Danny Glover shares his experience and history at Salt lake Comic Con 2014
Danny Glover entertained those at Salt Lake Comic Con 2014 with stories about his career and family/
“I’m an old hippie,” says Glover who lives in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco. On Acting “I love acting,” says Glover. “When I began to feel this was the direction I was going, I was 29 or 30 years old.” The best career decision he made was to use his last $800 to fly out to New York where he got into the play “Blood Lot.” The first thing that made this great was that the author watched the play. The second was that shortly in the play’s run, Glover got called to do a pilot and 13 episodes. Glover didn’t want to leave the play because he had no understudy and it would kill the play. So he declined the role on Hill Street Blues and finished the play. Two years later, the author called Glover and asked him to be in the play “The Boys.” “I did what I thought was the right thing to do,” says Glover, “not leave the play.” He still isn’t sure if that was the best or worst decision he ever made. He turned down the original Predator, and “they came back to me with Lethal Weapon.” “You only learn the craft of acting by understanding language.” Reading the great writers like Arthur Miller and Shakespeare can help people understand language. Acting for Glover is finding a way to immerse himself in the story and the character. He also believes that less is more. He also believes that actors need to “believe that whatever you do as an artist has value and treat it as value.” Dedicating the performance to someone helps. He has always found a way, in which the story is much larger than him. Glover has played a lot of people in law enforcement in the movies and says that the problems that we are facing as a society when it comes to confrontations between the police and civilians isn’t necessarily the individual’s fault. “It’s not simply the police officers themselves.” It’s the framework, in which they work. “We don’t understand history,” says Glover. “We don’t empathize with those people.” Sidney Poitier was a ground breaker in 1949. “Nobody ever walked across the screen like Sidney Poitier,” says Glover. “I think it was Diahann Carroll that said he moved like a panther.” Bill Cosby in I Spy and later in The Cosby Show was also someone who moved civil rights forward. “All these things happen in time,” says Glover. “We’re the beneficiaries.” In the Old West, there were a lot of black and Hispanic cowboys, and Western Literature of the 1920s reflected that. It wasn’t until the movies that the perception changed. “Film is a source of us understanding… who we are as human beings.” Glover says that the one film of his that people should see is Grand Canyon. “Einstein said that imagination is more important than knowledge,” says Glover. “Grand Canyon is embedded in imagination.” Glover just finished a movie called Waffle Street, a small film without a big advertising budget. “This is where we need you to go out and support these films,” says Glover. On Family Life Glover still remembers his great grandmother Mary Brown on the farm with his grandparents. She was born in 1853 and freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. “My grandmother could never figure out what I did” for a living, says Glover. She was a community matriarch, and people would normally come to see her. When Glover showed up, they began to come to see him instead. Glover’s grandmother said, “Son, you must be some kind of important.” “I’ll never be as important as you are,” Glover responded. |
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