He’s an actor with good-guy baggage

DANNY GLOVER is a complicated man. Which is strange when you consider the solid uncomplicated image of him. Tall, magisterial even, with that wide and lovely smile, the man we know from a hundred (OK, four) “Lethal Weapon” movies, from “Places in the Heart,” “The Color Purple” and “Angels in the Outfield,” from, a bit more recently, “Dreamgirls,” “The Shaggy Dog” and “Saw.”

“Saw.” Let it sit for a minute. Impossible. What was Danny Glover doing in “Saw?”

(Getting killed like the rest of the cast, for one thing.)

Did he know, did he sense, that the grisly, low-budget horror flick would become an enormous hit, generating millions of dollars and a spin-off franchise? Is that why he did it?

Not exactly.

“The producers were, at the time, my managers,” he says, referring to Evolution, whose principal partners produced “Saw.” “I did it as a favor to them. And let’s face it, no one was exactly banging down my door. I am glad I got killed off, though. Saved me from the sequels.”

This is one reason the career is complicated -- it may seem like Glover is working all the time, but he really hasn’t been. Music agent Marty Madison in “Dreamgirls” was the first big part in a big film he’s had in a while; it was the good folks at ICM, he says, who actively pursued it. “I was not the first person on their list,” he says, with a laugh. “But they were like ‘If Danny Glover wants to be in this movie, great. We’re glad to have him.’ Which was nice.”

Now, on the heels of “Dreamgirls” comes “Shooter,” an action-thriller starring Mark Wahlberg as Bob Lee Swagger, ex-Army marksman fighting for justice, and his life, that opens March 23. Glover had not been the first one on that list either -- director Antoine Fuqua originally considered Gene Hackman for the Congressional Medal of Honor-winning colonel who coaxes the bitter Swagger back into action. But then producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura uttered Glover’s name and the deal was sealed.

“Danny has such gravitas,” says Di Bonaventura. “He can mask his emotions or he can wear them on his sleeve. And his good-guy baggage worked to our advantage.”

“Everyone loves Danny,” says Fuqua. “He’s perfect. A sort of fatherly guy who will be able to convince someone to get back in the game.”

As Col. Isaac Fitzsimmons Johnson, Glover does more than that. To prevent any irate charges of spoiling the plot, let’s just say the role is not quite what it seems.

Which is a pretty good description of Glover himself. Although Glover is well established, he’s had a rocky few years. At 60, he is entering a territory where the roles are richer, though not as plentiful, where the competition can be stiff -- Morgan Freeman, Gene Hackman, Laurence Fishburne, even Alec Baldwin.

Fortunately, stardom has never been the sum of Glover’s self-definition, as a conversation makes perfectly clear. Yes, there is the same wise yet friendly face, same aged-in-wood voice. But Glover, who resolutely forsakes L.A. and New York for his hometown of San Francisco, is much more a political animal than an industry insider.

Wide-ranging table talk

OVER dinner, he talks easily, comfortably, in long, complex paragraphs about topics including the education system (he was in New Orleans at the behest of the Algebra Project and the Vanguard Foundation), his daughter and grandson (“I’ve only got one of each, so I have been accused of worshipping”), his third-grade teacher (“Miss Fumber. She’d wash your mouth out with soap, but she told us she was in the business of raising citizens”) and diversity in Hollywood.

“You try to do things outside the box,” he says. “But the industry has been so indoctrinated and intoxicated. Is ‘Blood Diamond’ an African film? Is ‘The Constant Gardner’? Do they depict the lives and feelings, the thoughts of Africans? No, because no one is really interested in that.”

It is easy to see the San Francisco State economics major who got into acting because poet, playwright and activist Amiri Baraka was holding auditions. “No one else auditioned for the play I was in,” says Glover, “so I got the part.”

At a certain point, however, he realized he was indeed an actor. “When you’re doing something day after day for 11, 12 hours for no pay, when you realize you can use your body, your voice to tell a story,” he says, “then that’s something else. You’re onto something else.”

Still, he hasn’t strayed far from those early days. He still lives in Haight-Ashbury, and his politics remain as progressive as in the days when he belonged to SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee).

“It’s so hard to get an intelligent film about anything made in Hollywood these days, much less one about race,” he says. “We frame the discussion in archaic ways, we focus on incidences of what some person said or what some person wrote. We don’t take on the real issues, like fear or that I represent 12% of the population and 50% of the prison population. No one talks about what is going on systemically.”

