There is a certain relish to the way Scott Glenn describes a knife. His voice a sort of Midwestern drawl that has a touch of Pittsburgh flint and a lot of Ketchum, Idaho, where hes called home for decades, in it stays slow and steady as he talks about some of the various weapons hes been using in his martial-arts training lately. You can tell from the gleam in his eye, however, that the actor is getting a serious kick out detailing his recent discoveries in self-defense cutlery.
Theres this one called a karambit, the 76-year-old says, leaning forward and putting down a cup of green tea. Its got a ring for your finger on the bottom, and the blade kind of curves out like that, kinda like a tooth. It began life as a gardening tool women in the Philippines and Indonesia would use it to cut rice or mushrooms, and the ring kept it from slipping out of their hands when it got muddy. Then they discovered it doubled nicely as an an anti-rape tool. He taps his fingers on the table, letting the sentence hang in the air for a second. Knives and swords cut, slash and stab. A karambit, however, well that rips and tears.
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The reason Glenn is sitting here, in the bar of the downtown New York hotel he and his wife use as a base of operations when hes on long shoots on the Eastern seaboard, is that hes doing publicity for The Defenders, Netflixs Marvel team-up extravaganza that unites the stars of its four superhero shows. Daredevil fans will be happy to know hes reprising role as Stick, the blind, tough-love father figure to that shows sightless vigilante; everyone else will be pleased to find out that the legendary character actor treats a deadly, geriatric comic-book killer with the same signature, no-bullshit manner that treats singer-obsessed soldiers, ex-con bull riders, corrupt cops, crazy Green Berets, F.B.I. agents, astronauts and apeshit prophets in the Australian outback. Most of the characters hes played during his 40-plus years onscreen radiate a sense that they could, if need be, kick your ass in a country second. This one literally kicks ass almost from the second you meet him.
Stick is one half of a late-act, small-screen one-two punch for Glenn, who, earlier this year, said goodbye to his character Kevin Sr. on HBOs The Leftovers or Senior, as the actor refers to him with a near-solo episode in which he wanders down under in search of an Aboriginal holy man. It features, without a doubt, a monologue of sorts that offers the most compelling five minutes of TV youll ever see involving faith, fatherhood, Niagara Falls, tape recorders, mystical chickens and a masterclass in acting. Many performers would have turned this showstopper into a delicate playing-the-scales showcase or a self-conscious awards-circuit reel. Glenn just rips and tears.
Over the course of an hour, several days before The Defenders hits Netflix in all its eight-episode glory, the actor talks about the tiny part he plays in the Marvel TV universe what he can say about it, at least. (Those Marvel guys really like their secrecy, he says, in the understatement of the decade.) But he also graciously dug into some of the highlights of four-decades-and-still-going career, from getting a big break from Robert Altman with a supporting part in Nashville to how he ended up on Kurtzs compound in Apocalypse Now, channeling the elite fraternity of NASAs space-race pioneers in The Right Stuff to introducing a female Fed to the worlds most famous screen serial killer in The Silence of the Lambs.
How was Stick pitched to you?
My agent and manager called me up usually when theyre both on the line, that means a job or an offer: Marvel is doing this thing called Daredevil I mean, Im not a Comic-Con kinda guy, I knew nothing about any of this. I asked: Whats the part? Its Daredevils mentor. I got so pissed off: Oh, its just some fucking old guy sitting behind a desk. His mentor. I dont wanna do it. Screw it. So I go for an angry run on this peak near my house pissed off that Id been offered a job! When I came back, my wife said, Why did you run out of the house? They want me to play this old man! Well, they just sent over a cast breakdown And then I read it and went, Wait, hes a blind assassin? Holy shit, this is great!
How did you train for this? Youve studied martial arts for a long time, but now you have to do them blind
Id been studying martial arts since I was six, but never played blind before, so I had to figure that out. Traditionally, what actors do is: If you play blind, you stare at someones mouth. Thats the trick. Problem is, that doesnt work when youre doing stunts in which five guys are attacking you with swords. So my solution to that was something I learned when I was in the Marine Corps called peripheral walking.
Whats that?
Ill give you an example: Right now Im looking at you. That woman over thereshe just took a sip a water. The person to the left of us way over therehe took a sip of tea. You, youre just fuzzy. You just concentrate on whats happening on the side. The more you do it, the better you get at it. You just need too relax at it. Which explains most of the roles Ive had: Relaxing under great pressure while tense.
When they brought me on for The Defenders, the first part of my schedule was three light days the first day I was on set, they literally had me say one word. That was it for the first five weeks. I called up Jeph Loeb and said, What the fuck? Do I have to be here? He just said, Yeah, you do have to be here were doing table reads and were paying you. Show up. So I thought, well, Ill learn a new martial art while Im waiting.
