Danny Glover (Lethal Weapon) Lethal Weapon (1987)

Danny Glover was forty years old when Lethal Weapon opened in March 1987 — playing fifty, with temple-grayed hair and a thickened carriage — and the film made him a top-billed Hollywood lead at an age when most working character actors are still hoping for the part.

San Francisco, the labor movement, and a late start

Glover was born in San Francisco in July 1946 to two USPS clerks who were both organizers in the National Alliance of Postal and Federal Employees. He worked for the SF Mayor's Office in community development, was a campus organizer at San Francisco State during the strikes that produced the country's first Black Studies department, and did not fully commit to acting until his late twenties at the Black Actors' Workshop of the American Conservatory Theater.

He was thirty-eight when Witness (Peter Weir, 1985) and thirty-nine when Silverado (Lawrence Kasdan, 1985) and The Color Purple (Steven Spielberg, 1985) hit theaters in the same calendar year. To Sleep With Anger (Charles Burnett, 1990) — three years past Lethal Weapon — would later become the prestige reference. By 1986 he was an established working actor with two Oscar-nominated supporting performances behind him and no leading-man credit.

"I had been the third man on the call sheet for years. Then they sent me a script where the second man was Mel Gibson and the writing was the funniest I had read." — Danny Glover, Variety (2017)

How Murtaugh came to him

Richard Donner (in Lethal Weapon) and Joel Silver have given different accounts of the casting. The version that has been most consistently confirmed is that Donner saw Witness and decided Glover was the actor who could play the witness-partner without being a stooge.

"I needed somebody whose presence could absorb Mel. If Murtaugh is overplayed, Riggs becomes the only person in the movie. Danny is the rare actor who can sit still in a frame next to a flame thrower and be the thing you watch." — Richard Donner, Empire (2017)

The role had been written by Shane Black (see also) for an unnamed older actor; Glover, at forty, was younger than the page demanded but old enough to play the page. The decision to cast a Black actor in the role — not in Black's spec script — was Donner's. The film does not name race as plot, but the LAPD setting and the suburban Los Angeles family hearth read with specific weight in 1987 because of the casting.

What the performance does

Murtaugh is structurally the position rather than the arc — see Backbeats (Lethal Weapon) and The Murtaugh Family as Stakes. Glover's job is to be stable across the run while Riggs converts. He does not get an arc; he gets a recurring line (I'm too old for this shit) and a kitchen and a wife and a daughter, and the film hangs the climax on his lawn because Glover has made the lawn worth defending. The trailer-scene reaction shot at beat 13 — Murtaugh listens to Riggs's hollow-point speech, the camera holds on Glover's face, the eyes do the work — is the single most-cited Glover acting moment in the film and the moment the partnership becomes mutual.b13

"Danny Glover gives Roger Murtaugh the gravity of a real person. The character could have been a comic foil. Glover plays him as a man with a mortgage, a back injury, and a daughter old enough to date. The audience cares about the suicide cop because the family man cares." — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (1987)

The "I'm too old for this shit" tag was, by Glover's account, a Shane Black line he initially resisted, on the grounds that thirty seconds of repetition was a sitcom rhythm. Donner kept it. The line ran through all four films and is the most-quoted line in the franchise.

"I told Dick I didn't want to say it more than once. He said, 'Danny, that line is the franchise.' He was right." — Danny Glover, Vulture (2017 anniversary)

The lawn fight as bookend

The structural argument of the film is that Riggs has the arc and Murtaugh is the destination; the climax is staged on Murtaugh's grass because the grass is the stake. Glover's late-film performance is mostly reaction — watching Riggs choose to release Joshua, then firing simultaneously when Joshua draws.b35b b36 The climactic two-shot is a duet of equal weight despite the asymmetric arc, which is the film's structural payoff. See The Lawn Fight.

After Lethal Weapon

Glover reprised the role in Lethal Weapon 2 (1989), 3 (1992), and 4 (1998). The 1990 Charles Burnett film To Sleep With Anger is the prestige peak; Predator 2 (1990), Grand Canyon (1991), Bopha! (1993, Morgan Freeman directing), The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), Dreamgirls (2006), and Beyond the Lights (2014) are the post-LW range. He has been a steady political presence in U.S. labor and Pan-African solidarity movements since the early 1980s, and his production company Louverture Films, founded in 2005, focuses on film from the Global South.

Cross-Film Connections

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