“If you love it, make it your life. And right along with that, be tenacious. Learn that the most important thing about being knocked down is getting back up. And if you can put yourself in the spot where you say, ‘I don’t care how many times I get knocked down, I’m getting back up every single time and going after what I want,’ that’s the answer.”
— Scott Glenn
Scott Glenn’s acting career spans nearly 60 years. His impressive film resume includes performances in Apocalypse Now, Urban Cowboy, The Right Stuff, Silverado, The Hunt for Red October, The Silence of the Lambs, Backdraft, The Virgin Suicides, and The Bourne Ultimatum. More recently, Scott has appeared on the small screen as Kevin Garvey Sr. in The Leftovers, the blind sensei Stick in Marvel’s Daredevil and The Defenders, and as the retired sheriff Alan Pangborn in Castle Rock. This year, Scott will return to HBO to join season 3 of The White Lotus.
Please enjoy!
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform.
The transcript of this episode can be found here. Transcripts of all episodes can be found here.
#729: Legendary Actor Scott Glenn — How to Be Super Fit at 85, Lessons from Marlon Brando, How to Pursue Your Purpose, The Art of Serendipity, Stories of Gunslingers, and More
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What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.
Want to hear an episode with Scott’s TV son on Apple TV+’s upcoming Bad Monkey series? Listen to my conversation with Vince Vaughn here in which we discussed developing grit, high school trauma, sharpening acting chops through improv, rejection inoculation, finding tone in storytelling, expanding comfort zones, and much more.
#243: How to Fear Less: Vince Vaughn
SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE
- Scott Glenn | IMDb
- Room Service Poems for Carol | Carol Glenn Ceramics
- Friction Zone by Scott Glenn | Carol Glenn Ceramics
- Scott Glenn Prefers Living Away From the Hollywood Hubbub | Deseret News
- Bighorn Crags: Climbing, Hiking, and Mountaineering | SummitPost
- Challis, Idaho | Chamber of Commerce
- The Baby Maker | Prime Video
- Nashville | Prime Video
- Apocalypse Now | Prime Video
- Universal Studios Hollywood
- Scott Glenn Landed His ‘Apocalypse Now’ Role After Saving Francis Ford Coppola’s Life | The Hollywood Reporter
- Baretta | IMDb
- Cattle Annie & Little Britches | Prime Video
- Wild Bunch | Wikipedia
- The Studios At Paramount
- 13 and a 1/2 | Urban Dictionary
- Nuestra Familia | Wikipedia
- Urban Cowboy | Prime Video
- Scott Glenn as Wes Hightower | Frostbite
- A Look Back at How Gilley’s Gave Us ‘Urban Cowboy’ | Texas Highways
- Collision Course: An Omnibus of Plays at Cafe Au Go Go (1968) | AbeBooks
- Scott Glenn Talks The Defenders, Daredevil, and The Leftovers | Esquire
- Scarlet Fever: All You Need to Know | CDC
- Benzylpenicillin | Wikipedia
- The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947) | Prime Video
- This Is How to See if You Would’ve Been Drafted for Vietnam | Military.com
- Snap-on Tools
- April 2, 1963 | Kenosha News Archive
- One of the Original Acting Studios in NYC | HB Studio
- Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad | Wikipedia
- The Salvation Army USA
- How to Convert to Judaism | My Jewish Learning
- Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu | Amazon
- Practical Shooting: Beyond Fundamentals by Brian Enos | Amazon
- Mysticism | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Why Do Creationists Keep Saying Carbon Dating Is Debunked? | r/Atheism
- What Kind Of Fish Swallowed Jonah? How Did He Survive? | I Love Docs
- Scott Glenn And Killer Joe: A Perfect Fit | Playbill
- The Leftovers | Prime Video
- ‘The Leftovers’: Scott Glenn on His “Unpredictable, Subversive” Character | The Hollywood Reporter
- Don’t Shoot the Dog!: The New Art of Teaching and Training by Karen Pryor | Amazon
- Vince Vaughn to Star in ‘Bad Monkey’ from ‘Ted Lasso’ Co-Creator | The Hollywood Reporter
- Eugene the Marine | IMDb
- Stories From the UN Archive: Marlon Brando, the UN’s First Frontman for Water | UN News
- Bizarre Things That Happened on the Apocalypse Now Set | Looper
- Royal Academy of Dramatic Art | RADA
- What Is Method Acting? | We Are Actors
- Marlon Brando in Streetcar Named Desire: Why the Method Actor’s Co-Stars Couldn’t Stand Him | Slate
- Where Was Apocalypse Now Filmed? | The Cinemaholic
- Rolling Stones: (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction | The Ed Sullivan Show
- Simple 10-Minute Daily Ear Massage & Acupressure | Qigong of Tulsa
- How to Breathe Properly | Breathwrk
- How Humming Stimulates Your Vagus Nerve for Stress Relief | Bustle
- Pressing Reset: Original Strength Reloaded by Tim Anderson and Geoff Neupert | Amazon
- The Quick and the Dead: Total Training for the Advanced Minimalist by Pavel Tsatsouline | Amazon
- Kettlebells | Amazon
- The Most Brutal Push-Up Exercise (Prison Push-Ups) | Victor Gaspar
- Resistance Bands Vs Weights: Which Gives The Better Workout? | Marathon Handbook
- Resistance Bands | Amazon
- FeetUp | Amazon
- Scott Glenn is a 75-Year-Old Knife-Fighting, Spear-Fishing Madman | GQ
