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Sins of the Father

Father knows best, or at least that’s exactly how Lionel Luthor feels about his son Lex. John Glover talks about what makes the megalomaniacal business mogul tick...

By Paul Simpson
Smallville Magazine 2004 Yearbook



“Lionel isn’t paranoid,” John Glover maintains strongly. “Paranoid is when the feeling is blown out of shape. Lionel isn’t paranoid because he is so powerful--people are after him. He’s really in touch with reality.”

There’s an old cliché that stretches back to the early days of film that the people who play the worst villains are really the nicest of people in real life. It’s a rule that certainly applies to the senior member of the Luthor family on Smallville. Whether he’s chatting to the team in the Canadian production office, or catching up with the other cast members when he sees them after an absence of probably no more than a week, Glover always seems to have a smile on his face. It’s almost impossible to believe that the laughing, joking person who arrives at the Smallville set in Vancouver is the same man whose eyes almost flash fire as Lionel Luthor.

John Glover has a long and distinguished career as an actor on both stage and screen, often playing the villain--he was described by New Yorker critic Pauline Kael as ‘the prime rotter of 1980s films,’ who ‘without question, played more despicable and believable villains than any other actor in the business.’ As executive producer Al Gough points out, “John started out as a guest star and then expanded into a series regular. He’s really good--and a totally necessary character in the show.” Lionel only appears in the 1989 portion of the pilot, but his horror as he sees the effect of the meteor shower on Lex was as memorable as the meteor shower itself.

“The producers called me a few days before they were shooting the pilot and asked me if I would be interested in doing this,” Glover recalls. “Would I like to play Lex’s father? They said it was only a couple of scenes, but they thought they might have me back, depending on my schedule. So I read the script, and it looked interesting.”

Glover could immediately see the potential in playing a businessman who seemed disappointed in his son, and was very happy to be invited back to appear in eight episodes in the first season. “I was doing a lot of theater at the time,” he says. “I got an offer to do Athol Fugard’s new play Sorrows and Rejocings at the Second Stage Theater in New York when I was up in Vancouver doing the pilot. Miles and Al compiled a list of films that had South African accents in them for a crash course. It was difficult, because I remember having to fly out from New York to Vancouver for one day’s work on my day off. But it was very nice. The people in Vancouver are so wonderful--the people in the cast and the people in the crew. Al and Miles are terrific, too, and what they came up with, is just wonderful.”

Glover is delighted that the potential he could see three years earlier is still being developed. “It’s so exciting to see what they have had Lionel doing this year,” he says. “And surprising, too. With what’s happened during the third year, there’s no turning back.”

The actor agrees that Lionel always takes advantage of any situation--”He’s so sharp, and he can read people,” he points out. “He’s got a way to get to people, and to somehow get in. He took advantage of Lex’s relationship with Helen--although she was also working with Edge--and with his therapist.”

Glover is aware of some of the reasons for Lionel’s behavior toward Lex, and why he is so eagerly continuing his experiments into cloning that apparently began on the mysterious Level Three in season one’s Jitters, and were seen in action in the following year’s Accelerate. “There’s a desperation involved,” he confesses. “There’s a need for it. It’s all life and death! I was sitting having lunch in the New York Public Library when we were filming Legacy, and Tom was saying that he doesn’t like to know what’s coming up. Miles [Millar] said, ‘You don’t either, John, right?’ But I said that sometimes a secret could be quite good for an actor to know, and it could deepen the playing of it.” Not that Glover is going to say what that secret is, but he does indicate that “if Lex found out, it would mean a nice shifting of power that could be really interesting..”

He is delighted that there is such an open communication between the actors on the show and the producers. “They’re very collaborative, and they want to hear from us,” he noted. “They pay attention to what we’re doing. They listen to us, and we listen to them, and that’s why in season three, things are really good. We’re all learning how to work together. They’re using our assets, and it’s being written more around the acting. They’re finding out who we are, so it becomes what it’s supposed to be.”

He admits that he does share certain ‘Luthor’ tendencies, such as “a striving for perfection and a need for excellence,” even if he doesn’t display them in the same way as Lionel. Glover has enjoyed finding out some of the factors that have shaped Lionel, particularly in the scenes with Morgan Edge at the start of the third year. “They went through adolescence together,” he notes. “I was hoping that we’d go somewhere further with that, and it made me sad that Edge went, because I loved playing with Rutger Hauer. We had a good time together, and we surprised Al and Miles, and the writers, with the way the scene in the office between the two of us came off. I so hoped he’d be coming back and we’d be getting into some heavy scenes together.”

