EXCLUSIVE: GLASS Star Spencer Treat Clark Details Working With M. Night Shyamalan & More - SPOILERS

With M. Night Shyamalan's Glass arriving on 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray last week, I was granted an exclusive opportunity to sit down with returning star Spencer Treat Clark to chat about his return as Joseph Dunn in the long-awaited conclusion to Shyamalan's beloved Eastrail 177 trilogy.
 

This time, we jumped right into spoiler-territory and revisited some of his key scenes from the film, including the big finale where Joseph Dunn (Spencer Treat Clark) is forced to bear witness as Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson) and her mercenaries mercilessly kill his father (Bruce Willis) as well as Mr. Glass (Samuel L. Jackson) and The Beast (James McAvoy).

ROHAN PATEL: Joseph is the first person in the movie to sort of get a sense that something may be a little off about Ellie and the facility. What do you think it is about him that immediately makes him a little wary of the whole situation? 

SPENCER TREAT CLARK: Well, I think, from the beginning, my character has always known that there's this whole larger universe does, in fact, exist.

I was 10 years old in Unbreakable and my character's a little bit younger, so this has been his reality - the fact that superheroes and supervillains exist - since he was a kid, so I think Joseph already thinks in those terms and is suspicious of the world around him. He's willing to accept that there are conspiracies and superheroes.

It's more that Joseph is just aware that these things are real and he's willing to believe and, when Ellie Staple comes into their lives, I think that it's an immediate red flag for him.

ROHAN: Tragically, Joseph has now lost both of his parents. While there's been no word of a potential sequel yet, what do you think comes next for him? 

SPENCER: Oh man, this is so cool. I haven't really done a lot of press about the movie after it came out, so this is really the first time I'm being asked these questions and to be honest, they aren't really questions I've had a chance to ask myself yet.

I'd love to sit down with Night and see what his opinions are about these things, but knowing Joseph, and having spent some time with him, I think it's genuinely insinuated that they're now exposing the whole world to the fact that there are superheroes and I think Joseph, as somebody who has always believed, would want to be at the forefront of that. I mean, at the end of the movie, they're basically unleashing, to the world, this whole universe that Joseph believed in that nobody else did.

So yeah, I'd imagine that, for him, it's something he's always believed in, but, also, it's his father's legacy and Joseph has such a profound love for his father. I think that he'd probably want to see this as his life's work and that he's doing justice to his father by making this secret known to the world, but I'm still curious to hear what Night's feelings are about that. 

ROHAN: I really loved your scene with him at the beginning, added some much-needed levity to a film that was understandably going to be dark and dour.

I remember talking to you, Anya Taylor-Joy and Sarah Paulson back in January and it was very clear that all three of you had a really great experience working with M. Night Shyamalan and I've noticed that Samuel L. Jackson, Bruce Willis, and James McAvoy have shared similar sentiments. 

Could you speak on what it is about Night that makes actors want to work with him over and over again? It really seems like he brings out the best in a lot of his performers. 

SPENCER: Yeah, it's funny. I feel like I could speak to it as one of his actors, but also as him being my boss. 

It's not just him having these big expectations from his actors, but from everyone around him. He creates an environment that people really want to perform and do their best and it's through encouragement and nurturing and also high expectations, it's not through this sort of fear. It's like the ability to know that you can take risks and put yourself out there and that he's a willing collaborator and that you have him as your biggest advocate and I think that's true for everyone I know. There's so many young people working for him in his production company and everyone holds him to such high esteem.

I really felt, that even after having all this history with him for the past two decades, there are a lot of other people as well that have had similar experiences with him, so I feel very lucky to have gotten to come back and work for him again.

ROHAN: Yeah, everyone I've spoken to just loves working with him and Sarah was very excited with just the prospect about getting to working with him again down the line. 

SPENCER: Yeah, he's so good at what he does and he's just a genuine person. His family is very important to him and we got to spend time with his family during filming and they were at the premiere.

Night just treats everyone that works for him so well. Every week, on set, we'd get together at a restauarant or bar and just hang out after work and that's really important to him. Having really good catering on set is another thing that is really common in Night's productions because he likes to feed everybody really well. He takes really good care of us and it just puts us in a really good environment to make something great.   

