Jared Wignall

People make fun of Steven Seagal Because he’s a pretentious douchebag. The actor Stephen Tobolowsky has what is perhaps my favorite Steven Seagal anecdote ever. In the 1996 flick “Glimmer Man”, Tobolowsky played a psychopathic serial killer. And Seagal had to kill this horrible villain, as any hero in any action flick ought to. But he suddenly decided he did not want to kill anyone anymore because killing people, even fake people in a movie, would be “bad for his karma”. Steven Seagal was big in his Tibetan Buddhism phase. And like all things in life, Seagal adopted it with the childlike enthusiasm only the simple-minded with a strictly rudimentary understanding of matters could ever hope to possess — Buddhism says killing is bad, I fake-kill people for a living, this is bad, so I cannot do it anymore. The director, in desperation, talked to Tobolowsky and asked him to not entertain Seagal’s delusions as the death scene had to be shot for the film to be concluded… And so, Stephen Tobolowsky explained to Steven Seagal that his character was “in pain” from his sinful and horrible life and that he was begging to be killed through his actions. And that if Seagal’s character killed his, the character’s soul could then be reincarnated in a better place and start anew and the world would be better for it. “You would be doing him a kindness,” he concluded Tobolowsky solemnly. After which Seagal did shoot the scene, and killed the villain.