Is Mr. Glass The Evil Professor X? Samuel L. Jackson & The Cast Of ‘Glass’ Weigh In
Samuel L. Jackson has played some bad motherf*ckers on screen, but who is the baddest? In his first of several films for 2019, Glass, Hollywood’s most bankable star returns as the titular villain Elijah Price, aka Mr Glass, whom we were introduced to in 2000’s Unbreakable. It’s been 18 years since the brittle boned malefactor with a high IQ was locked away for orchestrating the deaths of hundreds in a train crash just to confirm the presence of his polar opposite, an unbreakable man named David Dunn, played by Bruce Willis. In the years since his imprisonment a new entity has made itself known, The Beast, one of several personalities living inside Kevin Wendall Crumb, wonderfully played by James McAvoy. Audiences became familiar with The Beast in 2016’s Split, where director M. Night Shyamalan continued his exploration of a world filled with heroes and villains walking among us waiting to be discovered.
In Glass Elijah Price, The Beast and The Overseer are united for the first time in a special detention center for the criminally insane. Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson) has taken great pains to keep all three under wraps to study their secrets while keeping many of her own. But Price doesn’t believe in coincidences and believes the Beast has been brought to his prison to help him fulfill his destiny.
Samuel L. Jackson is pitch perfect once again as Mr. Glass. Compared to other villains in his repertoire, Mr. Glass doesn’t have the resources of the murderous oligarch Valentine from Kingsman: The Secret Service or the ruthless fealty of the overseer Steven from Django Unchained, but Jackson is confident that Mr. Glass will make his mark just the same.
“Elijah’s great because he’s brilliant and even in his brilliance there’s this fragility that he has and his outlook on what the world is, is very different from everybody else’s,” says Jackson. “As brilliant as he is he can’t fix himself in ways that doesn’t allow the physical world to injure him. But he’s learned to live with pain and manage pain in a way that’s made him even stronger than those two guys that he’s manipulating.”
Glass is an ambitious completion to a trilogy no one saw coming, except for its director M. Night Shyamalan, who came to prominence after the mind melting twist of his 1999 film, The Sixth Sense, which also starred Bruce Willis as a therapist named Malcolm Crowe counseling a young boy on his conversations with dead people. The twist ending—that Crowe was himself dead all along—established Night as a force to be reckoned with in Hollywood.
“The original outline for Unbreakable included almost all three movies in its entirety, but it was too much, it was too muscular for me,” says Night. “If you put Split into Unbreakable you have no time to do any character stuff. I realized I had to pull him out, then many years later did the origin story of The Beast.”
Unbreakable’s strong comic-book DNA was established long before Samuel L. Jackson became the common denominator in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Nick Fury, but there is still some deja vu triggered at the idea of a genius in a wheelchair seeking out enhanced beings in the world. Is Mr. Glass the evil counterpart to Charles Xavier, aka Professor X?
“That’s a good parallel,” says McAvoy, who has played Professor X in three X-Men movies. “Because a lot of people have made the parallel because they’re geniuses and they’re in wheelchairs, but they are actually seeking out super dudes and super ladies. So I guess he is the dastardly version of Professor X in some ways.”
However, Jackson and his other colleagues beg to differ, insisting that Elijah is rooted in something broader with a higher purpose.
“Eh, no. He’s somebody else,” Jackson says dismissively. “He was trying to find the David Dunn character in Unbreakable. ‘I’m this way so there must be somebody on the opposite end.’ And once he found him...at the end of that film he gets locked up. For those 18 years that he’s been in there they’ve tried a lot of things to break him and chemically handcuff him. But he’s too smart for that. He’s been keeping up with David Dunn and he knows what’s going on on the outside. Two weeks before this movie starts he finds out about this Beast dude and he knows he’s out there. So he can either break out and get that guy, or get these two guys together…but they delivered them to him. So all of a sudden his quest is to find an ally to be the evil strength to his weakness and see if good is more powerful than evil.”
“I think there was an archetype of the intellect in a wheelchair that was kind of pervasive in comic books. Someone whose body is not their weapon. Their mind is,” says Night. “It’s more from that archetype. It wasn't directly from Xavier to Elijah. It’s so beautiful that he’s a marginalized person, someone who was born with this disorder and he’s just trying to make sense of it. Ultimately he’s trying to ask the questions ‘Was I a mistake? Was I an aberration’ and his theory that comic books are based on reality includes himself. And if he’s right, then he’s important. He has some place in all of this. And he’s trying to prove it so he can prove his own place in the world.”
But the biggest difference between the film version of Professor X and Elijah is Jackson, who fuses the inebriated self righteousness of Lazarus from Black Snake Moan, the calculating violence of Jules Winnfield from Pulp Fiction with the near supernatural vision of Star Wars Mace Windu into one unforgettable villain.
“I just think Elijah Price stands on his own,” says Sara Paulson. “I just think he is an extraordinary character and fully realized by Sam in a way that’s pretty special and hard for me to compare him to anyone.”
Fans will get their say when Glass opens in theaters nationwide on January 18.