Were there any you still didnt know?
A few. I wanted to learn how to work with short blades because[pause] God, I probably shouldnt tell you because Marvel might sue me or kill me. Let me put it this way: I knew I was going to be doing a lot of stunts and I wouldnt be able to use both my hands.
I found a guy in New York who could give me private lessons for that kind of stuff. Then five weeks pass by, and all of sudden, they started calling me in for 16 hour days. And after the first day, my wife was like, Youd better stop training for a bit. I asked her why, and we were sparring with these rubber blades. They wont cut you, but they will tear your flesh if they catch. And she pointed toward all this blood on my side of the bed from where my arm had been. Maybe just take it easy now, Scott? [Laughs]
Would you say youre the type of actor who learns stuff from the outside in? If youre going to play, say, a bull rider in Texas, it makes sense that youd learn as much as you could to make it seem real. But then there are actors
Yeah, I see what youre saying. My background as an actor is improvisational street theater here in New York, along with doing a lot of work with [Method-acting teacher] Lee Strasberg so Ive worked in that sort of inside out way as well. But if Im doing a role like, say, the one youre talking about from Urban Cowboy, whats more important to me than critics thinking Im good or studio heads thinking Im good is whether real ex-cons who came out of Huntsville [where the Texas State Penitentiary is located] and real bull riders down there thinking Im good. I want them to believe Im one of em.
What do you remember about working with Robert Altman on Nashville?
I never net an actor who did not love Bob. He almost demanded freedom from you. I remember doing a scene in Nashville in a hospital room, and I said, What do you want from me in this scene? He said, What do you mean?Well, I could give you pathos, or I could be funny and clumsy, I could play aroundthere are a million ways I could go with this.Youre the actor, not me! [Laughs] You know what I want to see, Scott? I want to take a look at the dailies and go, Yeah, thats real.' You know, thats it?!? And with Bob yeah, that was it.
What I learned from him was to just try and live the life of the character and forget about where the camera is, what the people behind the scenes are doing, all that. When we did that state fair scene at the end, the big climax of Nashville, there were 11 cameras and we were all radio-miked. And somebody asked him, Where am I? Am I over here in the shot or over there? How are you following me? Bob said, Well, what makes you think Im following you at all? That set was where I learned my job was not to get a key light or, as my manager says, to not try to have a conversation with Oscar. Have a real honest-to-God life onscreen. Do that, and Bob would find you.
That was why actors loved him, right?
Its why actors loved him and producers hated him. I once asked him, why are you so great with actors? And his reply was, Because you guys are doing the only job on set that I couldnt do better. I can handle a camera, I can cook, I can do everything but I have no fucking clue how you guys do what you do.
But producers I remember on the set of Nashville, we were setting up a shot and this producer not one of our movies guys, but someone whod worked with him in the past came on the set. Bob turned around when he heard the mans voice and said, Ah, talking behind my back, I see. I heard you were talking behind my back in L.A. as well! The guy kinda chuckled, and then Bob just goes, You see me laughing? What are you doing my set? Can you act? Can you light a scene? Can you fucking help the caterers serve food? No? He turned to these two Hells Angels who worked for him Eddie and Angel and said, Put this guy in his limo, take him to the airport. Hes leaving. [Laughs] Its like, No wonder you have a hard time getting jobs from the studios. Holy shit! He was just a one-of-a-kind character.
Youve said in the past that being in Apocalypse Now was one of the most important jobs you ever took which is funny, because at least in the theatrical version, your character does not speak a word, correct?
Thats not the reason it was important to me, though. Ok, so when I arrived in the Philippines, I was supposed to have this very small part in the Do Lung Bridge scene. It was the weekend, and everybody was going back to Manila. I decided to stay there with the props folks, and a few others there were about 20 of us, including a pregnant woman, who stayed on the set. And while were there, the worst typhoon to hit the area since 1932 came in and just turned this isthmus we were living on into an island. Myself and a P.A. were the only ones who had any military experience; I was the only one who ever delivered a child before. So we filled up this generator with coconut moonshine so we could get a couple of hours of electricity out of it, and made sure everyone was ok.
Francis flew back a little later, and all of our sets were destroyed. In order to get insurance for something like that, you have to have an insurance person witness you trying to film and seeing that itd be impossible to go on. So Francis, this insurance adjuster and Vittorio Storaro, our cinematographer, they got on this boat thats in the rover, which was now basically a whitewater rapid. Theres a rope tied to the back of the boat to keep it from flying off, but the water is moving so fast that it pulls it and the rope goes completely tight. Its starting to rip the whole back of the boat off.
So I see this, and very quickly, I take out my knife I had a knife with me
Of course you did.
