‘OK,” says Julian Glover. “We talk to each other for an hour. And you extract what you want, as long as it’s nice.” We’re sitting in a cafe in Barnes, London, and it is all a little surreal. Glover, now 87, is so vividly recognisable from The Empire Strikes Back, in which he played villainous General Veers, that it’s like teleporting back to the 1980s. In fact, to look at, he seems to have altered almost not at all between starring in 1967 film Quatermass and the Pit and, say, playing the baddie in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade two decades later. What’s more, you would have easily picked him out as Grand Maester Pycelle in Game of Thrones. Basically, in the flesh, this man reminds you of every important moment on the large and small screen, from even before you were born.
Glover is a legend. How could he possibly think anyone would not be nice? Who has hurt him? He has to think back to the 1950s, to a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Julius Caesar. “One reviewer said, ‘Julian Glover’s Cassius is about as lean and hungry as Kenneth Clark.’ I didn’t care. I was damn good.” That was seven decades ago, and Clark was a famous art critic. Glover had gone angling for acting work after school, give or take a year at Rada and some national service.
