MOVIES : To Deal With Anger : For Danny Glover the search for balance is where all drama begins, so the ‘Lethal Weapon’ star blends his work on TV, stage and film with social activism

It is the morning after the Rodney G. King beating trial verdict and Danny Glover looks haggard and drawn. Understandable, since he worked till 2 a.m. on “The Saint of Fort Washington,” a film he’s co-producing in which he plays a homeless man. He and co-star Matt Dillon shot take after take in the dark, chilly Manhattan streets.

And yet here he is, arriving at 8:45 a.m. sharp at a Park Avenue office suite, wearing leather sandals and a light beige suit. Though the whites in his large expressive eyes seem stained with fatigue, he is ready to talk about “Lethal Weapon 3,” the latest in the lucrative series of cop-chase carnivals pairing Glover, as veteran Los Angeles police Detective Roger Murtaugh, with Mel Gibson as Murtaugh’s gonzo partner Martin Riggs. Lots of things explode in all three movies--cars, buildings, Riggs and, more infrequently, Murtaugh’s temper.

Somewhere between working on the new movie and promoting the other new one, the real Los Angeles has exploded. Glover only shakes his head when asked about the King verdict and its aftermath. He can’t talk about it.

But a few days later, in a phone call from the set of the film, Glover says he has been undergoing a collision of emotion from “great disbelief” over the verdict to “feeling depressed” over the subsequent rioting.

“You can’t expect people confronted with a clear injustice not to react with rage,” he says. “After all, this country reacted violently to injustice by going to war in the Persian Gulf. So why shouldn’t we expect (blacks) to feel justified in doing the same? I hate to make the correlation, but there it is.”

While many in the film community in Los Angeles are taking part in clean-up efforts, Glover, whose activist credentials are impeccable, says, “If there’s any way I can be involved, I will. But I’m not looking to highlight myself in any way. The kind of involvement I want to be part of is long-term solutions.” He cites such “areas of neglect” as education, housing and employment opportunities that needed attention “way before all this attention was given in the last few days.”

On that morning after, the only time Glover refers to the rioting comes when the conversation drifts to his last film, “Grand Canyon,” in which he played a garage mechanic who saves Kevin Kline from a street gang in a ravaged black neighborhood.

“People who saw the movie told me they didn’t appreciate being beaten over the head with its message,” Glover says. “And yet, you look at the Laker game last night and they’re showing fires on the screen there and telling people at the game how to avoid that when they’re going home. Well, Larry Kasdan (“Canyon’s” director/co-writer) wrote that! That was all from that movie. You know, the whole thing of ‘How do you avoid the shark? How do you stay out of its way?’ Kevin’s thing was how he got lost in it and got found.” Glover beams. “I want to call Larry today and hug him for that.”

Just as the Kline character in “Grand Canyon” was buoyed by Glover’s arrival at a perilous moment, audiences have found Glover a welcome and assuring presence. At 6-feet-4 and 220 pounds (give or take), he evokes steely physical force. Yet, he also conveys a vulnerability that does little to shortchange his strength. He can accommodate without compromising, ease pain through the assertion of his will.

These are just part of a matrix of balances that Glover, who turns 45 on July 22, has maintained through more than a decade of film, theater and TV work. His first film credit came in 1979 with “Escape From Alcatraz.” But after writer-director Robert Benton saw Glover playing a South African waiter in the 1982 Broadway production of Athol Fugard’s “Master Harold . . . and the Boys,” his ascension began.

Benton offered Glover a major role in “Places in the Heart” as Moze, the quietly courageous sharecropper who comes to Sally Field’s endangered farm--and almost loses his life because of it. The film, released in 1984, drew major awards and boosted Glover’s professional profile.

The following year, he played bad guys in “Witness” and “The Color Purple” and a good guy in “Silverado.” But it was in the first “Lethal Weapon” (1986) that he showed he could not only hold his own with a charismatic box-office draw like Gibson, but had more than a little charisma of his own.

His powerful physical magnetism has inevitably been likened to black progenitors like Paul Robeson and Sidney Poitier (both of whom are Glover’s idols). Yet he also conveys the kind of earthy vigor and solidity that made movie icons out of gritty white guys like Spencer Tracy and Gene Hackman.

Despite the stature he’s achieved as a film actor, he hasn’t received an Oscar nomination. Nor has he matched his hero Poitier in scoring an unconditional box-office victory as a sole leading man.

He was the swashbuckling star of “Predator 2,” the 1991 sequel to the Arnold Schwarzenegger sci-fi thriller. The weekend it opened, “Predator 2” made $13 million--but dropped to $4 million the next weekend and $1.5 million the next.

