More recently, the director Jeremy Kasten also had the opportunity to see both Glover the weirdo and Glover the Hollywood pragmatist, while shooting The Wizard of Gore (due for release in 2007). Early on in the filming of the horror remake, one of Glover’s choices (the donning of a giant codpiece) prompted a producer to threaten to shut down production, but the actor met privately with the powers-that-be, speaking to them as a businessman and not, as Kasten describes it, “crazy actor guy.”

“He just had the light enough touch that he talked them into it,” Kasten says. “And five guys who were going to shut down the movie and were freaking out, left that trailer 45 minutes later not only okay with it, but convinced it was the right decision. Ten minutes later we’re back upstairs shooting, and I’m talking to Crispin and he’s back to being kind of fussy actor Crispin. He switched modes seamlessly.”

I noticed the same toggling between personae while talking to Glover about how he’s been portrayed in the press. “I think the healthiest way for any actor or any person in the media to understand how they are represented in the media is as a separate business entity,” he says. “It’s impossible to control what your image is in the press…. I can have something to do with it, I can have some kind of influence on it, but at a certain point it’s not controllable.”

What’s interesting about this statement is the way Glover offers it. For the first time in over an hour of speaking with him, I notice his affectations drop away. He no longer sounds like a man deciphering alien transmissions in real time: He sounds like an old pro. “It’s working for me to do some things with this persona,” he says as a matter of fact. Kasten sees Glover’s mid-career embrace of Hollywood as reciprocal.

“Part of his making peace with Hollywood is Hollywood making peace with him,” says Kasten. “They need him as bad as he needs them.” Kasten points out that in The Wizard of Gore, as well as in Charlie’s Angels and several other recent films, Glover has taken to playing villains, noting, “There aren’t that many interesting young actors that came out of that generation who can play bad guys now.”

from “Mild at Heart” by Matt Haber