- Where to See Manatees in Florida | Visit Florida
- Master Your Inner Experience | Breath Hold Work
- Freediving Apnea Trainer
- The Actors Studio
- Decompression Sickness | Harvard Health
- Learn to Dive Today | NAUI Worldwide
- Static Line Skydiving: Is It Really Safe? | DZONE Skydiving
- Golden Knights | GoArmy.com
- Everything We Know About ‘The White Lotus’ Season 3 | Robb Report
- Krabi-Krabong: Thailand’s Traditional Martial Art | Fighters Vault
- Where to Watch Muay Thai Fights in Bangkok | HeavyBJJ
- Off Limits (1988) | IMDb
- Lesser Vehicle | Tibetan Buddhist Encyclopedia
- Savate | Wikipedia
- Asia’s Infamous Golden Triangle and the Soldiers Tracking down the Drug Smugglers Who Rule Its Narcotics Trade | ABC News
- Three Pagodas Pass Much More Than A Border Gate | The Lost Passport
- How to Increase Your Luck Surface Area | Codus Operandi
- The Right Stuff | Prime Video
- Tosca Cafe, San Francisco: An Oral History | Bon Appétit
- Natalia Makarova and Mikhail Baryshnikov in “Giselle” (1977) | American Ballet Theater
- Easy Writer | Sun Valley Magazine
- Slow Riding Tips: How to Ride a Motorcycle at Slow Speeds | Harley-Davidson Insurance
- The SVD Dragunov: The World’s Most Prolific Sniper Rifle And Its Olympic Roots | Gun Digest
SHOW NOTES
- [07:10] Idaho vs. Los Angeles.
- [13:26] Apocalypse Now, self-confidence soon after.
- [17:26] Burt Lancaster’s movie star lessons.
- [23:06] The birth and death of Wes Hightower.
- [32:22] Catching the attention of James Bridges.
- [35:42] Scarlet fever.
- [37:29] From Marine to police reporter.
- [42:12] Berghof Studios and parental advice.
- [50:44] Converting to Judaism.
- [53:36] Lao Tzu: the ultimate mystic?
- [58:16] Letting go with Killer Joe.
- [1:02:53] “Crazy Whitefella Thinking.”
- [1:08:31] Getting out of the way and Erwan Le Corre.
- [1:11:51] Lessons from the “morally phenomenal” Marlon Brando.
- [1:16:26] How Scott’s childhood bout with scarlet fever informed his life’s course.
- [1:19:05] Daily routines and exercises of an in-shape 85-year-old.
- [1:35:12] Securing a serendipitous skill set.
- [1:42:13] Thailand talk.
- [1:46:18] Increasing surface luck.
- [1:47:04] How Scott met and fell in love with his wife.
- [1:53:04] “Just dance.”
- [1:53:46] Mistakenly calling Rudolf Nureyev Russian.
- [1:55:57] Poetry.
- [2:00:01] What Laurence Olivier knew about the value of tenacity.
- [2:01:41] Parting thoughts.
MORE SCOTT GLENN QUOTES FROM THE INTERVIEW
“I understood, because of the way I’ve learned everything in my life that’s important to me, is you learn by apprenticeship, not from a book or going to school. At least I can’t.”
— Scott Glenn
“I did one audition and they said, ‘You know, you’re not really very good. We want to give you things to work on.’ And I said, ‘What the fuck do you know? Who have you worked with? Because I was just doing improvs and work with Marlon Brando, Vittorio Storaro, Francis Coppola, Dennis Hopper. And they accepted me as an equal. What have you done? You’ve done this and this. You can’t even fucking direct traffic.’ So they kicked me out of Universal.”
— Scott Glenn
“I stopped off in Wyoming at one point. People must have thought I was nuts. I got out of the Jimmy and I walked down to the side of the road and I took this invisible Wes Hightower and threw him in the ground and broke his fucking neck and called Carol at a pay phone. I said, ‘Wes Hightower is dead. I’m coming home.’”
— Scott Glenn
“The most important single event in my life was scarlet fever when I was nine years old that I wasn’t supposed to have survived. … But that experience turned me into an athlete, turned me into someone who had learned to not only live with, but fall in love with, my fantasies and my imagination.”
— Scott Glenn
“What gives performances on film their juice or electricity is their degree of spontaneity. … And complete spontaneity is not watching yourself at all. Complete spontaneity is being in the now so completely that you really don’t have a past, and more importantly, way more importantly I think with acting, you don’t have a future, which means plans on what you’re going to do in the scene dissolve and then finally disappear.”
— Scott Glenn
“When I need to learn something, the best teacher in the world materializes right in front of me.”
— Scott Glenn
“I’m willing to fall on my ass in front of people. The embarrassment of screwing up and being clumsy and falling on my ass in front of people is not great enough to keep me from doing it. And that’s the trick to being a good student.”
— Scott Glenn
“The thing about the pandemic that I realized is a lot of people who were in love with each other had to discover whether they liked each other or not.”
— Scott Glenn
“If you love it, make it your life. And right along with that, be tenacious. Learn that the most important thing about being knocked down is getting back up. And if you can put yourself in the spot where you say, ‘I don’t care how many times I get knocked down, I’m getting back up every single time and going after what I want,’ that’s the answer.”
— Scott Glenn
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