There have been a lot of movies over the years that feature famous actors playing real-life cops in the stories they are telling. Just as there are movies with real-life gangsters, the movies about the cops are equally interesting, and often the same movies feature versions of real cops and real robbers, like The Untouchables, Catch Me If You Can, and Donnie Brasco. Here is our list of movies that feature portrayals of real police officers and law enforcement officials.
Frank Serpico – Serpico
Frank Serpico, played by Al Pacino in the movie Serpico, was famous in the 1970s for bringing down important, but corrupt, members of the New York City Police Department. The movie, like the real-life story is harrowing and incredible. Pacino is perfect as the real-life Serpico.
Eliot Ness – The Untouchables
It’s more than fair to say that director Brian de Palma’s masterpiece The Untouchables plays pretty fast and loose with the actual historical facts surrounding Eliot Ness and his crew taking down Al Capone in Chicago during Prohibition. the broadest of the strokes are true, in that Ness and Capone were real people and Ness was partly responsible for nabbing Capone, but otherwise, it’s just a really great work of fiction. In the movie, Ness is played by Kevin Costner.
Javier Peña – Narcos
Like most TV shows and movies, Narcos isn’t 100% true to real life, but it gets most of the story correct, some of the real-life cops are condensed down into just a few characters, like Javier Peña, played by Pedro Pascal. Peña was actually one of the cops in on the investigation and chase for Pablo Escobar, but in the show, he’s a combination of more than one DEA agent.
Melvin Purvis – Public Enemies
Melvin Purvis was an FBI agent who was famous in his day for bringing the likes of Pretty Boy Floyd and John Dillinger to justice, or, at least to their death, as the movie portrays. In the movie Public Enemies, he is played by Christian Bale.
Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle – The French Connection
Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle (Gene Hackman) in The French Connection seems almost too over the top to be based on a real guy, but he was. The real guy who helped take down the French drug smuggling ring was named Eddie Egan. He was on the job in the NYPD for 16 years before he caught the acting bug after appearing in a small role in the French Connection.
Bill Tench – Mindhunter
Mindhunter is one of those Netflix shows that most people believe got canceled way too quickly. The show tells the story of the first FBI agents to dive headfirst into understanding the minds of serial killers and the formation of the Behavioral Studies Unit at the FBI. Robert Ressler, who the character Bill Tench (Holt McCallany) is based on, was one of those agents.
Wyatt Earp – Tombstone
It’s hard to think of Wyatt Earp being. 1. a bad guy and 2., a police officer. But he was kind of both. He was definitely a sheriff in Tombstone, as he is shown to be in the movie of the same name, played by Kurt Russell. He wasn’t strictly a “good guy” in real life and there is plenty of evidence that he and his brothers were just as much “a gang” as the Cowboys and they were all looking to make more money in town.
Joseph D. Pistone – Donnie Brasco
Joe Pistone must have cajones of steel to do what he did in real life. If you don’t know who he is, check Donnie Brasco, which tells his story pretty accurately. Played by Johnny Depp in the movie, Pistone went so deep undercover that he almost became a made member of the Bonanno crime family.
Frank Hamer – The Highwaymen
Frank Hamer, who was played by Kevin Costner in The Highwaymen was a legendary Texas Ranger who was primarily responsible for hunting down and eventually killing the notorious Bonnie & Clyde. In the 1967 movie Bonnie and Clyde starring Warren Betty and Faye Dunaway, Hamer was played by actor Denver Pyle.
Dave Toschi – Zodiac
In regards to 20th-century lawmen, there is no more famous one than San Francisco detective Dave Toschi. Toschi played a large part in the fruitless hunt for the Zodiac killer, as portrayed in Zodiac, where he was played by Mark Ruffalo. He was also supposedly the basis for the fictional detectives Frank Bullitt, Steve McQueen’s character in Bullitt, and Harry Calahan in the Dirty Harry franchise.
Carl Hanratty – Catch Me If You Can
Tom Hanks‘ character in Catch Me If You Can was based on a real FBI agent named Joeseph O’Shea. O’Shea worked on a number of notable cases during his time at the Bureau, most famously the Frank Abagnale case as portrayed in the movie.
John McLoughlin – World Trade Center
There were tragically only 20 people pulled out of the collapsed World Trade Center in the days after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Port Authority police officer John McLoughlin was one of the last. He was trapped for 22 hours under the rumble and his fellow first responders worked non-stop to free him. It’s an incredible story and Nicolas Cage‘s portrayal of McLoughlin in World Trade Center has all the emotion you would expect.
J. Edgar Hoover – J. Edgar
Leonardo DiCaprio is great at playing eccentrics from Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby to Howard Hughes in The Aviator, to the legendary (and controversial) former director of the FBI J. Edgar Hoover in J. Edgar. It’s a different kind of movie about a LEO for a very different kind of LEO than the cop on the beat, but it’s a great movie and as always DiCaprio puts on an excellent performance of the enigmatic FBI boss.
Eliot Ness – The Untouchables TV Series
While Kevin Costner may have played the most famous version of Eliot Ness in The Untouchables, he was the first. In the late ’50s/early ’60s Robert Stack, later of Unsolved Mysteries fame, played a very fictionalized version of the legendary Fed on The Untouchables TV show. It wasn’t about Ness napping Al Capone, it was more a standard police procedural with Ness and his crew chasing down the criminal of the week, often high-profile ones from the 1930s when the show was set.
LAPD Gangster Squad – Gangster Squad
2013’s Gangster Squad is a decent movie with some great performances about a crew of LAPD detectives who form a…well… gangster squad to take down legendary mobster Mickey Cohen (played by Sean Penn in the movie) in Los Angeles in 1949. Most of the characters, like John O’Mara (Josh Brolin), are loosely based on real members of the squad and it even features a scene with Josh Pence playing a rookie on the squad, Darryl Gates, who would find infamy later as the Chief of Police in LA during the Rodney King beating and subsequent riots.
Holden Ford – Mindhunter
John E. Douglas was one of the FBI agents who helped start the now-legendary Behavioral Science Unit. The excellent show MIndhunter, a show Netflix canceled way too soon) features a fictional version of Douglas named Holden Ford, played by Jonathan Groff.
Pat Garrett – Pat Garrett And Billy the Kid
Like most of the best Westerns in film history, Pat Garrett And Billy the Kid isn’t really the true story of the legendary lawman Pat Garrett (James Coburn) tracking down the outlaw Billy The Kid. Take into account the film’s director, Sam Peckinpah, and what you get is a wildly entertaining, but hardly factual account. It’s such a crazy movie though, it’s worth mentioning on this list.
Mark Fuhrman – The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story
One of the biggest villains in many peoples’ eyes in the O.J. Simpson murder trial was LAPD detective Mark Fuhrman. He was seen as dirty and racist (for good reason) and he became a lightning rod during the long trial that gripped the nation’s attention in 1995. In the incredible FX mini-series, The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story, Furman is played by Steven Pasquale.
Dan White – Milk
Josh Brolin’s performance as murderer Dan White in Milk is fantastic. White was not a cop when he murdered Harvey Milk (Sean Penn in the movie), he was a former cop and the performance is so good, that it deserves inclusion on this list.