The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: 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 (#729) - The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss (2024)

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Tim Ferriss: Man, I have an embarrassment of riches here. We could start just about anywhere, but I thought I would start with saying that I’m in part so happy to be having this conversation because even among all of the hundreds of people I’ve interviewed, if we look at people in their 30s and 40s, they don’t check career, fitness, and relationships. But you seem to have 50-plus years checking all three of those boxes. It’s hard to find three out of three in the young guns who have a wide open field ahead of them. And I want to dig into that, but I thought I would start with Idaho because we’re sitting here in your home. It’s been a long time since I’ve been here. And you have elk in the backyard. This is not what most people imagine when they think Hollywood star. How did you end up in Idaho?

Scott Glenn: A bunch of years ago. We’ve been up here for — I’m not sure the exact number, but in the mid to high 40 years. We were living in L.A. My wife probably throws on the wheel as well as any two dozen people on the planet. She’s really a good potter. She was accepted to a summer workshop that was invitation only to the best ceramic artists in this country and it was going to last all summer long. And we were living in L.A. We had a place in Topanga. So she said, we had a VW van, typical hippie dippy, live out of the back of it. She was going up with our two daughters to do this workshop and she said, “Well, you’re going to come with me.” And I went, “No. I’m waiting for the phone to ring to tell me whether I’ve got a job or not.”

And she said, “Does the phone really have to ring for you to kick you in your ass to go anywhere? Can’t you just do something on your own?” And I went, “I don’t know.” And she said, “Well, you can because there’s a group of people who are leaving from…” A place she wasn’t sure where. As it turns out it was Challis, Idaho. That they’re leaving on the following dates, which was like a week after her workshop started. She said, “They’re going into an area called the Bighorn Crags. The biggest primitive area in the contiguous United States. Bigger than anywhere except Alaska. And they’re going to be doing high mountain,” this is in July, “they’re going to be doing high mountain traverses in snow and ice for three days. Then they’re going to be going down into a little valley and climbing rock faces and naming them for the geodesic survey. It’s being led by a guy named Eric Ryback,” who’s, at that time, the only person ever to walk the whole Pacific coast. The trail from Canada down to the bottom of Baja. And she said, “You’re going with them.” And I was a rock climber at the time, so she knew that about me. But I said, “How do you know?” She said, “Because I signed you up.” So it was like I had no choice in the matter. So we got up here and I tend to overdo things physically. Just part of my stupid personality. So we got here and I started hiking up Baldy. Now we’d come from sea level to here so I got altitude sickness the first day and puked my guts out about four or five times. At any rate, had about a week to try to get ready.

And then she drove me north to Challis. I think there were seven people on this trip with us. And so I met Eric Ryback and these people I was going to be hanging out with for the next few weeks. And we drove 90 miles on a dirt road to the Cobalt ranger station where you didn’t tell them where you were going, you just told them when you expected to be back. And if you weren’t back inside, I think the cushion was three days, they were going to send people out to look for you. And at the time, it’s probably still true, the Bighorn Crags, no internal combustion allowed at all. So if the forestry service had to go in and open up trailheads, they had to go in with mules, two-man crosscut saws, because you couldn’t turn on a — that wouldn’t work.

So we did that and it was — I hadn’t been off on my own alone with the exception of once that I won’t talk about. But been in that situation and it was just so much fun and so cleansing. It was just the best. And I thought I knew how to rock climb, but there was a guy named Tony Jones there who was a great rock climber who took me under his wing and took me into 5.11++ stuff. The dangerous stuff, he led all of it. So I don’t want to pretend that I just instantly did it. But I did do those climbs again and again. And I remember when Carol was going to come and pick — when we were done, it was like two weeks. A little over two and a half weeks of doing this.

I said to Tony, “I’ve got to give you some money or something. I mean you’ve been giving me…” And he said, “Come on. I had a great time.” I said, “What can I do for you?” And he said, “You can do this. When you go back to L.A., tell everybody how horrible Idaho is. Tell them it’s a tick fever state. It sucks, and you had a bad time.” And I said, “Why should I do that?” He said, “Because I don’t want people coming up here.” So anyway, when Carol drove me back into Ketchum, I felt like I was entering Lower Manhattan. It was like noise and people.

Tim Ferriss: And it’s a small town, for people who don’t have the context.

Scott Glenn: It’s a small town. But what I discovered — this sounds woo-wah and whatever, but I don’t really give a sh*t because it’s true. It was like the family fell in love with each other again. I had been sort of living in the blues in L.A. because of what I do for a living and all that fell away up here.

Tim Ferriss: When you came to Idaho, roughly how old were you and where was your career at that point?

Scott Glenn: 38, 39, like that. Late 30s.

Tim Ferriss: And had you already had an inflection point in your career at that point?

Scott Glenn: I had done a ton of work in New York. Mainly street theater, improv, off off Broadway. And then we moved to L.A. for me to do the first film I ever did, which was called Baby Maker. And then I did a couple of very small parts in big, important American movies. One was Nashville. Bob Altman’s film. And the other was Apocalypse Now, that I was on for a little over seven months. They shot that film — the shooting was a year and a half, so I was a short-timer at seven months. But that was my experience of working in front of a camera. Learning a lot of stuff that stood me in really good stead later on. But what had happened in L.A. was — okay. I had gone to Universal, I think to audition for some —

I had done some TV stuff at Universal and I had gone there and because of my experience with Apocalypse — what had happened before is I would go in and I would audition for a TV job mainly at one of the studios and people would tell me what a crappy actor I was. “You squint too much. You’re not loud enough. You’re not doing this. You’re not doing that.” And on the surface I would say, “Well, what do you know?” But the reality was underneath it, I suspected maybe they were right and I didn’t know what I was doing in terms of a camera. On stage or doing improv in the back of an alley, yeah, I could do that. So I had no self-confidence. Then I did Apocalypse Now and wound up working — my choice. Francis thought, I think incorrectly, but he thought that he owed me because he thought I saved his life in the Philippines.

So I went over to do a small part and he said, “I’ll write you whatever you want because you filled up a helicopter in a rainstorm with nothing getting in the gas and you kept me from drowning in a river.”

Tim Ferriss: We might come back to that, but continue.

Scott Glenn: So I went, “Okay. Fine. That’s nice.” He said, “What do you want?” And I said, “I want to be in the end of the movie.” And he said, “You can’t be in the end of the movie, Scott. It’s absolutely, completely cast. Well, yeah, wait, there is a part you could do, but you’d be like a glorified extra. Play Colby, the guy who came upriver in front of Martin Sheen.” And 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. And I thought at the end of the movie, I’m going to be around the person who in my mind is far and away the greatest American, probably the greatest movie actor that ever lived, Marlon Brando. And I’m going to be around this guy and just being around him and Dennis Hopper, who’s a lunatic but brilliant, and Martin Sheen, and in the end of this movie is an experience that will change my life. And it did.

I told Francis later on that I got the greatest gift probably you could give any artist in the Philippines, which was self-confidence. So when I came back before we went up to Idaho, I was basically locked out of Universal because along with self-confidence, I came back with a huge amount of arrogance. And now I remember 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 f*ck 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 f*cking direct traffic.” So they kicked me out of Universal.

So now we’re back from Idaho and I’m sitting watching television, smoking a joint, and Carol walks into the living room and says, “Babe, what’s wrong?” And I say, “What do you mean? I’m fine.” She said, “No. You’re crying.” And I reached up and there were tears coming out of my eyes. I was on television in a Baretta I had done and I pointed at it and I said, “You’re supposed to get better at what you do. Not worse. That’s the crappiest acting I’ve ever seen. I was so much better doing street theater in New York. What’s happened to me?” And I started thinking, and that night at dinner, I said, “What I’ve turned into in L.A., and I’m horrible at it, is a show business politician, which is, what am I up for? Who do I know? What openings and parties can I go to to network and make…” And I used to think, what makes this person tick? Why are they doing what they do? What belief system are they coming from?

All that stuff that I really cared about then and do to this day. And I said to Carol, I said, “How would you and the girls feel if we moved back to Idaho?” And she said, “What’ll do you do up there?” And I said, “I met somebody who told me that if I gave him three years, he would apprentice me to be a backcountry, cross-country ski guide and hunting guide and I’ll do that.” And she said, “Will you quit acting?” I said, “No. I’ll do Shakespeare in the Park in Boise if I can get a part. I’ll do that kind of stuff, but I can’t go back to New York with my two daughters this young and subject them to the life of a street actor.”

So we came up here with that in mind. It was a super cold year. We came up with a friend of Carol’s and mine. He was a commercial director, but sort of feeling the same kind of burnout in L.A. that I felt. So the two families decided we’d come up here, and try to figure out what to do in Ketchum, Idaho. No real idea. We were up here inside two weeks, I get a call from a friend of mine, a guy named Rupert Hitzig, who said, “I’m doing a movie in Mexico.” The way I knew Rupert was he and I were in the same platoon in the Marine Corps. So Rup called, said, “I’m producing a movie in Mexico and I can give you a small part in it. We’ll be shooting for three months.” And I think it was, “I can give you 2,000 bucks.”

And I said, great. So Carol and I went to Mexico. And I was warned when I went down there, it starred Rod Steiger, Burt Lancaster, Amanda Plummer, and Diane Lane. Those were the stars. And I had teeny tiny little part as one of Burt’s — it was the Doolin-Dalton Gang. A western. And I was told by a lot of people when I went down there that “You’re going to love Rod Steiger. He works the same way you do. He’s a member of the Actors Studio and your kind of guy. But watch out for Burt Lancaster. He’s an old-school movie star. He’ll get in your key light, he’ll screw you up. He’ll intentionally ruin two shots so they’ll have to go to his closeup. Just watch out for him.” So we go to Mexico, first day there, El Presidente lobby, the hotel in Mexico, I meet Rod Steiger.

And I rarely openly dislike somebody when I meet them, but Rod — I wouldn’t say it was hate at first sight, but it was certainly dislike at first sight. And then a little bit later, Burt Lancaster comes into the lobby. And to be really honest, he hardly saw me at all. But boy did he see Carol. And he said to her, “So what do you do?” And she said, “I’m a potter.” He said, “You got any pictures?” And she says she has some little slide pictures of stuff she had done. He looked at them and I could see something change in him. And he looked at her and he said, “God, I love this stuff. I only have the work of one other ceramic artist. Would you throw me an 11-place or 12-place dinnerware set?” It was her first commission ever and she said, “Yeah. Yeah, I will.” Later on, many months later, she found out the other ceramic artist that he owned was named Picasso.

So the next day — and he kind of was like I wasn’t even there. So the next day we’re on the set and getting ready to do some scene and it’s a group shot and at the end of the first take, Burt walks over to me and he said, “So, Scott, has anybody ever taught you the difference between working with a closeup camera lens and being on stage?” He said, “I know you’ve done street theater. I can tell.” I said, “No.” He said, “I didn’t think so.” He said, “I’m not going to bullsh*t you. I seriously was watching you and I think you’ve got something, but if you’ll permit me to be a gigantic pain in the ass over the next three months, I’ll teach you whatever I know.”

Tim Ferriss: Wow. What an incredible opportunity.

