Bulletproof!
Esquire|August 2017

Starring international man of mystery Karl Glusman. And featuring suits to carry you through any situation, from client meetings to dodging assassins.

Jon Roth
Bulletproof!

In acting, they say you have to commit—to a gesture, a characterization—the point being there’s no time to half-ass anything. Every move counts. Karl Glusman could give a master class. You can see it on camera in movies like Nocturnal Animals, but he’s been going all in since college, when he switched his major to acting on the strength of one public-speaking award. And at nineteen, when he realized this could be his future, he thought nothing of moving cross country from Portland, Oregon, to New York City to go and get it.

What came next was a riff on the story of any starving striver. He joined an actors’ studio and spent hours watching taped performances in the library at Lincoln Center. He was an elf at Macy’s Santa Land and played a junkie for med students in training. He slept in a crawl space above a toilet in Chelsea with a curtain for a wall. He felt like a cliché. “In this business, it’s about how you’re introduced,” he says. “How do you start if no one’s going to give you a break?” Then he got one. And in the grand tradition of actors like Sly Stallone and Jackie Chan, it was a very adult debut.

This story is from the August 2017 edition of Esquire.

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This story is from the August 2017 edition of Esquire.

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