Danny Glover was shopping in a supermarket shortly after the release of "Angels in the Outfield" (1994), when a small boy spotted him and whispered to his mother: "There's the coach."
"That little kid's probably sitting at a university somewhere," Glover said as he recounted the story to a full Cohen auditorium of students who had braved dismal April showers to welcome the "Lethal Weapon" franchise star with a standing ovation. "You never know how a movie resonates, and how powerful it is to a certain generation."
Glover has most recently appeared in "Dreamgirls" (2006) and "The Shooter" (2007). He has also produced several miniseries for TNT and HBO on topics in African-American history.
He has received several Emmy nominations, five NAACP Image Awards and a BET Lifetime Achievement Award.
For Glover, positive change and cinematic power run together strongly in both his life, a connection about which he spoke at length over his Thursday night address.
After a short series of video clips of his work, Glover, clad in a red Oxford shirt, took to the Cohen stage for an informal question and answer session with moderator and sophomore Ben Moskowitz.
Themes of social justice and positive change extended back to Glover's family life. His parents, he said, were the first generation to benefit from the desegregation of federal agencies in 1948; they worked for the U.S. Postal Service, an important opportunity for middle-class blacks at the time.
"My parents set the tone in some sense; that was key," he said of his impulse to fight for social justice and civil rights. "It rooted me."
He expressed particular pleasure to speak to a college audience, describing his own years as a young man at San Francisco State University as particularly formative for him; there, he was inspired by the diverse crowd of young people working to register disenfranchised blacks to vote in the deep South.
As a young man, however, he wasn't studying acting, but international and development economics, he said. He spent six years working in community housing, education and health care.
Things changed in 1975, when he was asked to audition for a production of noted South African playwright Athol Fugard.
Without Fugard, he said, "I would not have become an actor," he said. "I had to have some way in which I could talk about whose side of the world I'm on."
Acting became a natural extension of his social justice work, and a moment of personal awakening. "The first time I auditioned for something, something happened at that moment," he said. "It happens for anyone at that moment where they come outside of themselves. I felt I was being of some use, that I was a vehicle to be used in some sort of way."
As his career progressed, he said, he sought this same calling throughout his cinematic work.
"When I'm thinking about how I select roles, [sometime it's] because I needed the work, absolutely, I don't dismiss that," he said. "[But] I was able to use my leverage of the other films [like "Lethal Weapon"] to do movies about the stories that I wanted to see done."
He cited "Grand Canyon" (1991), about a diverse group of young people in present day Los Angeles, "Mandela" (1987), about the South African president, and "Buffalo Soldiers" (1997), a story of black soldiers in the American West after the American Civil War.
"Those are the kind of movies that I want to do," he said.
He addressed the power of films and television as a sense of self-empowerment. "Why not use cultural production as a way of talking about issues?" he asked. "How do we empower people to be architects of their own rescue?"
But his social justice focus doesn't dilute his focus on the technical and personal aspects of acting.
Asked if he prefers directing or producing, he replied, "I still love acting; I like the idea of taking the words off a page, and taking those words and making something happen with those words."
For each character he plays, he said, he uses different techniques to sink in and "physicalize" the character.
In "Switchback (1997)", for example, he played a serial killer. "I was trying to find whatever I could about serial killers," he said. How did he find a deep sense of cold, calm and composure?
Pilates. "When you do Pilates, it centers you in a different kind of way. You can imagine how things work in the strangest ways," he said.
"I find where I want to center the character, everything else flows out of that," he said. "Then I'm in a place where I'm immersed in the language. I still like the give and take, the stumble, the everything, all that process."
As for the lighter side of his acting experience, Glover didn't directly answer the question when asked who chose the underwear in "Lethal Weapon"'s infamous toilet scene.
He did, however, address how he enjoyed working with Mel Gibson on the unscripted comedy in the scene.
"The joy of working with Mel was that we'd play with an idea, and the director always said, 'Give me more.' We were always playing with something and working with something."
Modest about his own role, he said he was surprised to see Cohen nearly filled on a Thursday night. "Do you have anything else to do?" he asked, in response to the rousing standing ovation he received upon entering. "It makes me blush, in ways."