“Everybody turned out the first weekend and then stayed away when they found out Arnold wasn’t in it,” laughs Glover, who has no regrets over the outcome. And why should he? He still gets all the work he’s able to handle, whether it’s a made-for-cable movie like “Mandela” or “Dead Man Out” or reading folk tales for the Windham Hill series of children’s recordings.

He is asked, at one point, whether he takes on so much work because he thinks he has something more to prove as an actor. The answer comes quickly.

“None. Absolutely none! ‘Proving myself’ is not even a part of my vocabulary. I’ve never felt that need. I think what’s happened in my career is this transformation that manifests itself in, well, what I think is a sense of awe with what’s happened to me in the brief period in my life. It’s very humbling and I think it’s the humility that takes the place of having to, you know, ‘prove myself.’ ”

Humility is a word that raises red flags for African-Americans who believe that showing humility in any way is commensurate with compromise at best, submission at worst. And yet no one would ever mistake Glover for a compromiser, given his tireless devotion to social causes from sickle cell anemia to South African reform to cultural and educational projects like the one that takes him to public schools all over the country to talk about the value of learning.

“He takes planes the way most people take the subway,” says a longtime friend.

All this wandering is balanced by a firm attachment to his roots. He lives in his native San Francisco with his wife of 17 years, Asake Bomani, and their 16-year-old daughter, Mandissa, in the same Haight-Ashbury neighborhood where he grew up and where he is known less as a movie star and more as a local kid who made good.

From his home, he’s able to take the local bus to the offices of his company, Carrie Productions (named for his mother), which co-produced the award-winning “To Sleep With Anger,” an independently made film in which Glover departed from his good-guy persona to play the enigmatic, vaguely sinister Harry Mention, who quietly disrupts the stability of a working-class black family in Los Angeles.

The prestige and attention that Glover’s name and aid draw for a small film like “Anger” is more enriching for him than all the big bucks he draws for the action pictures. True, “Lethal Weapon 2” grossed $150 million domestically in 1989, the year it opened, while “Anger’s” return in the first couple months of 1991 was a relatively piddling $1.15 million. Yet Glover says if it weren’t for his take from “Lethal 2,” he wouldn’t have been able to finance a risky, quirky venture like “Anger.” In similar fashion, “Lethal 3” is helping to pay for projects like “Saint of Fort Washington.”

While acknowledging that the “Lethal Weapon” movies are “wonderful films in terms of that genre,” Glover says he “feels a whole lot better about doing (“Saint”) because ultimately when people look at my career, they’re going to look at the body of work, not how much money I made or how many blockbusters I did.”

The sense of “balance” or “equilibrium” is a recurring theme in Glover’s conversation, whether he’s talking about his preparations for a role or the way he manages his daily life.

For instance, he talks, this bleary morning, of feeling “off-balance” over the relative lack of physical exercise he’s been able to squeeze in while shooting “Saint of Fort Washington,” in which he and Dillon play two homeless men who, in Glover’s words, “explore a side of their humanity in each other.” (The film is being directed by Tim Hunter (“Tex”) from a script by Lyle Kessler, who wrote the play “Orphans.”)

“In several films I’ve done, I’ve prepared by going on a 10-day fast. From the moment I entered this one, I haven’t been able to do anything physical. Like, normally, I’ll do 60 minutes on a stationary bike or maybe I’ll run like I did in ‘Pure Luck.’ ” (He refers here to a comedy released last summer in which he and Martin Short stumble around Mexico in search of a missing heiress. “We don’t have to talk about that one too much,” he says, laughing.)

“And I really need that activity because part of this role I’m playing here calls for looking for this equilibrium, this balance . . . from within the character. A lot of this comes out in the physical nature of the role. You take Mister (the cruel, abusive husband Glover portrayed in “The Color Purple”). A lot of his violent reactions come from fear and a need to be loved. And this can be conveyed through physical activity, even from his obsession with work. Even washing a window can be an act of love.”

The search for balance, Glover says, is “where all drama begins. That’s the dilemma we all face as human beings. That’s where people begin to define their humanity.”

Of all the balancing acts Glover carries out in his own life, the most conspicuous may well be the harmonious coexistence of his idealistic and pragmatic natures. The oldest of five children of two postal workers (who also were NAACP members and union organizers), Glover seemed born with the kind of devotion to hard work that would make a supply-sider smile. Yet he was just as nose-to-the-grindstone about his social activism in college and afterward.

From the time he was 5 years old and took charge of a paper route, he has worked without letup. “That’s the pragmatic side,” he says. “I’ve always worked. Whether it was custodial stuff or clerical, I just couldn’t stop working. That’s one of the problems now because I love to work. I take on so much, it doesn’t leave me much time for leisure.”

