Karl Glusman

KARL GLUSMAN IN NEW YORK, APRIL 2015. COAT: LANVIN. STYLING: KARL TEMPLER. COSMETICS: DIOR, INCLUDING DIORSKIN NUDE AIR HEALTHY GLOW ULTRA-FLUID SERUM FOUNDATION. HAIR: JAMES PECIS/D+V MANAGEMENT. MAKEUP: PETER PHILIPS FOR CHRISTIAN DIOR. MANICURE: MEGUMI YAMAMOTO FOR DIOR VERNIS/SUSAN PRICE NYC. SET DESIGN: STEFAN BECKMAN/EXPOSURE NY. PRODUCER: SARA ZION FOR PRODN/ ART+COMMERCE. PRODUCTION MANAGER: ASHLEY SCOTT FOR PRODN/ ART+COMMERCE. RETOUCHING: GLOSS STUDIO. DIGITAL TECHNICIAN: NICHOLAS ONG. PHOTO ASSISTANTS: SIMON ROBERTS, HUAN NGUYEN, MARU TEPPEI, AND DEAN PODMORE. STYLING ASSISTANTS: MELISSA LEVY AND ALEKSANDRA KOJ. HAIR ASSISTANT: ADLENA DIGNAM. MAKEUP ASSISTANTS: EMIKO AYABE AND TALY WAISBERG. SET DESIGN ASSISTANTS: MAX ZINSER AND YONATAN ZONSZEIN. PRODUCTION ASSISTANTS: KAIA BALCOS AND JOHN DANIEL POWERS. SPECIAL THANKS: SOHO LOFTS.

Shortly after getting what Karl Glusman considered to be his big break—a part in Roland Emmerich’s Stonewall—he dislocated his shoulder in a bicycle accident. He had been buffing up to play a closeted football player in the film, set against the 1969 riots. “I lost it. In an act of desperation, I sent Roland a video of me doing one-handed push-ups and demanding that I keep the job,” Glusman says. The tenacity paid off. The 27-year-old Oregon-raised actor held on to the part and is subsequently putting together an impressive body of work, nabbing roles in Nicolas Winding Refn‘s The Neon Demon and Gaspar Noé’s erotic drama Love, which recently premiered at Cannes. His turn as a man caught between his current and past lover required that he quite literally expose himself—and do full-frontal, in 3-D. “There was no script. There was an eight-page outline. I improvised every line of dialogue, which is an actor’s dream. Also a nightmare,” Glusman says. “And Gaspar says something like, ‘I want the audience to love you! You have to sell them the moon!’ No pressure.”

Glusman came to acting in college after buying a DVD of A Streetcar Named Desire. “I guess I had known who Marlon Brando was,” he says. “But I fell in love with that guy.” He then dropped out as a business major at Portland State University to study the Meisner technique at the William Esper Studio in New York, debuting on Broadway in Golden Boy in 2012. Some of the directors he’d love to work with one day: Jacques Audiard, Martin Scorsese, and Michael Haneke, who he thinks is “the bee’s knees.” “I think the really great movies and plays are ones that haunt you or disturb you,” he explains. “I want to be a part of movies that I want to see.”

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