Scott Glenn: So he taught me about how to work with a camera and how to — I mean, he was an amazing guy. He was an aerialist who traveled across the country with a carnival and to make drinking money fought people in tough man contests. He was the real deal. I loved Burt. It was like what people had told me about Rod and Burt was like, you could flip it around.

Tim Ferriss: Was totally flipped.

Scott Glenn: So on the way home — this is a long — and then I’ll —

Tim Ferriss: We got all the time in the world. I have my coffee.

Scott Glenn: Okay. So we’re coming back from Mexico. We went to Paramount to see a friend of Carol’s and mine that on their advice, Carol got pregnant. They said, “You guys have got to have a baby.” And we were really close. Jim was the director. Jim Bridges. And Jack Larson was his partner, lover, whatever. And they were great guys. Super great guys. So we wanted to just say hi to him on our way back to Idaho. We walk into his office, he looks at me, he said, “I can’t believe you’re coming in here.” He said, “I just realized you’re perfect for this part in this movie I’m directing. It’s the bad guy, but you’re perfect for it. Just hang around town for two or three more days. Meet the star who has cast approval.” Didn’t tell me who it was.

“Who has cast approval and the producers here at Paramount and I think we can make this happen.” And I said, “Screw that. I don’t go into anybody’s office like a piece of meat anymore. I just made 2,000 bucks and we’re on our way back to Idaho. I just wanted to tell you I love you and I hope you and Jack are well and Carol and I are out of here.” So we left. We came back up to Idaho. About two weeks later, maybe a little less, I get a call from Jim and he said, “Okay, now I’m on location in Houston. Paramount doesn’t know who you are. They don’t want you. They want Ryan O’Neal to do this part or maybe Sam Shepard. But I’m going to send you a plane ticket to come down here. I think we can make this work. I’ve told Irving Azoff, the music guy who’s also a producer about you, and he likes the idea. You’ve got to meet him and I think we can make this happen.” And I said, “No. Don’t send me a plane ticket. I don’t want them to have their hooks into me even for a plane ticket.”

Tim Ferriss: Just to feel indebted.

Scott Glenn: “I’ll get my GMC Jimmy, I’ll drive to Houston and I’ll see you down there.” And I said, “Just tell me what the part is.” And he said, “A bank robber and a bull rider.” And I went, “Okay.” So I drive down to Houston. On my way to Houston, I stop off just in front of Huntsville Prison where I knew the character I played spent some time. And I’m going to be a little shady about this because I kind of have to be. But so I’m sitting there in my Jimmy and I hear familiar voices out of the dark saying, “Hey, vato, what are you doing?” And I look over and there — when he was alive in another part of my life, I knew Freddy Fender, the country western singer whose real name was Baldemar Huerta. And Freddy was in a family that picked everything illegally — that was his background. And he hung out with these two guys who were, for real, pistoleros. The real deal.

And these two guys were there and they said, “What are you doing here, man?” And I told them what I was doing and they went, “We don’t believe this. We got our buddy coming out. He’ll be out of here in 15, 20 minutes. You’ve got to meet him. He’s a bank robber and a bull rider.” And I went, “Yeah, Mexican guy.” Said, “No, man, he’s a f*cking gringo.” And I went, “Okay.” So I met this guy who told me enough about the character that I was going to be playing and little things like he said, “You’ve got to get a hat sticker or something. Not a tattoo, but something on you that says 13 and a half because that’s the number that gets us in here and we all have it.” And I said, “What’s that stand for?” And he said, “Judge, jury, and a half-ass lawyer.” So I said, “Okay.” And he said, “And you’ve got to get tattoos on your forearm, “Nuestra Familia.” I said, “But I’m not a Latino.” He said, “Neither am I.” And showed me that he had that. So I went, “Okay.”

Tim Ferriss: What did that refer to? “Our family?” What was the meaning of that?

Scott Glenn: That’s the in-prison organization of Latinos.

Tim Ferriss: I see.

Scott Glenn: That —

Tim Ferriss: He was adopted into.

Scott Glenn: So he gave me that to do. And then I said, “Is there anything about being a bull rider that bull riders do that I could learn that most people can’t do?” And he showed me. He said, “Yeah, when you tie off your glove, since you’re going to be using your dominant hand to wrap the rawhide around, you’re going to have to use your non-dominant hand and your teeth.” And he said, “You’re going to have to do it a lot of times to the point where you can go — without even thinking about it.” So I went, “Okay. I’m going to do that at least a hundred times a day from now on. Hopefully a thousand.” I get down to Houston. Jim said, “I’m going to make this happen.” I met the actress who had never played the lead in a big movie, Debra Winger. And both she, John Travolta, Irving Azoff, and Jim Bridges always all kind of shoved me down Paramount’s throat. And Jim said, “This movie is going to change your life. You’ll never have to audition again after you do it.” And he told me the truth. I didn’t believe it. But in those days — it was Urban Cowboy. And the part was Wes Hightower.

It was funny because when I read the script, I thought all I have to do is be honest with this character. I’m not going to go for big moments. Because if I’m honest with it, I’ll jump off the screen at people simply because this movie is about oil workers and blue-collar workers who dress up like outlaw cowboys on weekends to go in and ride not a real bull, but a bull machine.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Mechanical bull.

Scott Glenn: And I’m going to play a guy who’s a real bank robber, a real ex-con, and a real bull rider. And if I just get close to it, I’ll look like a diamond in a bucket full of rhinestones.

Not because I’m particularly good, but it was almost like a setup. So anyway, that happened and I didn’t have to audition. I auditioned once since then for a part that — not a big part in a movie I really wanted to do and the director said, “No, no,” at that point, “I don’t want you to do it.” So I went to a cattle call under an assumed name, auditioned for it, and got that part. But since I did Urban Cowboy, my life has changed. And I was offered the lead in some TV series while I was in Texas, because in those days, dailies were shared by everybody in the business. And I turned them all down because I thought, I don’t want to leave Idaho and move back to L.A. I love my life in Idaho. I didn’t know how to ski, but I was learning how to ski and I was climbing and I was hiking and I was shooting and I was riding motorcycles and all the things I really love to do.

And plus I could really cleanly think about and concern myself with the art of acting and not who do I know and where am I going and I’ve got this cool place in Malibu or any of that stuff.

Tim Ferriss: The politics and the show.

Scott Glenn: So I turned down the TV stuff. When I’d been in Texas, Carol had — she hadn’t left me, but I knew at a certain point when I was playing Wes Hightower that I had the character, but I was terrified if I left it alone and put it down, it’d be like a bar of soap and I tried to pick it up and I wouldn’t — so I lived that part 24/7. Got arrested, got in trouble. I was Wes Hightower the whole time. I remember at one point I came back to — we had an apartment in The Galleria and I came back and none of Carol’s clothes or [BLEEPED] were — there was no presence of them in the apartment and there had been when I’d gone to work that day. And I’m thinking, what’s going on? The phone was ringing. I pick it up and it was Carol and she said, “I’m back in Idaho. I can’t handle living with Wes Hightower. So you let me know when he’s dead. Me and the girls love you. We’re up here, but we’re not going to put ourselves through this.” And I went, “Okay.” And I was about to hang up and she said, “Wait, before you hang up, I just want to say one thing.” I said, “What’s that?” She said, “Two things. Number one, I love you. And number two, I think you’re hitting a home run with this and it’s going to change our lives.” So when I drove back up here in my Jimmy, I remember I stopped off in Wyoming at one point. People must have thought I was nuts. And 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 f*cking neck and called Carol at a pay phone. I said, “Wes Hightower is dead. I’m coming home.”

Tim Ferriss: Wow. Okay.

Scott Glenn: Got home.

Tim Ferriss: Let me pause for second home. Okay. Okay, continue. And then we’re going to go back to the origin story. Okay.

Scott Glenn: Got home, we were renting this house with this family that had come up with us. We were sharing this house, we had a bedroom. On the bed were two scripts for the leads in movies for more money than I’d ever dreamed about making, and that was that. So here I am in Idaho.

Tim Ferriss: We’re going to go back in time. We’re going to slowly rewind because I have a couple of follow-up questions. One is Jim Bridges. What did he see? What gave him the feeling or the confidence to say this is going to change your life? What do you think it was? Was it that setup that you talked about?

Scott Glenn: I had done my first movie with him and I got the movie. I came out here and I met him, but I didn’t audition for the part. There was a director, Ed Parone, who I’d done a thing in New York, it was called Collision Course. It was 9-1 action, the course of a night. And Ed said to Jim, “If you’re looking for somebody to be a young guy who’s not going to charge you a ton of money, and is perfect for the part, Scott Glenn’s the guy.” So I got that part and did the movie. So Jim knew me over a period of, in those days, movies took about three months to shoot. Now it’s way faster. I guess whatever it was he saw in me, it was jangled awake when we walked into his office coming back from Mexico, that was when he went, “Oh, my God.”

Something that he saw about me that he wrote the script for Urban Cowboy with Aaron Latham, the guy who had originally written a column in, I don’t know if it was The Times, someplace in New York about Gilley’s and bull machines and all of that stuff. And then Jim adapted that and wrote the screenplay. I don’t know what it was he saw, I remember my screen test. They wanted me to do a scene from it, and I said, “I can’t do that. I’m not in the part, I don’t want to lose it.” And Jim said, “Well, we’ve got to put you on screen.” And Debra was doing her sexy bull ride at the time, and there were a bunch of guys in the front watching.

And I picked out the baddest looking one of all who was a bandito in Texas. And I said, “Put the camera on me.” And I thought, “Dear Lord, please don’t let this go bad. But here we go.” And they were watching Debra and I walked over to him and I went, “Hey.” And he looked up at me and I said, “You’re sitting on my f*cking seat.” And he looked at me and I thought, “What’s going to happen?” And he got up and walked away and I went and sat down. That was my screen test.

Tim Ferriss: So if we go way back in time, and this is just based on what I researched online, but it seems like initially you were not born out of the womb dreaming of being an actor. It seems like you wanted to be a writer.

Scott Glenn: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And how did acting enter the scene for you? And I read a bit about Berghof.

Scott Glenn: I wanted to be a writer. And if I look back on my whole life, 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. There was one weekend when the doctors told my mom and dad to get a plot, and what saved my life was crystalline penicillin. I don’t know if you’ve ever had a shot of it, but it’s interesting because usually with most shots, it’s the needle going in that hurts and then it’s fine. Crystalline penicillin is thicker than engine grease. So the needle going in kind of hurts, but then the rest of it going straightens you up. And I didn’t realize it was saving my life, so I hated it. 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.

And I don’t know if it’s true or not, and I don’t want to know, because it’s a fantasy that if it’s not true, I grew up believing it was, that on my mom’s side of the family, I was directly related to Lord Byron. When I got out of bed from scarlet fever, my bones were so soft that they bent and I limped for almost four years, but it turned me into an athlete because I was just embarrassed about the way I looked. And I was in a neighborhood where it wasn’t good to be physically frail.

Tim Ferriss: And this was Pittsburgh?

