Lights, camera, activist: Danny Glover on his new film Honeydripper
UK TIMESONLINE

by Kevin Maher, April 28th, 2008

"Danny Glover - Hollywood’s most ardent champion of worthy causes - tells... what keeps him fired up"

A small theatre, Off-Broadway, in 1981. Danny Glover is 35 years old, an aspiring actor, as yet unrecognised by Hollywood. He is about to perform in a production of the South African township play Sizwe Banzi is Dead by Athol Fugard. There’s just one problem: Glover has epilepsy, and he feels a seizure coming on.

He’s had them since he was 15 years old, but now, tonight, the timing is terrible. For anyone else this would mean the end of the night, and perhaps of their career. But no, Glover says to himself, not this time. He concentrates, really concentrates, and somehow he stops the seizure dead in its tracks. Remarkably, he will never have another one. The man, using just his willpower, has beaten epilepsy. The following year he will star on Broadway, and three years later he will wow Hollywood.

“But I couldn’t have stopped it before that night,” says the 61-year-old Glover today, meekly, as if ashamed that he hadn’t defeated a chronic neurological disorder any sooner. He is eating a breakfast bowl of fresh fruit and orange juice at a quiet corner table of a Central London hotel.

He is nearly 6ft 4in, eerily youthful (despite the flecks of grey in his hair and moustache), and wearing a black T-shirt with Martin Luther King’s face across it. He speaks in a lovely caramel whisper. “But from that point on, once the seizures stopped, imagine what it did for me!”

Glover has become a legend in film-making circles. He is a formidable performer who gained iconic status as the paternalistic straight cop to Mel Gibson’s incendiary wild man in the Lethal Weapon series. He sometimes trades on this status, playing lawmen in mainstream thrillers such as Saw or Shooter. Or else he nails delicate character roles, such as Anjelica Huston’s suitor in The Royal Tenenbaums, or the institutionalised slave in Lars Von Trier’s Manderlay.

But mostly he is a self-described activist, one who has always used his screen career (he is a tireless producer, too) to promote an understanding of the deeper social issues and wider worries of the world. It is these issues – from Third World debt or inner-city poverty to climate change – that fire him. He is a member, chairman or adviser to more charities than most Hollywood stars would know existed. In conversation, his ardour is infectious, and he has an encyclopaedic capacity for issue-based facts and figures that would make Bob Geldof weep.

Strangely, his new movie, Honeydripper, simultaneously captures all sides of Glover’s persona. Directed by the liberal iconoclast John Sayles, it features Glover in a whopping central turn as Tyrone Purvis, a shoestring entrepreneur, trying to save his beloved Honeydripper bar and lounge from bankruptcy in 1950s Alabama. The movie heaps repeated crises upon Tyrone, including escalating debts and a conscience burdened by a past murder. Yet Glover remains dignified throughout, culminating in a barroom climax in which he silences two pugilists by bellowing the near-biblical admonition: “You’re in my house now!”

“Tyrone is, in some sense, symbolic of so many men who tried to find a voice in that era,” Glover explains, before launching into a dense analysis of American race relations in the 20th century that includes references to the “Plessy Versus Ferguson” racial segregation decision of the Supreme Court in 1896, the effect that the cotton-picking machine had on urban migration, proof that 70 per cent of African-American men who were lynched by 1900 were aspiring businessmen, and how technology prefigured the development of urban music. “I trained as an economist,” he says, at the end of his analysis, with a devilish grin. “I understand the ways in which economic forces play, not only collectively on communities, but on individuals’ lives too.”

Glover studied economics at San Francisco State College (where he also met his future wife, Asake). But, typically, that wasn’t enough. His parents were both postal workers and active members of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People). Duly inspired, Glover and fellow student activists led a strike in 1968 when the college’s African Studies department was threatened with disbandment. It became the longest student strike in US history, lasting more than five months. “It ended up being much larger than we anticipated,” he admits. “But our demands were eventually met and we developed the first ethnic studies programme of any major university in America.”

The taste, you suspect, of activist victory was intoxicating for Glover. Unlike his Hollywood counterparts, such as Morgan Freeman or even George Clooney, acting for Glover was the bi-product of activism, and not the other way round. A counter-culture enthusiast who grew up in the Haight Ashbury neighbourhood of San Francisco, he enrolled in the city’s Black Actors Workshop specifically because he believed in the power of art to change lives. He gained fame on Broadway in 1982, in Fugard’s semi-autobiographical Master Harold . . . and the Boys. Then he made a blistering impression on Hollywood as Whoopi Goldberg’s savagely abusive husband, Mister, in Spielberg’s The Color Purple.

Soon Lethal Weapon and its sequels came calling, as did glossy blockbusters such as Predator 2, and there was a suspicion that Glover might be compromising his activism for the Hollywood high-life. Utter nonsense, he says. “Those movies were a testament to my agent, Arnold Rifkin,” he says. “He was always saying: ‘Let’s figure out a way to get you more control over the really important choices you make.’ ”

Glover, increasingly a Hollywood power player, continued his activism behind the camera. As a producer he financed home-grown TV dramas such as Buffalo Soldiers, about an all-black US cavalry troop. Abroad he collaborated on world cinema ventures such as the critically lauded Bamako, a Mali-set drama about the effects of globalisation on small African communities. His private life eventually suffered, and he divorced Asake in 1999. “I could’ve been a better husband,” he says sadly, before adding with a booming, self-deprecating laugh, “But that’s a story for another day.” His home is still Haight Ashbury – he lives ten blocks from where he grew up – but he travels a lot, on film-financing missions and charity tours.

His latest project, however, has been criticised by the mainstream US media. Toussaint, a biopic of the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture, which will also be directed by Glover, is being funded directly by the Venezuelan government of Hugo Chávez (the man who referred to George W. Bush as Satan). “That money is not a gift from the Venezuelan government,” says Glover, wearily. “It is an investment, it will stay in Venezuela, and if the film makes a profit then Venezuela will make a profit.”

Glover says that the brouhaha over Toussaint is a distraction from the real question, “Why hasn’t his story been told before now?” We’ve had Spartacus and Braveheart, but we haven’t heard of a man who threw off the yoke of slavery, defeated the Spanish, the French and the British, and actualised the very ideas of the French and American revolutions. “Imagine the discussions a film like this would elicit!” he says, bursting with enthusiasm. “And not just in my country, but in the rest of the world!”

I tell Glover that it must be exhausting being him, being this committed. I ask him if he has any vices or guilty secrets. He says no at first, but then admits that when he’s travelling he changes his laptop homepage to The New York Times, whereas normally it’s a baseball website.

I ask him again about his career, his activism, and why he does it. His eyes flicker for a bit and he pops into encyclopaedia mode, telling me that 2.5 billion people are living on less than $2 a day. He ponders this for a second, and then says, from the heart, that someone has to do something about it, that he just happens to be in the right place. “It’s the same way that [Martin Luther] King talked about it,” he says. “It’s an act of love, and of service to humanity.” He winces slightly. “I know it sounds corny, and it is. But I believe it.” He repeats the phrase quietly to himself, like an inward prayer, “An act of love.”

Honeydripper is released on May 9, 2008

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