PRINCE OF THIEVES
Master-robber Hans Gruber has been imitated in 1,000 Die Hard rip-offs. But nobody’s managed to out-loot Alan Rickman
The bearded, well-dressed european arrived in los angeles, ready to pull off an audacious heist. Unlike hans Gruber, though, alan rickman got away with it. as the urbane, supremely confident German kingpin, a preening cat of a villain, he stole Die Hard — incredibly, his first film. “Very early on, Jackie birch, the casting director, told me breathlessly, ‘This guy is fantastic — he can do anything,’” remembers screenwriter steven e. de souza. “I met him when he came in for a wardrobe fitting, got the way he spoke into my ear, and that informed everything I did from that point on.”
In Nothing Lasts Forever, the 1979 roderick Thorp novel on which the movie is based, the character’s name is Tony Gruber and he’s a blowhard, prone to extended monologues about wealth redistribution. Die Hard’s script originally followed suit. but once rickman turned up, everything changed: the character was beefed up and depoliticised, his lines got funnier (“he won’t be joining us for the rest of his life”) and Gruber became a showman, only revealing his master plan in slivers. “we added the whole business with the seven-lock safe, which is completely preposterous,” de souza says. “It makes no sense that he didn’t tell his crew what they were doing. but the whole movie works because of that: you’re secretly wishing for hans to be successful because you want to know what he’s doing.”`
even his look changed. Originally Gruber’s gang were to wear paramilitary uniforms. Until rickman gently protested. “I was being fitted for all this terrorist gear, and looking at all the actors who were going to play my henchmen,” he told Empire in april 2015. “I said, ‘why not put me in a suit?’ I looked stupid, next to these hulks.” so he was given a natty designer suit (the focus of a dialogue scene in an elevator) and the costumes for his crew were upgraded too.
“That’s why a lot of those guys look like fashion models,” laughs de Souza.
Where Hans has designer-wear, cop hero John Mcclane has a grubby vest. And in every other way, too, the characters are polar opposites. Gruber is calculating where Mcclane is impulsive, classically educated instead of bluecollar, slim-built instead of strapping. “Bruce is the working-class American, and this is the European aristocrat,” says director John Mctiernan, who cast Rickman on the strength of his performance in a stage version of Dangerous Liaisons. “We were figuring out how to make them foils for each other as we went. And Alan instantly got it — it was like, ‘Hey, fuck, get out of his way!’”
Originally, Gruber and Mcclane were only to meet at the climax of the story. “We were all concerned that we couldn’t have face-to-face interaction between the hero and villain,” recalls de Souza. “These movies are like romantic comedies, except they have to have a meet-cute, some interaction and then one kills the other.”
Then, one afternoon deep into the shoot during a break for sandwiches, somebody casually asked Rickman if he could do an American accent. He tossed off a few lines in a Californian sneer, and an idea was born. A new scene was hastily written, in which Gruber bumps into Mcclane and pretends to be a Nakatomi employee named Bill Clay. “A British actor playing a German guy pretending to be American,” de Souza extols. “It’s a terrific piece of acting from Alan, up there with [Tropic Thunder’s] ‘I’m a dude playing a dude disguised as another dude.’”
Rickman’s death in January 2016 has only strengthened people’s affection for his most iconic character, one of the few great screen villains you’d love to spend an afternoon with. (Though he’d probably be siphoning money from your bank account as he poured you a drink.) Gruber’s every line is quotable, his every smirk a potential gif. Even the character’s spectacular send-off has become a cultural moment. As was noted on Twitter this past December, if you start Die Hard at 9:58pm on New Year’s Eve, you can watch him plummet from the Nakatomi Plaza as the clock chimes midnight. Happy trails, Hans.