Scott Glenn: Yeah. So at any rate, I decided two things. Number one, I wasn’t going to be Walter Mitty. I wasn’t going to have an imaginary life. The adventures I was imagining were all going to be true. I was going to make them come true. And one of them was I was going to be a writer, poet writer. So when I enlisted in the Marine Corps, I enlisted as a six-month reservist.

Tim Ferriss: Why did you do that? Because you went from English major to Marine Corps.

Scott Glenn: Because where I came from, there was nobody dodged the draft, and the draft was happening.

Tim Ferriss: I see.

Scott Glenn: And so for me it was, and I knew even with a BA in college, I had so little technical ability, everybody will tell you about that, that if I was smart enough, I would’ve tried to become probably a Naval aviator or I would’ve wanted to be a, but I wasn’t smart enough to be a pilot. So where I came from, the choices were three. Marine Corps, 82nd Airborne, 101st Airborne, that’s it. And then a friend of mine said, “Well, you can be airborne and a marine both.” And then I was worried about my hearing because I’ve been legally deaf since I was 10 years old, because of scarlet fever as well.

Tim Ferriss: Because of the scarlet fever.

Scott Glenn: And they laughed. They said, “You’re going to be an enlisted marine. You’re going to boot camp at Parris Island. You’re worried about your hearing. People are going to scream at you the whole time you’re there and then you’re going to be shooting automatic weapons without hearing protection. Your hearing’s going to be trashed. Don’t worry about it.” So that was my reason.

And so I did my six months in the Marine Corps, and it worked out because this was the ’60s where if you were a reservist, you didn’t really have to make weekend meetings in summer camp. There are other ways of doing your time of deployments for three months or a month, month and a half, whatever. When I got out of the Marine Corps, I went to see my mom and dad who were living in Kenosha, Wisconsin. My dad, at that point, he’d gotten pretty high up in Snap-on Tools, but when I was born he was a salesman.

So he went from no money and no nothing to, he actually wound up kind of running that company. I went to Kenosha. There was a job opening on The Kenosha Daily News, and I did an interview and lied, as I often do. They said, “Can you type?” And I went, “Yeah.” And they said, “How many words a minute?” And I said “35,” because I knew that’s what I needed. And then after the interview they said, “Well, you got the job.” I came out and there was Joe Jacoby, one of the reporters there said, “You should be happy, you don’t look happy.” And I said, “Well, I’ll tell you the truth. I lied. I don’t know how to type it all.” And he said, “Me and one other reporter will cover for you, Scott, for two weeks. You go to adult education at the public high school and learn how to type.”

Tim Ferriss: And what was the job for? Were you transcribing or what was the job?

Scott Glenn: The job was cover reporter.

Tim Ferriss: I got it.

Scott Glenn: But I was not very good. So anyway, I’m up in the city room doing that, and I hear shots out the window and it was cold as sh*t. And I remember I said to somebody in the city room, “Those are shots, go out and check them out.” And it was 30 below zero. It was freezing cold. And somebody said, “No, that was a car backfire.” I said, “Vapor lock. Cars aren’t even starting now. And most stuff in life I don’t know, but I just got out of the Marine Corps and gunfire I do know, and I’m telling you those were shots.”

And they said, “Why don’t you go out and cover it?” So I went outside and two blocks from the newspaper at the side of the road was a city patrol car with Mrs. Haukedahl, the Chief of Police’s wife sitting in the driver’s seat with her husband’s pistol smoking in her lap, and next to her, Dorothy Bitautis, who was the Chief of Police’s secretary/mistress with half her head blown away.

It was my story. It was the biggest story, obviously. So they made me a police reporter, and I thought being a police reporter would be really cool because I’ll cover mob hits and all that stuff. And I realized that you do do that, but for every one of those, you do six interviewing a woman 15 minutes after her teenage son has died in a traffic accident. And you’re thinking about, “Do I get a byline? Is this going to be on page one or page two?” And I felt like a ghoul.

And so there was a bulletin board with other jobs listed. So I applied for the job of a reporter on the sports desk. I can’t even remember the name of the paper. But it was in American Virgin Islands. I got the job and I was talking to a friend of mine on the phone, and she lives in Long Island, and she said, “When’s the job start?”

And I said, “In about six months.” And she said, “Why don’t you go to New York and take an acting class?” And I went, “Why?” And she said, “I’ll be honest with you, Scott. I read the stuff that you write and your description of ideas and action and places isn’t bad, it’s okay. But your dialogue essentially sucks. It’s stiff. Nobody talks like that. The minute you put words into anybody’s mouth, whether it’s a poem or a short story or whatever, you blow it. If you have to get in front of people and say words, it’ll kick you in your ass to start to listen to the way people really talk. And if you’re doing theater, you’ll be dealing with arguably the best dialogue ever written.” So after I got over maybe five or 10 minutes of being angry because she told me the truth, I just thought, “Okay.” So I got in my car, I had an old Triumph, and I drove to New York, sold the car, got two jobs.

I looked up acting in The Village Voice, nothing under A, under B it said Berghof Studios. I didn’t know anything about it. Call it up. Call up Berghof Studios and this guy named Bill Hickey, who was one of America’s greatest character actors, nominated for, he might’ve gotten an Academy Award for — oh, God, I can’t think of the — anyway, Bill answers the phone and he says, “Yeah, work on this. Bring it by Berghof Studios Wednesday morning.” So it was Oh, Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad was the play, something I’m completely unsuited for. But it was a little monologue. I worked on it. I go down into the basem*nt of Berghof’s. It was raining outside, Wednesday morning, maybe seven or eight people sitting there to watch. I walk in front of Bill Hickey to start this monologue and for the first and only time in my life, literally a light bulb went off between my eyes and I thought, “Holy sh*t, I’m an actor.” That fast. And it wasn’t like, “Oh, I’m so fulfilled.”

It was for the first time, my life made sense to me, my proclivity to daydream, my laziness in a lot of areas. Everything made sense, acting, just like that. And Bill saw it and he started laughing and he said, “That’s right. You’re one of us.” And then he turned to the people who were sitting down at the bottom, the other students, and he said, “Scott’s not going to finish this. He’s got to go outside, walk around the block a couple of times, and think about things.” I went outside, there was a payphone on Bank Street. I called my mom and dad. I got my dad on the phone. I said, “I’m not going to the Virgin Islands, I’m not going to be a director.” They were terrified I would go back into the service, which I actually was thinking about doing because being in the service in a lot of ways can be rough and all that stuff.

But in other ways it’s very easy because you don’t have to make decisions about what you’re going to wear, what you’re going to do, what you’re going to eat. And I like that. I really am lazy. I’m a horribly lazy human being. Anyway, I told my dad that, and he took a second and he gave me the best advice I could ever have had. He said, “Son, I don’t really know anything about what you’re telling me. The only advice I can give you is don’t give yourself any deadlines.” And I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Don’t say, ‘If I haven’t made it in two years, I’m going to sell insurance.'” He said, “That’s like starting a race with a lead wheel weight hung around your neck in for a penny, in for a pound. If you love it, make it your life.” And I did. And here I am talking to you.

Tim Ferriss: I’d love to zoom in on your dad for a second because it seems like, just based on what you’ve said thus far, that for a company man at that time, that seems like very unexpected advice that would be given, that there wouldn’t be any pushback. What do you attribute that to? Why did your dad give you that advice, do you think? Or why did he feel comfortable giving it?

Scott Glenn: Well, my dad grew up in a way that I can’t possibly understand, in real serious poverty. I remember he told me at one point, if I ever have money, I’m going to give it to a charity, make it The Salvation Army because they fed us Christmas times. They had a cow in a vacant lot that three blocks of people used for milk. So I’m not going to go into, I don’t want to divulge to you, but my dad was involved in as hard a life as you can imagine, and did well in that life. So my dad’s background was he dealt with really poor Irish, Jewish, Black, Italian, and all of them involved in gambling and booze.

None of them involved in drugs. They were all people, like my dad’s best friend who raised me as much as my mom and dad did was Black Cherokee, super honorable, super loving, super gentle, but also somebody you wouldn’t want to f*ck with. And so that was my dad’s background when he met my mom and she said, “Basically, if you even curse around me, we’re not going to be together and you can’t do anything illegal.” So he left the world that he was in and started selling Blue Point tools that morphed into Snap-on Tools. And so his background wasn’t — he told me later on, he said, “I know so many.” When I was still struggling as an actor, and the thing that I’m sad about, but I can’t do anything about it, is he never saw me being a success.

My mom did, but my dad was dead by the time. But he told me, he said, when he started doing really well with Snap-on tools, he said, “I keep running into these men who are lawyers and doctors and they’re not happy because they’re doing their father’s dream, not their dream.” And he said, “The only advice I can give you about having kids is when you have kids, don’t dream their dreams for them. Do not do that.” So he was an unusual guy. To be very honest the only human being I’ve ever met in my life close to who he was, is him.

Tim Ferriss: Thank you for sharing that. And how would you describe your mother, her character, what you absorbed from her?

Scott Glenn: Filled with love, unconditional love. When I think back on it, my mom and dad played tennis. My mom also grew up really, really poor. Her dad died when he was in his 30s, but she had a rich super aunt who never gave the family money, but gave her things like ballet lessons. And so my mom was a dancer, and I think back on it, she was a loving, physical artist. And it was like, I remember when Carol and I were going to get married, and I told my dad that I was planning on converting to, we grew up Swedenborgians and I was planning on converting to Judaism because I didn’t want her to have a target on her back that I didn’t have on mine as well. And my dad’s answer was, “Man should do what the woman wants.”

So that was my mom and dad. What I will say about growing up with them is we hear all these people talk about growing up in these dysfunctional families. I don’t have any excuses. I grew up in the most functional family. Straight out love. My dad never hit me except for once in my life. I remember my mom wanted me to take this girl to a dance, junior high, and she was the daughter of a friend of hers. And I went, “Ew.” She was a little hefty, whatever. I didn’t want to do it. And I said, “No, I don’t want to do it.” And she said, “Please, son, I’m asking you.” I said, “No.” And my mom teared up and started going [crying sounds].

My dad walked in the door and he said, “Why’s your mom crying?” I said, “Something I said.” He walked over and hit me with an uppercut and dropped me on my ass, like wham. And I’m like — this is somebody who had never given me a spanking. And he looked down at me, he said, “Make your mom cry, you’re going down,” and walked away. So the next time my mom wanted me to do something, if she even started to go [crying sounds], I said, “Okay, mom, I’ll do it.”

Tim Ferriss: So let’s come back to the conversion to Judaism. I’d love for you to say a little bit more about that. You mentioned if Carol was going to have a target on her back, you didn’t want her to be alone in that. Can you say more about the decision to convert?

Scott Glenn: Yeah. I had a friend, his name was Milton [inaudible], and I’ve lost touch with him. I don’t even know if he’s alive or dead, but he was a rabbi in a shul in the Upper East Side in New York. And he was a friend of mine. He had been a rabbi in a shul in Charleston, South Carolina. He’d been in some of the first bus sit-ins. He’d been in shootouts with the KKK, and I believe he dropped a couple of those. And he was my friend. He loved theater. And I went to see him and I said, “I want you to make me a Jew.” And he said —

Tim Ferriss: Why did you say that to him? In preparation for getting married?