His paper route took him all over town and, since the town was San Francisco, that meant exposure to a “beat” scene that, even in its waning days in the early ‘60s, still offered heady aromas of cultural ferment.

“I was 10 when I walked into the Blue Unicorn on Hayes Street, which was one of the first coffeehouses. I also used to go to North Beach and places like that and I remember when I was 15, going to this club there called El Matador that had this flamenco dancer. And after seeing this, I decided that’s what I wanted to do. That’s what I wanted to be when I grew up.”

Away from such epiphanies, Glover was a shy, awkward adolescent, burdened by dyslexia.

“The first week of school was always the best. I remember thinking, if I could re-create the first week of school when I did my homework with no trouble and I was just on it. And I always thought if I could have that (feeling) multiplied for the next 26 weeks I would be a genius. But I could never maintain that and that was frustrating for me.”

Worse, he had, at 16, started experiencing epileptic seizures that persisted for the following 14 years and then, just as inexplicably, went away. The seizures had hampered his scholastic football career, though he continued to run hurdles.

Still he worked hard both during and after school. He developed an affinity for mathematics. (“I didn’t have much confidence with words back then,” he says. “Numbers were something I could embrace.”) He entered San Francisco State University and became part of a multiracial movement that led to the 1968 student strike.

Glover credits his youthful exposure to different cultures in the coffeehouses and clubs to his involvement in the strike. “Because all those worlds intersected, I was able to embrace the idea that we fostered during the strike of having an alliance of Asians, Hispanics, progressive whites and blacks. I think that alliance is what made the strike successful.”

While at San Francisco State, he met “Sake” Bomani, his future wife and fellow student-activist with whom he lived in a Haight-Ashbury commune of activists. He also worked in tutoring programs conducted in the city’s public schools and with an organization that helped people displaced by urban development.

After graduation, Glover seemed well on his way toward a career in public service. From 1972 to 1977, he worked with San Francisco’s model cities program. Somewhere in the mid-’70s, he started taking acting classes at night with the Black Actors Workshop of the American Conservatory Theater. In the beginning, acting was recreational, a way of building his confidence in public.

But gradually, the former high school hurdler began to find acting provided an equally challenging and exhilarating series of hurdles. “That’s the thing about acting. There are always obstacles to be overcome. After the first year (of classes), I was starting to do plays and it was like, I just got over the hurdle of just being there, you know? After a while, I felt just a little bit hungrier, a bit more fascinated with what I learned and what I could potentially learn. Then I thought, Well, you’ve got all this professional training. What do you do with it?”

Of all the roles in the plays and films he’s done, Moze from “Places in the Heart” remains Glover’s most paradigmatic part. For Glover, the significance of that movie stretches beyond the recognition he received in its wake.

“My mother died the day I found out I was going to do ‘Places in the Heart.’ Just before then, she said to me, ‘You’re going to do a film in September that’s going to be an important film. It’s going to be about you.’ This was before I even read the script, before I even met Robert Benton. And she was right because in essence, this part of Moze was so much about me that it was beyond me.”

How did he connect with so directly with Moze? “His optimism, I think. His way of dealing with his reality. His ingratiating, often diplomatic way of dealing with the world.” Most important, says Glover, “He was someone who . . . just had to make that leap. He had fears. But he had to leap over them and . . . just get beyond the fear. He was still able to hold onto something that was more important. That we are our brother’s keepers. And each one of us becomes stronger from that experience of going beyond the fear.

“You have to get beyond the fear,” Glover says.

Glover believes that almost all of the roles he has played since--Nelson Mandala, Roger Murtaugh, even Mike Harrigan in “Predator 2”--have been linked to Moze’s compulsion to shake loose of his fears in favor of a greater cause. For Glover, the actor and spokesman who once feared reading aloud in public, such transcendence is especially meaningful.

“Whatever toughness or strength people see in me or in the people I play on the screen comes from this release from fear . . . and anger,” Glover says. “That’s what Martin Luther King’s sermon about going to the mountaintop was about. You have to find some way of circumventing and redirecting the anger that you have.”

Which, he says days later, is difficult for those who have been neglected and mistreated for so long. Hence, the rioting in Los Angeles. Nevertheless, he adds, “I’m still an optimist. You have to be. I mean even with all that I’m able to do in terms of serving people--and you do have to serve people--I’m confronted by something like this and I always say to myself, ‘Was there something more I could have done to keep this from happening?’ That’s how we all should be feeling. Not just now. But all the time.”