Danny Glover is the American actor, producer and activist who played Lt. Mike Harrigan in Predator 2 and Detective David Tapp in Saw.
Quick Specs
| Born | Danny Lebern Glover, July 22, 1946, San Francisco, California |
| Training | Black Actors’ Workshop of the American Conservatory Theater; Jean Shelton’s Shelton Actors Lab |
| Screen debut | Escape from Alcatraz (1979) |
| Horror centerpieces | Lt. Mike Harrigan in Predator 2 (1990); Detective David Tapp in Saw (2004) |
| Best known for | Sgt. Roger Murtaugh in the four Lethal Weapon films (1987 to 1998) |
| Companies | Robey Theatre Company (co-founded 1994); Louverture Films (co-founded 2005) |
| Honors | Independent Spirit Award for To Sleep with Anger; Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award (January 15, 2022); NAACP President’s Award |
| Service | UNDP Goodwill Ambassador (1998 to 2004), later a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador |
Who He Is
Danny Lebern Glover was born in San Francisco on July 22, 1946. His parents, Carrie and James Glover, were both postal workers and both active in the NAACP. His mother, born in Louisville, Georgia, had graduated from Paine College in Augusta; his father was a World War II veteran.
He went to George Washington High School in San Francisco and then to San Francisco State University in the late 1960s. He didn’t graduate, though the university later honored him. As a teenager and young man he had epilepsy, and by his own account he hasn’t had a seizure since his mid-30s. He has also talked about dyslexia and about feeling awkward as a very tall kid with “diminished expectations.”
Before acting he worked for the city of San Francisco in community development. He trained at the Black Actors’ Workshop of the American Conservatory Theater, and with Jean Shelton at the Shelton Actors Lab, whom he credited with much of his development as an actor.
The Work, and What He Did in It
His screen debut was a small inmate role opposite Clint Eastwood in Escape from Alcatraz (1979), but the stage made him. His Broadway debut in Athol Fugard’s Master Harold…and the Boys brought him national attention and led Robert Benton to cast him as Moze, the cotton farmer who stands by Sally Field’s widow, in Places in the Heart (1984). It was his first leading film role. The next year he was the murderous corrupt cop McFee hunting Harrison Ford in Witness, Mal in Lawrence Kasdan’s western Silverado, and Albert Johnson, called “Mister,” Celie’s abusive husband in Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple. He played that villain without softening him.
Lethal Weapon (1987) made him a star. He is Sgt. Roger Murtaugh, the LAPD homicide sergeant days from retirement, saddled with Mel Gibson’s unstable Martin Riggs, for director Richard Donner from Shane Black’s script. Glover gives the film its ground wire: the family man, the fear, the exasperation. He was about 40 playing a man turning 50, which is part of why Murtaugh’s weary refrain lands. He played Murtaugh in all four films, through Lethal Weapon 4 (1998).
1990 brought the double his horror reputation rests on. In Charles Burnett’s To Sleep with Anger he plays Harry, a smiling, slow-burning intruder in a South Central family. He executive-produced the film as well, his first time in that role, and won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Male Lead. Many critics still rate it his finest performance.
The same year he took top billing for the first time, in Predator 2. Stephen Hopkins directed; the film is set in a near-future Los Angeles of 1997, in the middle of a gang war. Arnold Schwarzenegger had declined to return, and producer Joel Silver brought in three Lethal Weapon veterans: Glover, Gary Busey and Steve Kahan. Glover plays Lt. Mike Harrigan, the LAPD lieutenant who chases the alien hunter from rooftops to a subway car to its ship, and who is finally handed a 1715 flintlock pistol by an elder Predator. What makes the performance work is exhaustion: Harrigan wins hurt, sweating and outmatched, a dramatic actor’s idea of an action lead, and it is a big part of why the film has aged so well.
Through the 1990s he worked constantly: Simon in Grand Canyon (1991), Easy Money in A Rage in Harlem (1991), Micah Mangena in Morgan Freeman’s Bopha! (1993), the manager George Knox in Angels in the Outfield (1994), Judge Tyrone Kipler in The Rainmaker (1997), and Paul D opposite Oprah Winfrey in Jonathan Demme’s Beloved (1998). He voiced Barbatus in Antz and Jethro in The Prince of Egypt that same year. He made his directing debut with the Showtime short Override (1994). On television he played the title role in HBO’s Mandela (1987), which brought an Emmy nomination, an NAACP Image Award and a CableACE Award, and Joshua Deets in Lonesome Dove (1989).