Scott Glenn: Yeah. I said, “I’m going with Carol. I want you to make me a Jew.” He had met her. I said, “I want you to make me a Jew.” And he said, “Shmuck, I’ll lie for you. I’ll tell her parents that I did it and I won’t do it.” And I just went, “No, her parents don’t have anything to do with it.” And he said, “I’m a conservative rabbi. I don’t really believe in conversions that much. What do you know about the Talmud?” And I said, “If a man teaches his son no trade, it is as if he taught him highway robbery.” And he said, “You’ve read the Talmud.” And I said, “Some of it.” And he said, “Do you accept it as the word of God?” And I went, “No, not really.” I said, “I think it’s a book with a lot of wisdom, as is the Bible, as is the Koran.”

But if you’re asking me of all that stuff, what resonates the most with me it would be Lao Tzu’s The Way of Life. And that’s what I really — but he said, “I’ll find a rabbi that’ll do it for you.” I went, “Okay,” and I started walking out of the show and he said, “Hey, wait a minute, asshole, turn around.” So I did. And he said, “You’re not doing it for the Talmud. You’re not doing it for her parents. Why do you want me to convert you?” And I said, “Because I met this woman and I love her, and we want to travel, and I don’t want to go anywhere in the world where somebody’s pointing a gun at her and not at me for the same reason, period. That’s it. If there was no anti-Semitism, you and I wouldn’t be having this talk.”

And he said, “Sit down.” So I sat down and he said, “After me, ‘Aleph, Beth, Gimel, Daleth.'” And I said, “What are you doing?” He said, “I’m converting you.” And I said, “Well, you just told me you wouldn’t.” He said, “Nobody has ever given me that answer to that question.” He said, “If you want to take this on that way, I’m duty-bound to convert you.” And then he kind of converted me. I was doing an off-Broadway play at the time. So he would go down, and when I would go to the shul to learn about Judaism, he was a closet director. He would say, “I want to come back on stage in two days. I want you to try this.” I went, “Oh, man. Okay.” I’m not going to say no to the guy. Abraham Ephraim Ben Abraham is my Jewish name.

Tim Ferriss: You mentioned Lao Tzu. Why does that resonate? Why does his writing or the conglomerate known as Lao Tzu, the —

Scott Glenn: It feels like an honest description of inner and outer truth the way I know it. It just resonates with me that — I mean, we can talk about this later on or not talk about it, but — you shoot, I know, do you know who Brian Enos is?

Tim Ferriss: I know the name. It strikes a bell.

Scott Glenn: He wrote a book called Practical Shooting: Beyond Fundamentals, and it’s about when you enter the space of doing something, the less thought that can be involved and the more you’re just present in the now, the better it will be. Doing martial arts and boxing, wrestling, all that stuff, I just realized at a very young age that if I wanted something to work out well physically, the best thing I could possibly do is watch my body do it, not make any decisions at all.

If somebody does this, then you do that, I never bought that in martial arts. Given where I grew up, I knew that wasn’t true. Number one, if anybody who predicted what would happen in, let’s say, a physical confrontation, if they were making the prediction, one thing for me was very clear about them, they’d never been in one. Now I believe that that’s not just true of that kind of stuff, but it’s true of pretty much anything you do physically. If you have muscle memory, let your muscle memory alone, it’ll do it so much faster and cleaner than you ever will. For me, spiritually, that’s what Lao Tzu is saying.

Tim Ferriss: So it’s this diminishing of the self or dissolution of the self, in a sense?

Scott Glenn: I mean Lao Tzu is the ultimate mystical. For me, the mystical side of every religion is not the impractical, that’s the practical side. The impractical side is orthodox that says — this is a whole other thing, and I’m just an actor and I’m not that bright, I’m just saying this. But I believe that orthodoxy right now is under fire and diminishing quickly. It’s in the rearview mirror. And people like Mike Johnson even complain about going to fundamentalist evangelical church and seeing less and less people in the pews.

The reason for that, I believe, is because orthodoxy is not practical. Orthodoxy says, “Take for absolute for real, the words that are written in these books.” Well, if you believe that two plus two equals four and you run down the line — I mean if you want want to save orthodoxy, forget about banning books about LGBTQ or Blacks or Latinos, you want to save orthodoxy, ban the teaching of these three following subjects: math, physics, chemistry. Because under the harsh light of science, orthodoxy doesn’t work. Carbon dating says to the Bible, the Talmud, and the Koran, all of which get kind of close to the same date as the age of the Earth, carbon dating says, “You missed that one by only around 170 million years. Whoops.”

Somebody lived in the belly of a whale. Well, 2,000 years ago, you look at something as big as a whale, you see if it’s possible. Biology says, “This thing can barely swallow anything bigger than a minnow.” Guess what? It never happened. Whoops.

But mysticism says all of this is is poetry to tell you from God how to live your life, how to be an honorable just person, how to have a family. All of which I completely believe. Absolutely. To me, Lao Tzu is the ultimate mystic because in my mind, what mystics and orthodoxy are looking essentially at doing the opposite thing. Orthodoxy is saying if I bow to Mecca or if I eat fish on Friday, or if I live kosher, when I die, I’ll be cool. My ego will be cool. I’ll be fine. I will be fine.

Mysticism tries to dissolve the ego altogether. Do I believe when I die Scott Glenn will be around? No. But do I believe there’s something in me that’s a point of view? That’s a point of view of you two guys and the cloud outside and elk running? Yes, I do believe that.

Tim Ferriss: Talking about that dissolution from a firsthand experiential perspective like a mystic, have you ever experienced, say in acting, a role playing you as opposed to the other way around?

Scott Glenn: Yes.

Tim Ferriss: Could you describe what that’s like?

Scott Glenn: The first time it happened was Urban Cowboy, but I translated it wrong. I translated as fear of leaving this character alone. The second time it happened was doing an Off-Broadway play called Killer Joe. And I just realized that up until one part of Killer Joe, staying out of the way and just letting it — it was a crazy play where the director realized that the acoustics were so good in the Soho Playhouse that we could turn our back on the audience and be heard. We could walk off-stage and be heard. He thought, to make this really spontaneous and organic,

I’m going to allow anyone to do whatever they want. There’s not going to be any blocking at all. None. The whole thing took place in a trailer on the outskirts of Dallas. If, as a character in the middle of a conversation, you felt like walking down the hallway off-stage to take a leak, you did. So it was completely open like that. The only part that was choreographed originally was there was a big fight at the end, and we brought in a guy from the opera to choreograph the fight and he choreographed a great fight scene, but it didn’t look right next to how loose the rest of the play was. So we realized we had to improv the fight as well. Mercifully, the people in the cast had circus skills, we knew how to pratfall and stuff like that. But everybody got hurt doing that.

15 minutes before half an hour, we’d come on stage and we’d say, “Tonight this chair’s a breakaway. This will shatter. This is real.” The deal that we had was like, if you came up behind me and grabbed the back of my hair and pulled me, I would fall backwards. But since I couldn’t see what I was falling into, it was the obligation of the person pulling me, if there was a chair or something that I was going to f*ck up my back, to kick it out of the way. The only place to kick it was the first aisle of the theater.

We told people when they came to see us play, “This is a projectile aisle. You may not get a heavy object landing on your lap, or you may. You for sure are going to be covered with fried chicken and ketchup and fake blood. There’s no question, so don’t wear suits that you care about.” Anybody over the age of 25 avoided those seats and the kids fought to get them.

That was the way the play worked. There was one scene at the beginning of act two where I’m supposed to walk on stage, it’s dark and this guy is drunk and he’s trying to get in the front door, but I don’t know who it is. I’ve moved in at that point and I’m in bed with a young girl.

So I come out in the dark, grab him, slam him down on the ground, and I’ve got a 45 automatic and I’m wearing a watch and the lights come up and then everybody else wanders on stage who’s in the trailer. My wardrobe is a 45 automatic and a watch. At one point, Tracy Letts said, “Scott, when people walk on stage, all I see is your ass. You live at this place,” so that he broke. Full-frontal nudity, fine. But after the first night of doing it was like — I don’t know whether “liberate” is the right word, but —

Tim Ferriss: I was just going to use that word.

Scott Glenn: — I realized that after that, and Tracy forced me into that spot.

The best thing I could do with the play was just let it happen. Just let it happen. That was Killer Joe.

Tim Ferriss: When you say, “Let it happen,” how does that change how you approach the next performance? You decide to let it happen, what do you —

Scott Glenn: The next performance I didn’t make any decisions about what I would do, what prop I would pick up, anything.

Tim Ferriss: Just let —

Scott Glenn: Well, let’s see what’s going on here. I’m going to live in this space. I know that I am this character. I even told Tracy, I said, “I know other people have played this part at Steppenwolf where it started in Chicago, but you f*cking wrote this for me.” I just know it in the way that I felt the same way about Wes Hightower in Urban Cowboy. That was Killer Joe.

The next time it happened, I was doing Leftovers and I had been in two seasons of The Leftovers and I’d gone from just being a character to Damon Lindelof calling me up with Mimi Leder, the producer who she directed most of them, and Damon wrote it. And they said, “We want you to be a regular member of the cast. We’re doing the last season in Australia. And I think the second or third episode is going to be just you, Scott, just you in Australia.

“I’ve written the longest monologue I’ve ever written. I am so lucky.” I said, “What? Is it two pages long?” He said, “No, seven.” I was, “Holy sh*t. Seven pages.”

He sent it to me, and at the time he sent it to me, I was reading this book — I know you’ve got a dog, I’m going to ask you about your dog.

Tim Ferriss: Sure.

Scott Glenn: But I was reading this book called Don’t Shoot the Dog.

Tim Ferriss: Excellent book.

Scott Glenn: Isn’t it a great book?

Tim Ferriss: It is my top recommendation always for people who are considering getting a dog for any type of training. It is an excellent book.

Scott Glenn: If we weren’t holding mics, I’d hug you.

I’m reading Don’t Shoot the Dog, and the section I’m reading is where she says, “Positive reinforcement can help you train your dog, your husband or your wife, your friends, even yourself.” For example, if you’ve got something long to memorize. And I’m thinking, “Holy sh*t. Here’s my…” What she said in that was it’ll take longer initially, but it’s the perfect way to memorize something really long, start at the end. Do the last sentence and then the last sentence and the next last sentence, and like that.

Because what will happen when you get to the beginning of this thing and you launch into it for real, as you’re getting towards the end, it’ll become more and more familiar. It’ll be like walking home, “Wait a minute, I know this street lamp. I know where I’m at.”

Tim Ferriss: That’s fascinating. Instead of the ending being this hanging unfamiliarity.

Scott Glenn: It scares you — well, I remember it, as you get near the ending, you become more and more comfortable and more and more comfortable.

So Carol and I get to Australia, we go to the outback and we’re going to do this scene, the first one we’re going to do. Mimi says, “We’ll do this in bits and pieces because this is seven pages, there’s no way you can do the whole thing in one.” I said, “You know what, Mimi? Can you at least give me a shot at doing it in one take?” And she said, “Okay. I can do that.” We set up, it’s not a monologue in that it’s not me talking to myself, I’m talking to David Gulpilil, but he doesn’t say anything, so he just sits there and listens.