And I ran over there and just cut it. Boats ok, everyone on board is ok. Francis, meanwhile, is convinced I saved his life. So the next day, he comes up to me and says, Im a really good writer. I know the small part youre doing, but tell me another part of the movie you want to be in, and Ill write you a whole other role.You saved my life, you did all this stuff, I owe you.
What did you say?
I told him I wanted to be in the end, at Kurtzs compound. And he threw his hands up and said, Thats the only part of the movie I cant put you in. Theres nothing to give you there. I mean, theres Colby, the guy who goes up the river before and ends up becoming one of Kurtzs foot soldiers, but youll be like a glorified extra. And were not doing that for three months. Pick something else. And I just said, No. Thats what I want. You asked me. Im telling you. Finally, he just went, all right, fine.
The reason I did that is, I didnt know that much about working in front of a camera. And I just knew that instinctively that, down the line, this would pay off. I felt like I was serving an apprenticeship and I knew Id learn way more about acting by being around Marlon Brando and Dennis Hopper every day than being around anybody else doing anything else. So thats what I did. And it was the smartest fucking thing I could have done.
How close did you become with Alan Shepard when you making The Right Stuff?
Never even met him. Purposefully so.
How come?
Lets say I was going to play you in a movie, and you know Im exploding your physical image into something thats the size of a four-story building, and that millions of people will see it, youre going to act differently. Youll edit yourself: I never did this, I was never like that. Youll try to make yourself appear better than you are its a natural instinct. And I saw that happening with folks; I saw it with Dennis (Quaid) and Gordon Cooper. So when someone asked me, do you want to meet Alan Shepard, I just said: No. What I want is to see every home movie you have of himjust all the footage youve got of him. The hardest part was really just making myself right-handed. Im left-handed, so I had to work on that to get it down.
The best review Ive ever got, still to this day, was Alan saw the movie down In Texas somewhere, and he wrote [director] Phil Kaufman a letter that said, Tell Scott Glenn that I just saw The Right Stuff and he did a fantastic job! He got me almost perfectly. Theres only thing he missed, and that is hes nowhere near as good-looking as I am. [Laughs] Yeah! The icy commanderyou didnt disappoint me!
Its amazing how the film walks this balance between celebrating these guys and still totally puncturing the mythology around them.
Phil understood that the movie had to be made in San Francisco and shot at Edwards Air Force Basethey were on his ass to move the production down to Los Angeles and film the whole thing on backlots. And I think he knew that if were all this weird little family shooting up there, free from the eyes of the powers that be, he had a better chance of making something a bit deeper. We all knew we doing something special; we could tell that it was something significant and that it was good. I mean, it flopped when out came out, and now its considered one of the great American movies. [Pause] Its just rough for me to think about it now because of Sam [Shepard, who played Chuck Yeager]. I was really good friends with him. Itll be a while before I can watch it again.
You got involved with The Silence of the Lambs through Jonathan Demme, right?
Yeah. Another script that I read and threw it against the wall. Once again, my wife came in and rescued me. Whats wrong? Oh, they sent me some stupid fucking horror movie. Well, who sent it? Jonathan did. He wants me to come to New York and talk to him about it. Scott, weve known him for 20 years! Let me see that script. She disappeared for an hour or so, then came back and said, You need to read this again. This is unbelievable. Thank god she said that.
So I had dinner with Jonathan in New York, and afterward, we went to see these Haitian drummers play. During the intermission, Jonathan turned to me and said, You have too play this part. Youre the only person I know who can do it. At the time, I was three weeks out from shooting something elsesorry, but Im committed to another feature. If they sue you, Ill pay the legal fees. Thats how bad I want you for this.
I called my agent up and said, Look, I really want to do this, but I have to do this other thing. Maybe 15 minutes later, she calls me back: Apparently this other film was supposed to put my money in escrow, and they never did. The producers assumed I wasnt going to get another offer, so yknow, why should they lose the interest on my fee? So I went and did Silence. It was maybe the 50th time Ive had someone yell at me, Youll never work in this town again! Yeah, ok. Right. Got it.
Why do you think the film became such a huge cultural phenomenon? Yes, its well-written and well-acted and well-directed
And its also incredibly talky, and even kind of slow in parts. Yet it was the second highest-grossing movie of the year when it came out, and was a huge hit in places like Japan and Germany and France and Japan. Yknow, usually the movies that do well internationally are things like Conan the Barbarian lots of muscular folks grunting and you know what the story is already. Ive thought about this quite a bit: Why did this particular movie resonate with so many different people? The one answer that Ive been able to come up with is that there are tons of films about the rites of passage from boyhood to manhood yet very, very few about the rites of passage from girlhood to womanhood. Jodie Fosters character starts the movie, for all practical purposes, as a girl; she ends that movie as a woman. Strip away everything else from the film, and thats really whats at its core.
