In 1966, Hudson fired the agent who discovered him by phone. Per Hofler, Willson retaliated by telling Hudson, “All you have going for you is your face. You don’t have the talent! I have a jar of acid and I’m going to throw it in your face.”

Rock Hudson, the closeted Hollywood heartthrob, was not born a movie star so much as he was carefully molded into one by his Svengali of an agent, Henry Willson. In “Outlaws,” the third episode of Ryan Murphy’s most recent Netflix series, Hollywood, audiences are drawn into this star-making saga. Jake Picking plays an early-career Hudson—having recently arrived in Hollywood as a clumsy Illinois native named Roy Scherer. Then Jim Parsons pops onscreen as Willson, the profane and predatory agent who transformed Hudson into one of the most bankable romantic leads Hollywood had seen.
Speaking to Vanity Fair, Ryan Murphy explained what made the agent so ripe for the TV treatment. “Henry Willson was a fantastic, crazy character,” he said. “He was a complete alcoholic. He drank crème de menthe. He was involved in the mafia. He had dirt on everybody that he would weaponize. And he would find these young guys who almost all came from horrible home situations—with broken marriages and absent fathers—and take them on as clients…He was a tormented gay man who preyed on tormented gay men. He would be their manager and make them sexually service him. Weirdly, he was actually an okay manager. He was friends with everyone, so could get clients in the room with [power brokers].”
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