We start doing this scene and we come to the end of it. I hear, “Action.” I feel the key light a few times. I hear, “Cut.” And Mimi, first she said, incorrectly, but I’ll say it because I’ve got a big ego. She said, “Ladies and gentlemen, you just had a master’s class in acting.”

She said, “Scott, so when you picked up the tape recorder and you started to play it and you welled up and you started to cry and you wouldn’t let yourself and you put it back down, what did you do next?” And I said, “What did I do with the tape recorder?” She said, “You don’t remember what you…” And I went, “No.” She said, “What do you remember about what you just did?” And I went, “Not much.” She said, “You’re telling me that so much of you was in that scene, there wasn’t enough to step outside. You weren’t watching yourself at all?” And I went, “No.” And she said, “If you can’t direct yourself, I can’t direct you. Would you be willing the next time we do this to have a little piece of you watching it so that when I talk about parts that I want to change, we can talk to each other?”

I said, “Are you asking me as somebody who has this job and is being told by the director or as an artist?” She said, “What’s the difference?” And I said, “The difference is I’m a blue-collar enlisted Marine, I know how to take orders. You’re my boss, if you tell me to do it, I’ll do it. But if, as an artist, you’re asking me, will I do it? Artists wait whole lifetimes to be able to have this experience and if I could have this experience again, f*ck no, I don’t want to do it. I do not.”

She said, “What if I’m not getting what I want?” I said, “Let’s do another take. We’ll just do one take after another.” She said, “It’ll wipe you out. It’ll exhaust you.” I said, “No, it won’t. Look at me. Am I exhausted?” We did three or four more takes of the whole thing, and at the end of it, Mimi said, “Is this what I’m going to be dealing with for the rest of this episode?” And I went, “Not if you tell me not to.” And she said, “I’m not going to tell you not to. Let’s just go for it.”

We did that whole episode, “Crazy Whitefella Thinking.” And all I would do in the morning when I would wake up first in the outback and then later on in Melbourne, was literally look in the mirror and I’d say, “Stay out of the way. Do not make editorial decisions or try to work for that big moment.” I had a manager, his term was “Having a conversation with Oscar.” “Have no conversations with Emmy or Oscar. Just stay out of the way of this and let it happen.”

That was when I really understood being in that spot as an actor. And then it happened to me again with Vince Vaughn doing a series that hasn’t come out yet. The first season, I don’t know if there’ll be a second season, but the first season will be around August. It’s called Bad Monkey and it stars Vince. The first day on the set working with Vince, I play his dad. And the character is a shaman who talks to manatees and —

Tim Ferriss: To manatees. I love it.

Scott Glenn: — the birds flying by the sky and sh*t like that.

At any rate, Vince, we did the scene as written like three times and it felt like it was just taking me — Vince said, “We know the scene, Scott, will you be cool with just throwing the script out and just winging that scene, what we just did, just completely open-ended loose?” And I went, “You mean like I used to do in street theater? sh*t, yes.” And after we did that, I just thought I’m not going to edit myself or this character that I’m playing because of a key, something that I signed up for, a breathing thing with this guy Erwan Le Corre.

At any rate, I just realized after that day with Vince and the key that I had to play in the character, I’m going to stay out of the way of this because it feels so good and so fresh, and I’m lazy too. I mean, it’s taking care of me. Why should I work my ass off when the best stuff is just leaving it alone? And then the next job I got after that was something called Eugene the Marine, which is this low-budget thriller that will be coming out sometime in the next year.

With that, I realized from the get-go, just stay out of the way. Both because the director was going to let me do whatever I really wanted. I mean, I would make it physical, I’m supposed to pick up a drill and drill a hole in the wall, I do that. But how I was going to do it, whether it was going to be the same again and again, whether it would match? I was not even going to think about that a little bit. To a great extent because I am lazy and in the part that I was doing in Eugene the Marine was beyond the lead. It was a 98-page script. I was in 96 of the pages. I couldn’t even memorize. I just hoped that the words would come to me.

What I happened on with that was I realized, in my mind, what gives performances on film their juice or electricity is their degree of spontaneity. And complete spontaneity, and I got this from Brian Enos as well about shooting, 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, is you don’t have a future, which means plans on what you’re going to do in the scene, dissolve, and then finally disappear.

What I had with that movie was finally would just wound up being with the crew as my very small audience. Every single take was a one-act play called, “Now.”

Tim Ferriss: You mentioned Marlon Brando earlier, was there anything that you gleaned from your time around Marlon Brando or that he taught you? Any gems you picked up?

Scott Glenn: Well, aside from his moral behavior, which was phenomenal.

Tim Ferriss: What do you mean by that?

Scott Glenn: He supported two villages in the Philippines with all of his pay and wouldn’t let anybody write about it.

I remember at one point I was working on the scene, it’s not in the movie, but there’s one point where I killed Dennis Hopper and I was working on the scene and Marlon came over to me. He said, “Scott, just because they call it acting doesn’t mean you have to act.” And I went, “Okay.”

Tim Ferriss: What did he mean by that?

Scott Glenn: What he meant by that was I was trying to squeeze something out of a moment rather than seeing what the moment was going to present to me. And what I’d learned from watching him was, because he had this reputation of being — okay, there are two basic schools of acting that, even to this day, that when you watch people work and you know which one they’re coming from, one is RADA, really great Brit actors all have this, which is technique. You get down the accent and the physical characteristics and the wardrobe and the makeup and the dealing with props. Get the whole outside perfect, and then do the part. That’s RADA technique acting, most of what you still see.

Then there’s the Russian School, which is Stanislavski, Boleslavsky and that is you begin with the inside of the character. Does this person share my same — the way I look at life, philosophy, all that stuff. What emotions are really mine that are also this character’s? And if they’re not the same, can one be replaced with the other? If something makes me angry about getting on a subway and I’m playing somebody who’s angry about not being left money in a will, the audience doesn’t know where that anger comes from, so you use the subway because you’re not in the other —

Marlon had the reputation of being mainly, if not a hundred percent, the Russian school. I realized around him, he was whatever worked. Sometimes he would take a mirror, make an expression on the mirror, freeze and say, “Say action.” And other times he would say, “How are they lighting this scene?” And he says, “Is there a way I can put this ear in the dark so you don’t see it?” “Yeah, but what are you going to do?” And he’d put a sound plug in his ear and play, not his lines, but the stuff he wanted to cover in improvisation so he wouldn’t miss stuff.

Tim Ferriss: It was audio he had recorded himself.

Scott Glenn: Yeah. He would do anything. And I learned from him that part. But I also got from Marlon, his understanding about —

Brief little story, where we were in the Philippines was in a place called Pagsanjan. I had a room at the Pagsanjan Inn that I basically kept all of my crap in. I was living at the time with this group of people called the Ifugao that were on the set. One afternoon, I was back at the hotel with Marlon, with two producers, I think Dennis Hopper, and I can’t remember — I think Larry Fishburne was there. Anyway, we’re sitting around — and the table in the hotel and where you check into the hotel and a jukebox were all in the same room.

This couple came in to check into the hotel, Filipino couple, and they had two little girls with them. One was holding her mom’s dress hiding behind it. I think it was “Satisfaction” was playing on the jukebox. The other little girl heard this song and she came dancing into the place where we were all sitting around miming to satisfaction. She was magical. People were laughing.

Finally, her parents checked in and they all laughed and went upstairs. One of the producers, I think was Gray Frederickson said about the little girl who was in dancing, he said, “God, that little girl was magical. Someday that little girl will be a great actress.” Marlon said, “Great actress?” And he said, “Yeah.” And Marlon said, “You’re wrong. It’s the other one.” They didn’t get it, but I immediately understood what he was — because that other little girl doing like this was me. Who needed the permission of a part to go nuts, to do whatever it was — and Marlon was saying the same thing about himself.

Tim Ferriss: With the quickening that you felt when you realized that you were meant to act, when your life started to make sense, do you think that was predestined out of the box? Was that informed by your experience with scarlet fever? Because I believe you couldn’t read at the time?

Scott Glenn: Scarlet fever attacks, sometimes all, usually just one of your senses. They don’t know why it does that, but they were trying to protect my eyesight, which turns out to be really good. What scarlet fever left me out with was damaged auditory nerves. I mean, I’ve got hearing aids in now because Carol finally — was up here probably five, six years ago, she just got tired of screaming at me and having me walk into the room and turning the TV up. Ear-splitting loud, she said, “You’ve got to get hearing aids.” I didn’t think I needed them. And then I got checked by the audiologist who went behind my back to talk to me.

What happened was he was talking to me, I’m looking at him and I’m hearing him fine. He walks behind me and I can’t hear him. He told me, “That’s because you read lips.” I thought, no, I don’t read lips. He said, “Oh, yeah, you do.”

And he said, “The good news, Scott, is this is not age-related. The bad news is you’ve been suffering this for at least 40 years. My suspicion is longer.” That was scarlet fever.

Tim Ferriss: Do you think that helped shape you into what later became this actor?

Tim Ferriss: So for people who of course are listening to this and not seeing any visual, for the majority of our conversation, you were sitting comfortably cross-legged on a couch, no back support, something that I know 30-somethings who wouldn’t be comfortable in that position more than a few minutes. What does your physical training look like now? And what would you say are some of the most important types of training or decisions about training that you’ve made, say post-40, just to allow this type of durability?

Scott Glenn: I always wake up the same way. I didn’t today. Oh, I slept in, but normally I wake up around 5:30. I slept till 7:00 today, I don’t know why, but anyway, I come downstairs, I fill up the coffee machine with water, turn it on, clean up the surfaces of all the tables, just because it feels like a good thing to do. And then I massage my ears, pull them up as high as possible. I’m not talking about being gentle, not gentle at all. Pull them down and then massage my ears, and if I feel any even slightly tender or sore spot, I really go after that as hard as I can. I learned this in a tai chi seminar years ago in New York, and I’ve done it ever since, but anyway, super strong ear massage. And while I’m doing all this stuff, I’m making sure that my breath is horizontal and low.

Tim Ferriss: What do you mean by horizontal?

Scott Glenn: There are two kinds of breathing that most people, like most Americans do improperly after the age of, I don’t know, two or three. One is we’re born breathing horizontally, which means if I say take in a big breath of air, your stomach goes out, your diaphragm is working, and you’re not bringing anything into the top of your chest at all. That’s horizontal breathing. Vertical breathing is where you see the shoulders going up, and we vertically breathe way too much because what vertical breathing will do, aside from the fact that you’re not taking in as much oxygen, is it will put tension into your upper body and lower body. It’ll also jack you into a fight-or-flight situation. So, if you do that at a stop light because somebody got in your way, that’s really a bad idea because you’re going to jack up your heart rate, you’re going to jack up your blood pressure, you’re going to screw with your central nervous system. So I, just early in the morning, try to remind myself —

Tim Ferriss: Horizontal breathing.

Scott Glenn: Horizontal breathing, and then drop it down low, so that you’re feeling the diaphragm, that’s all, so I do that. After the ear massage, I tap my head, brain tapping.