ROHAN: At the end of the film, it's you, Casey, and Mrs. Price that have joined forces and released the footage, but before it starts to go viral, there's a really subtle joke in there when you're talking about how long it'll take to go viral. It's a very natural sense of humor that Night tends to have in his films and you convey it so well.

This is a dark film, but you're basically in charge of bringing a few fleeting lighter moments. Is humor something that comes naturally to you as a performer or did you have a different approach to those scenes?

SPENCER: It's fun! That's one of the awesome things about TV, is that you can go and explore all these different aspects of a character that you may not get to explore in film because of a runtime.

It's fun. Night always injects humor into all of his movies, even with serious subject matter like Split and Glass. There's always these moments of levity. I feel like that's really important. It was so fun. It was so fun. That scene with Bruce and Night in the shop and I really wish we could have taken that premise further because it was so funny.

It's so important, especially in a movie like that, for it not to be so heavy at all times and you know especially working with Bruce, we also have such a cool relationship, having known each other for so long that it's fun - he does, in some ways, feel like a father figure to me, - and so it's nice to have that time and rib each other a little bit,

ROHAN: The movie opens so heavy and then there's just that scene that seems out of place, but works in context and is just so funny once it plays out. 

SPENCER: That scene, like many of Night's stuff, is a oner - it's all from one angle. I think maybe he used the first half and the second half of two different takes because it has to cut to the computer screen at one point, but for the most part, we just got to shoot that scene all the way through. It was pretty fun, did it a whole bunch of times and tried a few different things. 

ROHAN: You've known Bruce Willis since you were a teenager basically, how has your relationship evolved with him over the years and what was it like filming his death scene along with the demises of Samuel L. Jackson and James McAvoy's respective characters?

SPENCER: That finale scene was tough. It's one scene, but it was two weeks of filming outdoors and the weather was starting to get pretty cold, and it's an amazing job by Night that he was able to make it feel like one continuous scene because we really broke it up into so many different elements and we shot in so many different ways.

It's really a testament to Night, that for the audience, he was able to make it feel so cohesive and to be constantly reminding us of where we are in the scene and where we are in the scope of the movie and then, that scene, when David Dunn dies, I think that there was a lot of emotion that was wrapped up in it for me because the fact that we were back on the set and it was Bruce's last day and it was getting towards the very end of production and everything is sort of coming to an end... I'm so glad that we - Night did try to film as much stuff as possible in sequence - I'm just glad we didn't film that scene at the beginning of filming because I just don't think it would have necessarily had the same impact.

I got to know my character a little bit better again, but also, just the fact, that it was sort of the summation of this experience as well, so in that regard a little bit of real life got to bleed into that scene. The emotion had all built up after a month or two, so I was never really worried. You have scenes that you worry about, that keep you up at night beforehand, but I was just never really worried about that scene, I always knew that emotion would be there. It's all on the page. It's all on seeing Bruce lying there, on the ground, in his costume, so it wasn't really hard to evoke the emotion necessary.

ROHAN: You had a really great scene after they kill David and you're confronting the guards and it's just a very authentic reaction to such a sudden tragedy and it's just so heartbreaking.  

SPENCER: Oh yeah, I remember I pushed the guard and that was not scripted. The poor guy had no idea it was coming. I felt bad, I mean he was huge, he was like 6'6" and a tank, but I think it maybe surprised him, but he stays in character.

I think it was like the third take in, I didn't do it the first time, but yeah, it just felt like a really natural reaction to what had just happened. 

ROHAN: It cuts to the score so everything you say is inaudible, did you have dialogue in that scene or was it mostly improvised?  

SPENCER: Oh yeah, there was a little bit of dialogue there, but it's filming through the puddle, I think that you're looking up through the puddle, so I think that was sort of how it how it plays in the movie. It's sort of how they auditioned did. And you know you have that long speech between The Beast and Casey Cooke, so they didn't want to have like three different segments of each character dying.

Night distinguished each little piece and I was really please about how it turned out. 

M. Night Shyamalan brings together the narratives of two of his standout originals—2000’s Unbreakable, from Touchstone, and 2016’s Split, from Universal—in one explosive, all-new comic-book thriller: Glass.

Following the conclusion of Split, Glass finds Dunn pursuing Crumb’s superhuman figure of The Beast in a series of escalating encounters, while the shadowy presence of Price emerges as an orchestrator who holds secrets critical to both men.