north of Austin to film a gruesome story under grueling conditions. The actor best known for his portrayal of Leatherface in "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" is dead of pancreatic cancer at 68, his agent, Mike Eisenstadt told the Associated Press, calling Leatherface "one of the most iconic evil figures in the history of cinema." But Gunnar Hansen's artistic bent didn't prevent him from, quite improbably and to the outrage of many moral critics, gaining great fame playing a cannibal who carved up victims with a chainsaw and made masks out of their faces in a notorious cult horror film. He was a sensitive big lug: an actor and a poet whose imposing figure, 6′ 4″, 300 pounds, and size 14 feet, hid an aesthete able to churn out a 240-page meditation on American barrier islands.
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