Tim Ferriss: Is this also from Chinese medicine?

Scott Glenn: Yes, so after I finish tapping, I wash my hands, blow my nose, walk outside, and I’m dressed usually like this. Usually, I’ve got a lighter shirt on.

Tim Ferriss: You have shorts and a sweatshirt right now.

Scott Glenn: And I slip on these slip-on shoes because this time of year, I’ll probably be standing in snow and ice and I open up the garage and I walk outside and I hum, and when I say I hum, any of us can do it easily. You put your back teeth together, you have to take — and I do that eight times and put vibration in my vagus nerve. This is every morning for sure. And then I come back in, shut the garage door, then I look at what the temperature was because I think, “Whoa, that was pretty cool.” This morning, it was 14.

Tim Ferriss: And you’re outside in shorts?

Scott Glenn: Yeah, and I’m not uncomfortable at all, but I know other people who handle the cold way better than I do, but the humming, you know who does that? Buddhist monks do that in the Himalayas, and they do that in way colder weather with robes on. It actually will work, if you can do it in a relaxed way, you start to learn to anchor your coccyx. I hum, come back in, and then take a sh*tload of vitamins and minerals and crap like that, probably most of which I don’t need, but I do it anyway. And then make the bed upstairs. I always make the bed, and then I do something physical to finish waking up. Today it was baby fit. Do you know baby fit?

Tim Ferriss: I do not know baby fit.

Scott Glenn: Russian special ops do it in the morning. You use your legs first five times with each leg lying on your back with your arms over your head. You use your legs to turn yourself over the way a baby would, and then you use your arms to do the same thing five times, five times. Then, you rock back and forth. I do it 20 times. Do it with your neck, I do 10 times usually, and then a low crawl and a bear crawl. You can either do a bear crawl with your butt up in the air or your butt lower than your shoulders. I do it lower than my shoulders.

Tim Ferriss: Did you get John into this?

Scott Glenn: And what he said was, it made so much sense, “We spend so much of our time looking at cell phones and computers and driving and doing so much stuff, like that or like that…”

Tim Ferriss: Right, with your head, with your —

Scott Glenn: It would be good to do that a bit.

Tim Ferriss: Get your neck extended instead of pitched downward.

Scott Glenn: And I do a bear crawl. Like today, I didn’t do that many because I was thinking about you guys coming over here and I didn’t want — so I just did 12, but usually I do 60. When it’s warm out, I’ll use the lawn out there, and usually it’s like 90 to 100 out.

Tim Ferriss: This is yards or feet? Feet, I guess?

Scott Glenn: This is just moves.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, okay.

Scott Glenn: One, two, three, four, like that.

Tim Ferriss: I got it. That’s quite a bit. Good for you. Geez, I don’t even know if I could do that.

Scott Glenn: So, that’s one thing I’ll do. The other is a really brief warmup. When I say brief warmup, 30 seconds of running in place, swinging my arms, just getting my joints used pretty some synovial fluid in my joints, and then what I’ve been doing a lot is Quick and Dead. For me, that’s just 10 kettlebell swings, either with a 32-pound — I don’t know the kgs, in the 30s or —

Tim Ferriss: Probably 16. 24 kilos, wow, geez. 52, okay.

Scott Glenn: I stopped doing the 52 because I screwed up my muscles. I’m learning about more muscles in my body with my old age, but anyway, I do 10 kettlebell swings inside a minute, 10 more inside a minute, wait a minute, get on the ground, do pushups, and it depends on how ambitious I am. I rarely do straight pushups. I’ll usually do fist pushups or open finger fist pushups, try finger pushups, or these, which are —

Tim Ferriss: Oh, I got it, the closed hand, more tricep-type pushups.

Scott Glenn: Right, prison pushups. So, I’ll do 10 of those, 10 of those, wait a minute, back and forth, and I’ll do five rounds. So inside of five rounds, I’ve done a hundred KB swings and a hundred pushups. And then I’m pretty much done with specific working out. I used to do workout with dumbbells and barbells and stuff like that just for the chuckles of it. Every now and then I’ll pick up some dumbbells just to play with and say, “Can I still do this?” But I avoid that because I’m 85 and I don’t want to mess with my joints and tendons and ligaments. And I’ve discovered that bands work just as well, and they’re way more merciful on your body.

At one point you talk about being 85, I absolutely take into account the fact that I’m — and the other thing I realized is that already at 85, my recuperation time is way longer than it used to be. If I do an all-nighter now, it’ll take me three days to get back. It used to be that when I was in the Marine Corps, if I could get — I’m not exaggerating, I could get 15, 20 minutes of sleep just tying myself to an armored personnel carrier and I was good for 72 hours, for real.

Tim Ferriss: That’s wild.

Scott Glenn: But those days are long gone. Now also, I don’t know, if drink too much tequila, I’m going to really feel it for two or three days, all that stuff. The one place that I’m lucky, I’m not bragging, it’s really true, is my reaction time. I’m still as quick as I used to be, but what I realize is that could turn into —

Tim Ferriss: For people who can’t see, you just threw a jab right in my face.

Scott Glenn: What I realized is that could drop off 30 seconds from now, I’m 85. At some point, that’s going to go, and if it does, I’ll deal with it. But anyway, so those are some of the stuff that I do, and aside from the breathing stuff. I used to think the most important muscles in the body were the butt, the hamstrings, and the quads, lower body, big muscles. And they’re not unimportant at all, but now I believe that easily the most important muscle you have control — I guess yogis have control over their heart, so that would work. I don’t, I can slow my heart rate down and that’s pretty much it. So, the most important muscle on my body that I can have control over for sure is the diaphragm, nothing else even gets close. And that FeetUp thing over there, I used to — every now and then, I’ll like —

Tim Ferriss: Oh, wow, look at that. I know the FeetUp.

Scott Glenn: I’ll forget exactly how the diaphragm feels, so I’ll invert myself and then drop my heels over so that they’re against the wall really gently, as gently as possible. And why I’m doing that is that I can then take all of the tension out of my shoulders and my hands and everything, and then I just start breathing deeply. If you’re in that position, you won’t be able to vertically breathe. You will not be able to.

Tim Ferriss: So let me just describe this —

Scott Glenn: So, if you start taking in big breaths, you’re going to be introduced to your diaphragm right away.

Tim Ferriss: So let me explain this for folks, because a lot of people listening, a lot of my friends who are former athletes in their 30s or 40s could not do this comfortably, so I want to explain it. So, imagine there’s a device called the FeetUp, but just for visual purposes, imagine that you took a, let’s call it a three-inch cushion and put it on your toilet seat, emptied the toilet of water, put your head in the toilet, and then kick your feet up, so you’re basically doing a handstand on your shoulders, and then you can’t shrug your shoulders, it would be very hard, so you have to then breathe through your diaphragm. So, this is what Scott does at 85, just for #LifeGoals for everybody listening. And do you exercise every morning?

Scott Glenn: No, I guess I kind of do. I was thinking when I was doing Eugene the Marine, all I would do is well, actually I did do about 60 pace. I would do baby fit in the morning, that would be pretty much it because I knew I had so much work to do during the day, and a lot of it was super physical, as martial arts stuff with training knives and stuff like that. So, I’m not compelled to work out every day, but at least every other day mean. And the diaphragm stuff I use, because like I say, I’m super lazy as an actor. So, I got this part in Bad Monkey. I’m playing this shaman. I get the part and then I freak out —

Tim Ferriss: I can’t wait to see this, by the way.

Scott Glenn: — because I’m thinking, how do I play a shaman? How do I play somebody who talks to manatees? And I don’t want to have to technically figure that out as an actor, that’s going to be way too much work, so [BLEEP] had signed me up for this thing with this guy named Erwan Le Corre who does natural movement. You probably know who he is.

Tim Ferriss: I do.

Scott Glenn: He also would concur that the diaphragm is the most important muscle and he’s all about breathing, and the course was all about breathing and meditation. And Erwan believes — for me it’s true, it may not be true for other people, I don’t know, but for me it’s true, that thoughts are either trying to figure out problems, which we all do. How do I get from here to there? What’s two plus two equal? That kind of thing, or it’s a conversation that you’re writing the script and you’re delivering to yourself.

Tim Ferriss: When you say that, you mean these are like the stories you’re creating for yourself?

Scott Glenn: So this is what Erwan believes. In a breath hold, where you feel stress, because the stress you ultimately feel when you’re holding your breath is you’re afraid you’re going to die. You’re not because at a certain point, against your will, your body will take over and force you to breathe, so he believes that if you have one thing to think about and meditate on during that breath hold, you can rewire your central nervous system. Now, that sounds like woo-woo stuff to a lot of people, but for me it actually worked. Anyway, so he said, “Scott, what kind of conversations do you have? Are they basically any one thing?” I said, “Yeah, they’re minor being pissed off, being angry at somebody who took my parking place, or making up this confrontation that I may never have with a casting person, but they’re pissed off.”

So he said, “I would suggest that one of your meditations be peace, go in the other direction.” So at the end of this course, he gave us this thing, and I’ve got it on my phone, and what it is is six breath holds. You decide how long you want them to be, and they shouldn’t be killer, but they should be long enough that they’re difficult because Erwan said, “Keep telling yourself, I’m getting stronger and better with and because of the stress.” So, there are six and with diminishing amounts of rest between each one, and I try to do them at least three times a week. Erwan says, “Don’t do them in succeeding days because it’s probably not good for you,” and so I don’t, but I do these breath holds, and I started doing them here while I got the part of — and I remember at one point —

Tim Ferriss: Oh, this is the part of the shaman.

Scott Glenn: I sit upright in bed and I yell, “Whoa,” and it’s 2:30 in the morning and Carol says, “What? What?” And I said, “I found my manatee. He’s a French guy. His name is Erwan Le Corre.” What I meditate on are peace, clarity, and focus. And when I say focus, I do mean physical focus like a gun sight. I’ll pick a tiny spot on the ceiling and as I’m holding my breath, I’ll focus on that, but try to find the place of meditation that just lets me live there.

And I started off with doing a minute — I think I was doing a minute 15, anyway, right now I’m doing a minute 40 —

Tim Ferriss: Breath hold?

Scott Glenn: Yeah. Performance Freediving will tell you that, of record, my longest breath hold is four minutes and 15 seconds.

Tim Ferriss: Non-trivial.

Scott Glenn: Sea level might even be longer now, I don’t know, but up here I am at 1:40. Ten seconds doesn’t sound like much, but what I’m aiming for, I would like, by the time I hit 86 to be able to do six two-minute breaths. The benchmark for me is two-minute breath holds, those are real.

Tim Ferriss: Those are very real.

Scott Glenn: But I’m at a minute 40 right now, but what I was going to say about good luck, and this is just pure good luck to the point where I almost just accept it now. When I need to learn something, the best teacher in the world materializes right in front of me.

Tim Ferriss: So I want to ask you about this because it seems like, and this is going to be a leading question, but it’s an uninformed observation, it seems like from L.A. to Idaho, you loosen your grasp on something, and then this amazing opportunity presents itself for this career-changing role and it seems like that’s happened a few times. How would you explain that?

