Ready to shoot

The 'Lethal Weapon' star gets angry when accused of making propaganda for his friend the socialist president. But why is this activist reluctant to help Barack Obama win the White House?

Cole Moreton meets Danny Glover

Barack Obama needs help. Struggling to cope with the impact of his former pastor, the rabid Reverend Jeremiah Wright, he needs support from a man of integrity. A man trusted by voters of all colours. A man they have seen blow bad guys away with his great big gun, then say something really funny.

Danny Glover could be that man. The co-star of the hugely popular Lethal Weapon movies is also a political activist who has spent his whole life campaigning for change. His active support could deliver votes to Obama. But if he were to come out against the presidential hopeful ahead of this week's two primaries, he could blow those votes away. So what is he going to do?

"What does it mean to have a black president?" asks Glover, rhetorically, slurping his way into a huge bowl of chopped fruit in a London hotel. "Does it mean anything other than having a white president, or another male? Does it mean anything more?"

Obama clearly hasn't convinced the actor, who backed John Edwards for the Democratic nomination at first because he "didn't talk about 'change' in a vacuum". Like Obama? He nods. "A campaign is built on certain principles that get you elected. A movement is based on how we really envision the nuts and bolts of change." So far Obama has built a campaign, he says. "We need a movement."

As for Hillary Clinton, she's "a career politician". He fears the choice between a black man and a woman is not as revolutionary as it seems. "Does it mean we are seduced, once again?" By people who look different but turn out to be just the same old kinds of politicians in disguise, is what he means.

Glover's taste is for something stronger. He's playing a leading role in his own international drama right now. Hollywood hustlers would pitch the plot this way: wicked Latin American dictator - likes a uniform, you know the stereotype - seizes power in an oil- rich country and sets out to spread revolutionary socialism, threatening liberty, freedom and the American way. Who will stop him? Enter Danny Glover, action hero. Great casting. Yay! Eat lead, red menace! But hang on, what's this? Danny's shaking the bad guy's hand. They're hugging. Oh no! Now they're making a film together ...

"The President and I are friends," Glover says of Hugo Chvez, leader of Venezuela and scourge of the White House. Chvez calls George Bush "the devil" and is so determined to resist US influence that he has set up his own film studios to overthrow "the dictatorship of Hollywood". So what is he doing, hiring a Hollywood legend? And why is Glover interested?

"It's a business deal," he says, looking like an executive abroad, in his open-necked, pastel blue shirt and olive-coloured suit. Glover is 61 years old now, and the familiar moustache and cropped hair are dusted with white, but he still moves with the slow, angular elegance that made him the perfect foil to the manic intensity of his Lethal Weapon co-star, Mel Gibson. He speaks slowly, too, as if supernaturally calm (or jet-lagged) - until asked about Chvez.

"If you get into attacks on me about how I'm a tool of propaganda, and all that, come on!" says Glover, his drawl now a bark that startles a waiter in this quiet Bloomsbury hotel. "That's so sophomoric. That's so juvenile."

Sorry, but they're not my words. A Republican senator slated him for being "part of the Chvez propaganda machine". He has also been compared to Lenin's "useful idiots", liberal Westerners who supported the Soviet regime without knowing the full story. "I can't even respond to that, you know what I'm saying? This is a business relationship."

Not quite just that - although the deal, as he describes it, is a simple one. The government of Venezuela is investing millions of dollars in a film about Toussaint L'Ouverture, leader of the slave revolt in Haiti in 1791. Glover is about to start shooting it. The hope is for a profit, using local skills where possible so that much of the money stays in the national economy. "It does look like a good deal."

But then you have to stir in the politics. Chvez is loved by his supporters, the Chavistas. His opponents loathe the nationalisation of industry and the high taxes imposed on foreign oil companies. The US sees him as a security threat. This particular individual, I say, attracts strong emotions. "The individual and the government were elected by a majority of the people," insists Glover, agitated. "They do not control the press, they are not authoritative in that way, they do not censor what people have to say in that country ..."

Condoleezza Rice has attacked Chvez's record on press freedoms and human rights. (To which the Venezuelan Foreign Minister responded: "How many prisoners have they got in Guantnamo Bay?") So will Chvez tell Glover what to put in his film? "Huh?" I repeat the question. "No! I have a business relationship with them. They saw the script."