His second act opened with Henry Sherman, the Tenenbaum family accountant who marries Anjelica Huston’s Etheline, in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums (2001). He plays him perfectly straight.
Then came Saw (2004), James Wan’s first feature, from Leigh Whannell’s script. Glover is Detective David Tapp, who with his partner Steven Sing (Ken Leung) is the first to corner Jigsaw. Sing dies in a trap. Tapp gets his throat slashed and survives, is discharged from the force, and, convinced that Dr. Lawrence Gordon is the killer, stakes out the Gordon house alone until the climax costs him everything. Reviewers singled out the weary, tenacious obsession he brought to it. Tapp dies in the first film; his later appearances in the series are archive footage, as in Saw V (2008). The casting itself mattered: a prestige dramatic lead lending his weight to a tiny independent horror debut that became a franchise.
After that came Marty Madison in Dreamgirls (2006), whose cast was nominated for the SAG ensemble award, Colonel Isaac Johnson in Shooter (2007), and President Thomas Wilson in Roland Emmerich’s 2012 (2009). His later films include Beyond the Lights (2014), Sorry to Bother You (2018), The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019), The Dead Don’t Die (2019) and Jumanji: The Next Level (2019).
Cool Verified Facts
- Murtaugh’s catchphrase belongs to Murtaugh. In the first film it’s “I’m too old for this sh--”; the “getting too old” version comes in the sequels. Glover repeated it in a cameo as a bank robber in Donner’s Maverick (1994), sharing a double-take with Gibson.
- He co-founded the Robey Theatre Company in Los Angeles in 1994 with Ben Guillory, a nonprofit developing new plays about the Black American experience.
- In 2005 he co-founded Louverture Films with Joslyn Barnes. Its socially conscious slate includes films by Abderrahmane Sissako, Lucrecia Martel and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
- He was a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Development Programme from 1998 to 2004, focused on Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and later became a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador.
- The Academy gave him the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the 12th Governors Awards on January 15, 2022, the same night Samuel L. Jackson, Elaine May and Liv Ullmann received Honorary Awards.
- His Primetime Emmy nominations came for Mandela, Lonesome Dove, Fallen Angels and Freedom Song, and he earned a Daytime Emmy nomination for directing Just a Dream. He also has four Grammy nominations for children’s and spoken-word recordings.
Signatures, Habits and Behind the Scenes
He prepared for Predator 2 like an athlete. He has said that for five weeks before shooting he ran four miles a day, six days a week, at 7 a.m. on the sand near his San Francisco home, then lifted weights, “so I could be convincing. Also, I wanted to survive.”
His menace and his authority both run quiet. Across Mister, Harry, Henry Sherman and Colonel Johnson, his voice drops rather than rises. His two horror cops share a trait: Harrigan and Tapp are defined less by gunplay than by fixation, and both keep going long after the institution behind them has told them to stop. Watch them back to back and they play like the same Glover figure, fourteen years apart.
He has explained the activism in his own words: “Acting is a platform that can become a conveyer for ideas. Art is a way of understanding, of confronting issues and confronting your own feelings.” He uses star leverage to get other people’s films made. He did it with Burnett on To Sleep with Anger, and he does it on a larger scale with Louverture, especially for filmmakers from Africa and the global South.
Why He Matters
For horror, Danny Glover is the prestige bridge twice over. In 1990 he took top billing in a studio horror-action sequel and played it as a serious, physical, dramatic lead. In 2004 he lent an established dramatic reputation to Saw, a small independent film whose franchise reshaped the genre for a decade. Few actors connect the Schwarzenegger era to the James Wan era in their own filmography.
Lethal Weapon helped define the modern buddy-cop film, and its emotional center was Glover’s Black family man. That kind of leading-man role wasn’t standard in 1987 action cinema.
The Hersholt award honored his activism as part of his film legacy, not something separate from it. Between The Color Purple, To Sleep with Anger, the Robey and Louverture, his career is a model for the actor, producer and activist, and his page here would be incomplete with only Harrigan and Tapp on it.