Scott Glenn: I would like to be some kind of intellectual giant, which I am definitely not. I’m probably at average, maybe a little bit above average intelligence, but not much and that’s not false modesty, that’s for real. If people ask me, am I a good shot with a handgun? My honest answer is above average. A lot? No, above average, but I’m a really good instructor. I can teach anybody, probably to expert level, how to shoot a handgun. Am I a good shot with a rifle? Yes, I am. Can I teach people well how to — No, I’m the world’s worst teacher. I don’t do anything right. I don’t get a consistent spot well, and I don’t do any of this. I’ve just been doing it since I was so young, I just do it and it works out. My great fortune in life, and I used to be amazed by it, and now I just accept it is okay, I got into the Actors Studio by accident, and I got, by accident, Lee Strasberg as my own personal standalone teacher and coach, the best in the world.

I’d never planned on that happening, it just happened. I’m out at the range shooting, the guy next to me is watching me shoot and he says, “You’re pretty good at doing this, but I could give you some pointers. Come on over to my house tomorrow and I’ll show you what I know.” His name was John Shaw, world champion. Kurt Johnstad calls me up when I’m in L.A. and says, “You want to know about combat shooting? That’s not military, but the real civilian stuff, LAPD, SIS, come on out to the Eagle’s Nest and meet this guy, Scotty Reitz. And we become —

Tim Ferriss: You took a course with Scotty Reitz?

Scott Glenn: — we’ve become really good friends and —

Tim Ferriss: He’s the real deal.

Scott Glenn: He’s my teacher. I’m down in the Baja — this is how stupid I truly am. I’m down in the Baja, and for two years I’ve been scuba diving without any instruction, and I should be dead. I used my BC at almost 100 feet to rocket myself to the surface.

Tim Ferriss: Don’t try that at home, kids.

Scott Glenn: I’m in this far and I’ve just spent a day doing this. Oh, man, and I’m talking about it like I’m the coolest person that ever lived. This guy walks up to me, in his 60s, potbellied guy, and he looks at me and he said, “You’re a real asshole.” And for whatever reason, I don’t know what about him saying that to me, but I came to attention and I said, “Why, sir?” And he got a big grin and he looked at me and he said, “Okay, you’re Army, Airborne, or Marine, which one?”

And I said, “Marine Corps, sir.” And he laughed and he said, “I’m here with my girlfriend. I’m staying in that room. You show up tomorrow and give me the next six days of your life. Show up tomorrow with coffee at 8:45, not before, not after, and I’ll teach you how to scuba dive and certify you.” And then he walks out of the bar and the owner of the bar, this guy John Ireland walks over to me and I tell him about it. He said, “Do you have any idea who that was?” And I said, “No.” He said, “That was James Stewart.” I said, “Jimmy Stewart, the actor?” He said, “No, like Jim Stewart, dive master emeritus at Scripps Institute, Jim Stewart, who wrote the syllabus for the SEAL teams, Jim Stewart, who’s the only person who can sign the chit that says you’re allowed to dive in the Antarctica. Jim Stewart, whose NAUI card is number one, and Jacques Cousteau said, is arguably the greatest scuba diver that ever lived. That’s who’s going to teach you and certify you.” And he did.

Tim Ferriss: So, all right.

Scott Glenn: So I mean, again, again, I’m out here —

Tim Ferriss: You’re like the Forrest Gump of skill acquisition.

Scott Glenn: I’m out here in the summertime and I’m talking about what does it feel like to be a bird? Because when I was in the service, I never free fall. I never did free fall like him and like, you know, SF and SEALs do at all. But I’ve done static line jumps. So I’m telling somebody at this co*cktail party, this guy walks up to me and he said, “You want to free fall? I’ll teach you. Come over to my house tomorrow afternoon. I’ll hang you from my porch. I’ll teach you malfunctions and major malfunctions and how to deal with them and we’ll go jumping.” And I said, “Why should I trust you?” And he said, “Because I’m four times world champion. I’m the only person allowed to videotape the Golden Knights.” If you know anything about jumping, videotaping skydivers is easily the most dangerous part because of all the stuff you can — I mean, it’s crazy.

Tim Ferriss: All the things that can go wrong. Yeah.

Scott Glenn: So I said, “Are we going to tandem jump?” He said, “No. You already told me you’re a static line jumper. We’ll put a two-by-four on a Cessna. We’ll go up. We’ll use the two-by-four to launch ourselves out on the strut of the wing. Hang on to it.” And he said, “And you’ll go first.” And I said, “What will you do?” He said, “I’ll come after you.” He said, “You jump off and establish a hard arch.” And he showed me how to do that. And I said, “Okay. But then what will I do?”

And he said, “Well, I’ll jump off, catch up with you, and I want you to pantomime — but don’t do it — pantomime pulling your rip cord.” So you want to keep yourself balanced. And he said, “Yell to me what your altitude is. We’ll go out at hopefully 15,000 and when you hit 3,000, you don’t pantomime anymore. You actually pull the rip cord and pump air into the cells of your parachute and that’s the way it’ll work.” And it did. It worked that way perfectly. ‘Cause he was so good he would bullet dive down and be as far from me as I am from you right now.

Tim Ferriss: Like four feet, three feet.

Scott Glenn: But I mean again and again and again, the best person, not like, oh, this person’s kind of good at what they do. They’re as good at it as anybody on the f*cking planet Earth, and they’re going to teach you. And the one thing I will say, and hopefully whoever is hearing this will take it to heart, there’s part of me that’s really a good student and here’s the part of me that’s really a good student. 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.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I heard someone say recently, very high performer, I’m blanking on the attribution, but they were taught by a mentor something, and I’m paraphrasing, but they said, “In order to be excellent at anything, you have to first be willing to be extremely crappy at it.” And —

Scott Glenn: That’s so true. I mean it’s like with martial arts, you’ve done them enough, so I know I’m talking to somebody, the two of you guys can understand this. Okay. So I’m going to Thailand to do this TV show, White Lotus, that I can’t really talk about it because they’re very secretive, but I’m going to be in Thailand. So I called up a friend, just because I love the word Krabi-Krabong. I mean, it’s so cool. Krabi-Krabong, little babies probably like saying it too.

But it’s a Thai martial art and it’s the weapons side of Muay Thai. And when you’re really good at it, you use razor-sharp double swords. But when you begin it it’s just rattan sticks. And what I want to do in Thailand is not learn Krabi-Krabong or be taught secret moves or any of that. I just want someone to show me the absolute basem*nt cellar foundation. What are the moves that you need to be able to — I know they won’t be complicated. I know there’ll be something that with just pure repetition I can do again and again, so that’s what I’m going to do when I get to Thailand.

Tim Ferriss: And you’ve done a lot of knife work also. I imagine that some of the movement —

Scott Glenn: Knife stuff I, yeah, actually do know pretty much about it.

Tim Ferriss: The movement patterns probably translate really well. One thing that you should definitely try to do while you’re there if you can, is go to Lumpinee Stadium or Rajadamnern to watch the Muay Thai fights.

Scott Glenn: I’ve been to both of those places.

Tim Ferriss: Oh. You have?

Scott Glenn: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Excellent. All right.

Scott Glenn: I did a film in Thailand as an actor. I’ve been in Thailand a few times, but I was there as an actor doing a movie called Off Limits, and it was the King’s birthday and he was turning 60 and if you know the Lesser Vehicle Buddhism, you become an adult at 60. It’s the end of the fifth cycle, a cycle being—

Tim Ferriss: So there’s still hope for me.

Scott Glenn: — 12 years. Yeah.

So his birthday was all year long and we lost locations. And so my week-and-a-half or two-week job wasn’t going to happen for at least two months. So I said to them, “Why don’t you just keep me here in a hotel rather than spend first-class plane tickets back and forth and back? And I bring Carol over and we can go to phu*ket and have fun.” So we did that. But while I was there, the movie is kind of a sad movie to me because two of my friends who were in the movie — who played much bigger parts than me — are no longer alive. One was Gregory Hines, who I loved, and Gregory I knew from martial arts, from doing Korean martial arts in New York. He was really good at it. He’s the only person I ever saw on his passport, you know where you put occupation? His said “Tap dancer.” He was amazing.

Tim Ferriss: That’s a power move.

Scott Glenn: He died of liver cancer. And the other was Fred Ward, who died of Alzheimer’s, but Fred was an amazing athlete. Fred had a silver boot in Boxe Francaise, Savate.

Tim Ferriss: Savate. Yeah.

Scott Glenn: And when he was in Thailand, he trained Muay Thai with the people from Rajadamnern.

Tim Ferriss: Oh. Yeah. Rajadamnern.

Scott Glenn: So he brought, at one point, I remember he brought me into work out with those guys. I wouldn’t hit palm trees with my hands or anything like that, but they had heavy bags and stuff like that too. You know, and Fred told me that God gave me a right hook. And I said, “Yeah, I know that part.” But Fred and I went across the border illegally into what was then Burma up in the Golden Triangle —

Tim Ferriss: Dangerous area.

Scott Glenn: — with Three Pagodas Pass. Yeah. So I had adventures in Thailand and saw a lot of Muay Thai. Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Oh, yeah. It’s the art of eight limbs, beautiful and brutal and very effective art. So I want to revisit for a second this luck, because there’s luck, differing degrees of luck, and a lot of it’s outside of your control, but it seems like there’s certain ways you can increase the surface area in your life that luck can stick to, and one is by being a good student for instance. Right? That increases the likelihood that luck is going to stick to you.

Scott Glenn: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: Are there any other recommendations you would have for people who want to increase the type of serendipity and luck that you’ve experienced? Are there any other ingredients that you can play with?

Scott Glenn: If you have the good fortune to fall in love with and find yourself with a Jewish girl from Brooklyn, don’t fight her about anything because, number one, you’re going to lose. And, number two, she’s going to take you in a much better direction than you ever figured.

Tim Ferriss: Okay. Well this is a, let’s go deep down that rabbit hole then. So relationship, we’ve talked about career. We’ve talked about some fitness. Long, durable, good relationships with a partner, any advice for people out there? Especially in your, I would imagine in the world of entertainment, this is a rarity, I would have to think from the outside looking in.

Scott Glenn: Again, it was my good fortune to just fall completely in love with this woman.

Tim Ferriss: How did the two of you meet?

Scott Glenn: In a movie theater in New York. The girl I had been kind of not really living with, but semi-living with off and on, and I had broken up and she just tried to kill herself. And I had a friend who now is teaching school in Iraq of all places. His name is Jeff Siggins. At any rate, he called me up and he said, “We’re going to the movies, Murray Hill Cinema, me and a group of people. You want to come with us?” And I said, “Sure.” So Carol was one of them. I had never met her before. So I sat next to her in the movie theater and I just felt these — I didn’t touch her or anything. I just felt these waves of, I don’t know what it was, but something. And I’d fallen in lust probably at least a couple thousand times in my life and pursued that with full vigor, but I’d never really fallen in love. Anyway, so the movie came to an end and everybody got up to leave.