These days, Glover says, he makes more money lecturing -- about education, civil rights, poverty -- than he does in filmmaking. And it shows.

“Danny is so smart,” says Fuqua. “So smart. They’d have to break us up on the set. We’d sit down, start talking about his character and then we’d be talking about politics. The cameramen would just be standing there saying, ‘Uh, we do have a movie to shoot.’ ”

A movie that, despite its action hero, is highly political. A movie that Glover was happy to be involved in, and not just because of the politics.

The last 10 years have not been easy ones, at least not career-wise. When he turned 50, Glover says, things sort of dried up and he still isn’t quite sure why. It could have been his age -- at 50, you’re too old to play the husband, too young to play the grandfather -- or simply too many “Lethal Weapons.”

“He’s been typecast as the good guy,” says Di Bonaventura, who worked with Glover on the “Lethal Weapon” series. “And it’s strange because he is such a good actor. But success drives the town into their perception of any actor.”

Whatever the reason, when Glover was offered a small part in the Tim Allen remake of “The Shaggy Dog,” he jumped at it -- he had spent the previous year doing only four episodes of “E.R.”

“So, yeah, I took ‘Shaggy Dog,’ ” he says. “They were offering a lot of money. Jane Curtin, she played the judge. There were a lot of us in there. Robert Downey Jr.... It was that kind of movie.”

Glover seems quite capable of holding two opposing notions in his head -- that film is an art form that can change people’s hearts and minds, and that it’s OK to make a lot of money doing popcorn flicks. You could call him an idealistic pragmatist. Did he want to do “Lethal Weapon 3” and “4”? No, but it was work and it was money and these are both good things.

Lending his name

STILL, gravitas becomes him and the word “legacy” comes up more than once in his conversation. Like many actors, he tries to leverage his star power to finance or support films that wouldn’t otherwise get made. As happy as he is with his work on “Shooter,” for example, he’s more interested in talking about “Bamako,” a tiny feature film he produced last year about the African debt, which opened at New York’s Film Forum.

“It got great reviews,” he says. “It did incredible business in Paris and opened in London. And Christian Aid has started a petition to renounce British contributions to the IMF and the World Bank. So the film meant something.”

“You’re trying to talk about issues in an industry that, let’s be honest, is not that imaginative. So how do I leverage ‘Lethal Weapon’ to make ‘The Saint of Fort Washington’? Or ‘Freedom Song’?” he asks, referring to films he was in dealing with homelessness and the civil-rights movement.

Right now he’s working on getting the funding for and casting “Toussaint,” a film about the Haitian revolution in 1781 that led to the first black-led government in the Western Hemisphere.

“How do you do a movie that turns a corner?” he says with a shrug. “I’ve made good movies,” he says. “I’m proud of ‘Grand Canyon,’ I’m proud of ‘Beloved,’ hell, I’m proud of ‘Gone Fishin’,’ even though the reviewers crucified me.”

And even with an almost 10-year hiatus, Glover has legs among the driving demographic -- teens. On a recent trip to New Orleans to meet with educators about rebuilding the city’s decimated school system, he was surprised to find that the school children knew him well, from “Angels in the Outfield” and “The Color Purple,” never mind that the films are 13 and 22 years old, respectively.

“ ‘Angels in the Outfield,’ ” he says with a delighted laugh. “Everyone had seen ‘Angels in the Outfield.’ They’re all asking me, ‘How come you couldn’t see the angels? We could see the angels.’ ”

When he spoke to a group of boys on the same trip, however, celebrity did not trump age. “They’re looking at me like I am this old guy, boring, until I started telling them about my dyslexia. Then they all perked up, you know. They thought I didn’t understand them, and I couldn’t -- I mean, I couldn’t imagine being where they have been, losing their homes, their families -- and I told them that. But I knew what it was to feel like an elephant in the room, to feel like you don’t belong.”

There is something hypnotic about the way Glover speaks; words and thoughts laid down and built upon -- here is the foundation, here is the rampart. He would like to say that “Dreamgirls” and “Shooter” mean the lean days are behind him, but he’s been in the business too long to be anything but realistic.

“People could start offering me a lot of things,” he says, “or they might not. We’ll see.

“I’m still in it for the same reason I came to this,” he adds, in that unmistakable Danny Glover voice. “To be of some use.”

mary.mcnamara@latimes.com