Did you and Jonathan have discussions about the relationship between your character, Jack Crawford, and Clarice Starling?
Well, after I had read Ted Tallys script, I remember thinking, this is the strangest relationship in the movie, even stranger than her and Lecter. You cant quite figure it out: Is this like a surrogate father-daughter thing? Are they lovers? What the hell is going on? I remember Jodie and I were doing a table reading early on, trying it one way or another, and Jonathan said, God, dont play the relationship. Thats just a writer being a writer. [Laughs]
Later on, theres a scene where shes leaving Washington and Im walking her out to the car. She had a hard time getting in, so I just took her arm to sort of help her getting in to the car. And Jonathan yelled, No, Cut! He comes running, like really running, up to us and goes, Scott, I do not want you to touch her! Jodie said, Well, hes just helping me in, and Then he says, Remember way back when we did that reading, and I told you two that you couldnt play that relationship? Well it exists on the screen I see it in every frame of the footage I watch of the two of you. And I just know instinctively that if you touch here in this scene, its going to blow it all. You should only touch her once, at the end, when you shake her handthat handshake will be so loaded, but it only works if you dont do that. I mean, watch that scene and you see what he means. That was the kind of artist he was.
Lets talk about your role on The Leftovers youve said in interviews that you thought Damon Lindelof was bugging your house, because he was giving you lines that seemed to echo your own ideas to an astonishing degree. Which is a little frightening, to be honest.
[Laughs] What I meant was he wrote for my voice in a way that I dont think any other writer has done quite as well. We had a long Skype conversation about him wanting me to play this character, and I asked him, So whats this show about? And he said, Ultimately, I want the audience to ask themselves a couple of questions. I dont plan on answering any of them, but i want them to be at the forefront of their mind by the time we get to the final episode. So I countered with, Well, whats the main question? He replied What does it mean when we say the word family?' Not blood lines or gene pools, but the idea of family.
He also said that in times of great trauma, which this show certainly ended up tapping in to, theres usually a prophet. Theres usually three kinds: false prophets, the guys who want money, power and sex; crazy people, like the Guilty Remnant; and real prophets, like Moses, Muhammad and your character. He hears voices, reject the voices, fight the voices then give in to the voices. How many voices am I hearing, I asked. You cast them, he saidbut know that they are never, ever lying to you. And then he said I think one day, maybe, your character may go on some sort of walkabout. He just blurted that last one out.
And theres Crazy Whitefella Thinking, your stand-out Season Three episode, in a nutshell.
That episode is the best part Ive ever had and the best work Ive ever done. Period. Damon told me hes written the longest monologue hes ever written, and I may want to think about doing it in bits and pieces. Sight unseen, I told myself: Youre going to do this in one take. Take the challenge. Then I asked him, how long is it? Seven pages. Oh, shit. [Laughs]
He never said it outright, but I knew that, regardless of how long that speech was, I had to walk the tightrope between: Is he a prophet, a madman or both? What I had used as sort of a through line for Senior throughout the show was that, once the voices left me, all I had left was an addiction.
An addiction to what?
To having a purpose. Do I wanna see God? Ok, Ill take this acid. Well, that was bullshit. But wait, theres this holy chicken? Then Ill go see the chicken! Now Ill go to Australia! [Laughs] That kind of thing. Unlike everyone else on that show and some for cast got pissed off at me for saying this Kevin Sr. doesnt whine. Grief is not his primary motivator. I just sort of knew from the beginning, this character is special. And I play it right and somehow don;t fuck it up, this man will just pop off the screen.
Youre still getting good roles in your mid-Seventies
Ive been lucky, yeah. Stick and Senior. Good stuff.
But there are a lot of actors who would look back on a 40-year-plus career and go, well, Im proud of what I did, I left a good body of work behind, now Im going to go fishing. So whats driving you to keep working?
Yeah, I meanyoure not the first person to ask me this. I really dont know. [Long pause] So that long scene we were just talking about from The Leftovers, the one I did with David Gulpilil? I remember when we finished doing the first take, [director] Mimi Leder said, So Scott, when you start talking about your son, then you cry and start playing with the tape recorder, and then I was like, Huh? You dont remember any of that, do you? [He shrugs] It wasnt like I was in a trance I heard her say Cut, and I was present when she was talking to me but I dont remember what I did.
So we did two more takes, all seven pages of this thing. After the third take, she goes, You really dont remember doing any of this, do you? How do you feel about that? I said, Im fucking ecstatic! She sort of stops for a second, then goes, Well, I cant direct you if youre not there. How would you feel about dialing it back and having a little bit of your consciousness in the scene there, so I can get what I want?
What was your answer?
Absolutely fucking not. Artists wait their entire life to have one of those moments. So thats the best answer I can think of as to why Im still working. Im still chasing after those moments. I cant help it.
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