And for whatever reason, I turned to Carol and I said, “I think I want to sit through this and watch it again.” She said, “Yeah, me too.” So we sat through the whole movie again, not holding hands or not even touching, and the movie came to an end. And in that period of time, it was like magical. We walked out of the theater and there was probably half a foot of snow everywhere. So we went out and we played in the snow and it was getting late. And Carol said, and I was doing a play, but I was off that night. She said, “You want to spend the night?” And I said, “Yeah. Oh, yeah.” So I went over and she cooked spaghetti and meatballs and we had beer. And at the end of dinner, she went into the bedroom, came out with a pillow, threw it on the couch and said, “This folds, this turns into a bed. There are blankets on it. Have a good night.” And went back into the bedroom, shut the door, and went to sleep. I went, “Okay.”

So the next morning we had breakfast and we played in the snow some more. And I was going to say goodbye to her and I thought, I’m not going to even try to hug her and kiss her. If I do this, and she does one of those pullaways, my whole world will collapse. How I knew that, I don’t know. So I said I had a really good time and I held out my hand. I shook her hand goodbye. And then for the next week, I would open my, I had a predictably, a little black book, and I would open it up and I would call a phone number and a young woman would answer, “Hello, hello?” And I wouldn’t say anything and I would just hang up. And I went through one phone [inaudible] and finally I thought, who are you kidding? You want to see her. That’s who you want to see.

So I called her up and I told her my TV was broken and there was something I wanted to watch on television that Saturday night, I think it was. And she said, “Okay.” So I get down to her apartment and she’s got makeup on and she’s all dressed up. And she said, “Oh. I’ve got a date tonight, but you know where the fridge is and there’s the TV, and so knock yourself out.” And I sat literally two feet away from it. I was so pissed off. I was just f*cking really pissed off. If I had been a dog, I would’ve been growling.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah.

Scott Glenn: So I’m looking at the T — I’m not watching the TV, and I hear the downstairs bell go “Dong, dong.” And I hear Carol say, I remember the guy’s name to this day, Earl. She said, “Okay, Earl, I’ll buzz you in.” [Buzzing noise] And I’m looking at the TV and I’m hearing the front door open and I’m hearing Earl say, “Whoa. You look hot tonight.” And I hear Carol say, “Listen, Earl, an old friend of my brother’s just dropped by. I haven’t seen him in a long time. I’m not going out with you tonight.” You can see the emotion that I’m filled with right now.

Tim Ferriss: I can.

Scott Glenn: And I went, “Yes!” She shut the door, walked into the living room, and that was about 55 years ago.

Tim Ferriss: Wow. Incredible. What would Carol add to this Genesis story, if she were sitting here with us? What else would she add?

Scott Glenn: Tell me I was “full of sh*t” and “Wrap it up,” and “You’ve got shopping to do for me today.” This I’ll say about her because she’s not here right now. And I’ve seen it with enough people. And what it is about her, I don’t know, and maybe I don’t want to know, but even with, he’s no longer alive, but I remember when she and I first met Freddie Fields, who was the toughest, hardest-ass agent, Hollywood as old-school has ever seen. Within 10 minutes of meeting her, he desperately wanted her approval. I’ve never seen anybody around her who doesn’t want her to say, “You’re okay.” What is that about her? She comes from, I think now it’s 30, 35 unbroken generations of Jewish rabbis and Israeli Airborne or whatever. I don’t know. Maybe that’s part of it, but that is true about her. People want her to say they’re okay and what that quality is in her, I don’t know. But it’s there, that’s for sure.

Tim Ferriss: She’s an amazing woman.

Scott Glenn: And she’s funny. She’s funny.

Tim Ferriss: She is funny.

Scott Glenn: You know, and doesn’t take seriously a lot of the stuff I do and laughs at it and keeps sort of like properly puts me in my place.

Tim Ferriss: I have to ask, and I may get the name wrong here. You mentioned Gregory Hines, you spent some time, at least as I understand it, a brief but intense period with modern dance, I think.

Scott Glenn: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: And let’s see if this goes somewhere. Playing pool with Nureyev in New York City? Am I getting the name right?

Scott Glenn: No. That was —

Tim Ferriss: It wasn’t Nureyev.

Scott Glenn: I was dancing with a guy named Matt Mattox, who was phenomenal. And I remember at one point I said, “How do I get better at this?” And he said, it was when I quit dancing almost altogether. He said, “Stop acting. Stop doing martial arts. Stop wrestling, working out. Don’t do anything else, just dance. You want to get better. You’re at that point right now.” And I quit dancing because I —

Tim Ferriss: Couldn’t go all in.

Scott Glenn: No. I ran into Nureyev while we were doing The Right Stuff in San Francisco and New York City Ballet had moved to San Francisco for the year, and I met him and he had seen Urban Cowboy. And he told me that I was a much realer, better cowboy than John Travolta would ever be. And by the way, John Travolta pretty much sucked as a dancer, too. So I remember at one point we were down in the basem*nt of this place called Tosca’s, a bar in San Francisco.

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah.

Scott Glenn: They had a pool table.

Tim Ferriss: Tosca’s is famous.

Scott Glenn: And we were shooting pool and drinking, me in a minor way, he in a major way, vodka. I remember at one point I said to him, “Boy, you Russians can really hold your vodka.” And he stopped and got really angry and looked at me and he said, “I am not Russian.” And I said, “What are you?” He said, “I’m Latvian.” That was the first time it ever dawned on me that these parts of Russia that I thought were kind of, along with Putin, were actually Russian, were more like Ukraine. They had their own identity, their own sense of who they were. And it meant something. It certainly did to Nureyev. He was, in some ways, the best physical shape of any human being I’ve ever been around. I watched him go down a flight of long stairs on his hands.

I mean, he was — he would invite me to come and watch the New York City Ballet work out, and Makarova, who was the best prima ballerina in the world at the time, I would watch her en pointe, not coming down from pointe spinning one direction, three directions, four, back and forth, chain-smoking two Camels at the same time. It was the weirdest world because it was a world where there was zero fitness in that way. And yet they were the outrageous athletes. I mean, like stuff that triple black belts in Shotokan couldn’t even dream about doing, these people did easily.

Tim Ferriss: I did want to talk about poetry, if that’s possible.

Scott Glenn: Okay. Sure.

Tim Ferriss: Because I believe you’ve written a fair amount of poetry. What is the, and we already spoke earlier a bit as we were discussing Judaism of the scriptures as poetry/parables for living.

Scott Glenn: Yeah.

Tim Ferriss: What does poetry mean to you? Why write poetry? Why read poetry?

Scott Glenn: Poetry to me is, along with physical art, scratching on the side of a wall.

Tim Ferriss: Oh. Look at that.

Scott Glenn: The first —

Tim Ferriss: This is one of your books, Friction Zone, Scott Glenn.

Scott Glenn: It’s the most sort of elemental way that human beings have to communicate ideas and feelings, real deep ideas and feelings. And also because, as I said, I grew up with probably, but I don’t want to know for sure the myth that I’m directly related to Lord Byron, who had a club foot, was crippled, but swam the Hellesponts and fought in Greek’s War of Liberation from Turkey. And he did all this stuff and was an outrageous co*cksman and mainly he was a poet.

So I’ve lived with the belief that I have that in me. But what happened with Carol was I wrote a poem to her every Christmas, Hanukkah time, and at a certain point on our 50th anniversary, she said, “I want to publish these. Is it okay with you?” And I said, correctly, “It’s not up to me.” I’m not a — I can say Indian giver, ’cause I’ve got Comanche blood, so I don’t mind using the word. If I give something, it’s yours. It’s not mine. You can rip up those pages and wipe your ass with it.

So she said, “Well, I’m going to publish it, self-publish.”

So that was Room Service. That’s not that book. And then during the pandemic, there was no acting happening anywhere. And then right after that, I had a brief period of time when I could work and then the strike happened. But during the pandemic, which was about two years long, all I could really do aside from work out and hang out with Carol was write poetry. And I wouldn’t even know if I would call it, I would call it observations. I leave it to other people to say whether that’s poetry or not. I don’t know. But 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.

Tim Ferriss: That’s so true.

Scott Glenn: And what I discovered with Carol was I liked her better than anybody I knew. We were like, even to this day, we’re like agoraphobic hermits. We’d have no problem. I don’t need the company of anybody. And anyway, that Friction Zone is kind of what came out of the pandemic. And it’s not big heavy duty, you know what Friction Zone is? Friction Zone is where you want to be with a big, heavy motorcycle like a Harley-Davidson to drive it slowly. You’re slipping the clutch, constantly slipping the clutch with a little bit of power on. So the metaphor for that, just anyway —

Tim Ferriss: How do you apply that metaphor outside of riding a motorcycle like that?

Scott Glenn: Trusting that your body will do the right thing. So when you’re riding, let’s say a big Harley, I can tell you this axiomatically, when you’re riding a big Harley and you’re going over 25 miles an hour, you ride it like any other motorcycle. If it’s a street bike, just remember the following dictum. Front brake until you’re really sure about how it works only. Stay away from the rear brake. Dirt bike, the opposite. But so anyway, that’s if you’re going under 25 miles an hour, if you’re going under 12 miles an hour, you keep the power on slipping the clutch and you will go where your head looks. If you look down at the ground, I guarantee you, you’re going to dump the bike.

Tim Ferriss: I like the metaphor. So we’re going to wrap this up. I’m wondering, just as a way of landing this plane and wrapping up, what advice, let’s just say 10 years from now your grandkids are listening to this and they’re wondering what life advice —

Scott Glenn: I would give them both the lessons I learned from Sir Laurence and from my dad, which is: 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. I mean, again, I’m at a bar with Laurence Olivier, who created the National Theater of England, who was the biggest movie star in the world, was the most creative stage actor in the world and director. He’d done everything.

And my question to him was, “What is it that you need to make it in this business? Is it timing, the right place, at the right time? Is it contacts, knowing the right people? Or is it just working on your skills and becoming better and better at what you do?” He said, “My dear boy, none of the above.” He said, “Develop very strong jaw muscles, learn how to bite on, and not let go.” I said, “You’re telling me it’s just pure tenacity?” And his answer was “Yes. If you’re a monk outside the gates with a beggar’s bowl and you stay out there long enough, they’ll finally get sick of seeing you, open the gates, and let you in.”

Tim Ferriss: That’s fantastic. Scott, thank you so much for taking the time.

Scott Glenn: Oh, thank you.

Tim Ferriss: What fun.

Scott Glenn: I blabbed away a lot.

Tim Ferriss: That’s the whole point.

Scott Glenn: Okay.

Tim Ferriss: That’s the whole blueprint. And maybe we’ll get a chance to go out and shoot again. And for those people listening, I think a little birdie told me that with open sights, you can still hit targets at 400 yards, maybe beyond.

Scott Glenn: I don’t about — there was a time in my life and I have witnesses that, because it sounds out, I could, with steel sights, hit 600 yards. Whether I can right now at 85, probably not. But who knows? I mean, you know, get the Dragunov down in warm weather, I’m going to, I’ll give it a shot to use a horrible, horrible metaphor.

Tim Ferriss: Well, I’m curious to see if I can get my ass upside down on the feet up after, after being inspired by your daily routine. So thank you so much for the time. It looks like it’s time for some water and some snacks.

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