He hasn’t been disappointed by the revelations about Lionel’s past. “I hope they don’t go too far too soon,” he says fervently. “I’m having a great time, but I know that certain people have been killed off. This season has really started to get pretty heavy for Lionel--they’re not fooling around anymore. Before I was really just testing Lex to strengthen him and his mettle, but this is heavy stuff now. It’ll be interesting to see where it all ends up.”

Part of Lionel’s journey takes him to New York to visit Dr. Virgil Swann, the millionaire recluse astronomer who first told Clark about his parentage in season two’s Rosetta. Glover was delighted to be asked to film a scene with Christopher Reeve, who returned to the show to recreate the role for season three’s Legacy. “Every word that I try to find to describe the experience seems so trite,” Glover says. “It was astounding. It was amazing. I worked with Chris on stage back in 1980, long before his accident. I had seen him a couple of times backstage at plays, but I had no real communication with him since his accident.”

Glover flew from his home in Los Angeles to New York, arriving in the middle of a bitterly cold January winter, to film scenes at the New York Public Library on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. “Chris’s mind is just as sharp as a tack,” he comments. “He’s got a great sense of humor. He was focused and full of energy, and only interested in doing the best possible job with the part and the three scenes that he had as he could have done. I think he worked for about 12 hours that day. It was a long day for him, and he was tireless. He was always alert and even thinking ahead of everybody, because he’s directed himself. He had opinions about the best way to do things, which several times were used.”

Reeve also clearly enjoyed the chance to chat with a fellow actor; as he said at the time of Rosetta’s filming, working on Smallville was ‘a very welcome relief from politics and medical research.’ “He even wanted to talk theater, because he goes to the theater all the time,” Glover recalls. “I mentioned one thing I’d seen, and there was a little pause and then he said, ‘All right, what did you think?’ He’d seen it and he wanted to discuss it!”

Glover noticed that Reeve was at pains to “put everybody at ease. I had anticipation,” he admits, “because I didn’t know what to expect. I think everybody was a bit trepidatious. Just think about all the things Chris has been doing with spinal injuries. But he’s an artist--a true artist. When he’s acting, he’s acting and trying to make it as good as he possibly can.”

Reeve appeared in three scenes--one with Tom Welling, one with Glover, and then a final scene on his own. “Tom’s scene was first,” Glover explains, “so I didn’t get there until he had almost finished shooting it. We were filming in the big old rotunda of the Public Library, up on the third floor. It was just beautiful up there. When I arrived, they were shooting Tom’s coverage, so I watched him do his takes, and when he finished he said, ‘When I was offcamera, I felt much better.’ Chris was there, and I said to him, ‘Isn’t that always the way, Chris? You do some of your best work offcamera.’ Chris replied, ‘I’m just here living, and if somebody wants to come and photograph me while I’m doing it, that’s fine with me.’ Everybody paused, and then he went on, ‘At least, that’s what I try to strive for. I don’t always do it--I get nervous when the camera turns around on me!’”

Glover didn’t know he would be working with Reeve until about a week and a half before the camera rolled. “We shot it on Monday, and I didn’t get the script until Friday night,” he comments. “The full episode hadn’t been written when we filmed it, we just had those three scenes from the outline. I play with Chris, then Tom plays with him, but we don’t all play together. I kept saying to Greg Beeman, who was directing, ‘I don’t understand what’s going on?’ So he read me some of the information from the outline. It was all very much like life--you don’t know what’s going on, but it was very exciting.”

In the early seasons of the show, Clark and Lionel’s paths don’t cross that often, but each time they do, Lionel becomes increasingly interested in the strange young man whose adoption by the Kents he helped facilitate. “I’ve only had a couple of scenes here and there with Tom,” Glover agrees, “but they give Lionel such juicy stuff with everyone. I’ve had great stuff with Allison, and some incredible stuff with Michael and Annette. That time with Martha working for Lionel was quite wonderful, and Annette and I just loved playing together in that incredible little arc. I remember the scene with the piano, when I sit down and I’m playing the piano, while I talk to Lex after I’d just been with Martha--that was a lot of fun. They’re the main people they let me play with, but I had a nice scene with Sam in Exodus when he gets me to change my focus, while Tom comes in and steals the key. That was fun, because I’d never gotten to play with Sam before.”

As far as Glover is concerned, Lionel was well aware of what was going on in the LuthorCorp jet at the end of the second season. “Sure, I did,” he says. “Lionel’s kind of like God, don’t you think?” Or perhaps more like the Devil--a role that Glover played in the short-lived series Brimstone a few years ago. “They are very similar,” he notes. “The Devil was God’s favorite, don’t forget.” He gives a wry smile and asks rhetorically, “I wonder why I keep playing such intelligent people?”


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