Some years ago, he heard a rumor that a movie featuring Lando was in the works. “I told my agent, ‘I wanna be Lando,’ ” but his agent didn’t like his chances. “That was exactly what I needed to hear,” Glover told me, “because I’m the person who’s not supposed to make it, so much so that I don’t think people recognize where I came from and what I’ve done. At a certain point, it does look easy. I do sometimes look like a Mary Sue. I was like, ‘Oh, okay, cool.’ I studied, I watched the movies a lot, and I killed it, because I was ready.”
Glover called his father as soon as he landed the role and told him, “Yo, you’re not gonna believe what I’m going to be doing next year.” The best part, he said, was bringing his father to the set on the Canary Islands, where the production team had built an entire city. Ron Howard, Solo: A Star Wars Story’s director, told me that Glover was so trained and focused that he didn’t always have to use a stunt double. “I loved his take on Lando and his passion for the character,” Howard said, noting how deeply Glover gets the different ways the character can entertain an audience. “It’s charm, it’s humor, it’s an intelligence, there’s a roguishness he understands without selling out the character’s traits,” he said. “You’d be a fool not to engage him creatively.”
