Scott Glenn tosses a lot of scripts—literally. His wife of 57 years, Carol Schwartz, took to calling these discarded screenplays “wallbangers” because of the sound they make after he hurls them across the room.
“The White Lotus” script started as a wallbanger. Glenn just didn’t connect with the character he’d be playing: Jim Hollinger, a wealthy American businessman who’s been living in Thailand for decades and possibly murdered the father of Walton Goggins’ Rick Hatchett. When Rick finally confronts him with a raised fist, the elderly man flinches—twice—before Rick topples him over in his chair. “I get offered this part of a guy with a cane who’s had a stroke. He’s physically frail, but his mind’s still sharp,” said Glenn, 86. “I thought, ‘Fuck this. This sounds like the last five parts I was offered, all of which I turned down.’”
But after reading the script more closely, he had a change of heart, joined the wildly eclectic Season 3 cast and delivered a performance that is a departure from the tough-guy roles that have made him one of the most recognizable character actors of the past six decades. He’s best known for playing men of authority, skilled charmers and fighting machines in films including “Silverado,” “Urban Cowboy,” “The Hunt for Red October” and “The Right Stuff.” And now, thanks to that change of heart, he has earned his first-ever major acting nomination, for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series.
“I make horrible decisions on parts all the time, so that’s nothing new for me,” he said. “What was interesting to me about (Jim) is this is a guy who’s lived steadily in Thailand for 50 years, on and off for 60 years, married to a Thai woman, has two Thai daughters. To a great extent, he’s Thai, as opposed to this American guy.”
To play Jim, Glenn studied two Thai martial arts, Krabi-Krabong and Muay Boran—not because his character engages in fisticuffs but because he wanted to “get the rhythm of that country and hopefully have it seep into my character,” he said “Every take is a one-act play called Now, and I literally don’t know what I’m going to do from take to take. What gives my work, I don’t know what the right word is, juice, magic, strength, whatever it is, it’s a degree of spontaneity.”
Looking at Glenn’s early life, you can understand why he might chafe at people telling him who he is. As a boy, he had scarlet fever, which he wasn’t meant to survive. When he did, he devoted the rest of his life to intense physical activity—athletics, martial arts—in an apparent rejection of his bedridden childhood. He spent time in the Marines before moving into acting, fittingly playing soldiers, most notably in Robert Altman’s “Nashville” and Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now.”
In Altman’s sprawling 1975 film, Glenn had a small part in a huge cast, playing a
Vietnam vet who is obsessed with Ronee Blakley’s Barbara Jean, a popular but fragile country star. He called the film, written by Joan Tewkesbury but frequently improvised by Altman and his actors during shooting, a formative experience, one where the famously unruly director encouraged him to trust his instincts.
A few years later, Coppola taught Glenn another important lesson. For years, the actor suffered from self-doubt when given notes in auditions, fearing he wasn’t meant for the camera. But making “Apocalypse Now,” even with just a few minutes of screentime, rejuvenated him. Coppola gave him what he called “the greatest gift anyone can give an artist”: confidence. After that, notes didn’t hurt so much. “I would say, ‘Who the f–k have you worked with? Because I just finished working with Marlon Brando, Dennis Hopper, Francis Coppola, Vittorio Storaro, and they all thought I was f–king good,’” he said, laughing.
The 1980s found Glenn doing steady high-profile work, including “Urban Cowboy,” “The Right Stuff” and “Silverado.” Near the end of the decade, he got a script that became an immediate wallbanger. “(My wife) said, ‘What’s that?’ and I said, ‘Oh, it’s a horrible horror show. I don’t want to have anything to do with it.’ She said, ‘Let me read it.’ She came back and said, ‘Who’s directing this?’ I said, ‘Jonathan.’ She said, ‘Jonathan Demme? He’s our friend. I think maybe you should do this.’” He did. The movie was “The Silence of the Lambs.” So yeah, he said, “I make big mistakes.”
In the mid-2010s, Glenn had a second act on television, picking up notable roles in HBO’s “The Leftovers” and Netflix’s “Daredevil.” In “The Leftovers,” he plays a man who moves through the series speaking to unseen voices and predicting pending apocalypses, alternating between sageness and apparent insanity. “I love that character because you never knew whether you were dealing with a prophet or a madman,” Glenn said. “In many cases, it was both.”
On paper, “Daredevil” (and Marvel’s “The Defenders,” also on Netflix) sounded like a perfect project for Glenn, who plays Stick, a blind martial artist who trains the eventual Devil of Hell’s Kitchen. But the actor didn’t care for this guy either at first. “I got so angry at that—the father of the lead, I’m going to be this doddery old man,” he said. “I went for a crazy hike up the mountain and almost crippled myself. I got back and on my iPad was the first script. I started reading about Stick, and I thought, ‘Holy shit, this guy is great!’”
As for “The White Lotus,” Glenn found the musicality of creator Mike White’s writing and directing addictive. Before heading to Thailand, he caught up on Seasons 1 and 2. Watching the second episode of the first season, Glenn stood and danced along to the show for an hour. And he sees similarities between White and Altman. “They encouraged my probably crazy and unpredictable way of work rather than get in the way of it,” he said.
Glenn isn’t sure where he’ll go next. He called himself “too lazy” to return to stage acting, which is where his career began, on Broadway in 1965 with “The Impossible Years.” (The last play he did was “Finishing the Picture” in 2005.) Still, he learned so much from playwright Tracy Letts while doing “Killer Joe” with him in the late ’90s that the right script could entice him back. It’s not like the man is going to slow down now. “I feel just continuously lucky,” he said. “People pay me to do something that I love to do so much I would probably pay them to let me do it if it wasn’t the other way around.”
This story first ran in the Down to the Wire Drama issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
