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For much of his Hollywood career, Frank Grillo has been a man of action: good guys, bad guys, brawlers, soldiers, and – when he needs to be – even a dancer.
But after decades of movie and TV work, the New York City native is having a bit of a moment at age 60: He’s a key player in James Gunn’s revamped DC movie universe as steely government operative Rick Flag Sr., appearing in the summer blockbuster “Superman” and Season 2 of HBO Max's “Peacemaker” (first episode streaming now, then weekly on Thursdays). And Grillo returns for another season as Bill Bevilaqua, a gangland thorn in the iconic Sylvester Stallone’s side in Season 3 of Taylor Sheridan’s “Tulsa King” (streaming Sept. 21).
Is he the Nick Fury of the new DCU? Grillo chuckles, and brings up the fact that his “Tulsa King” costar Samuel L. Jackson, who plays Marvel's Fury, is getting his own “NOLA King” spinoff. “He’s in the whole world of Stallone,” Grillo says. “I actually might go jump over on that series and have a crossover with Nick Fury. It's a very incestuous thing here.”
Like Jackson, Grillo’s a veteran of franchise universes – he also had a too-short stint as the villainous Crossbones in the Marvel movies. But so far his DC journey has been great, he says. “I feel very fortunate even to just jump in ‘Superman’ in a glorified cameo (and) be that connective tissue in this embryonic phase" of Gunn's rejuvenated DCU.
“Unlike the other superhero world I was in, I look forward to hanging around and just serving these guys however I can.”
In “Superman,” Grillo’s character was one of the government types contending with the powerful Man of Steel (David Corenswet) and nefarious plans to eliminate the good-hearted Kryptonian concocted by big bad Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult).
The new season of “Peacemaker” is set several months later. Flag’s now in charge of the A.R.G.U.S., an agency keeping tabs on metahumans, and he’s investigating an interdimensional portal similar to Lex’s involving Peacemaker (John Cena). Flag also wants to bring in Peacemaker, who murdered his son, Rick Jr. (Joel Kinnaman), on a mission abroad in Gunn’s 2021 film “The Suicide Squad.”
Rick Sr. faces “the stages of grief and revenge and all of that stuff” at the same time he’s “going through different responsibilities and job titles,” says Grillo, who first appeared as the character in last year’s HBO Max animated series “Creature Commandos.“
"You either have to let revenge go and accept and move on, or you implode, and that's the end of you. We don't know what's going to happen with Rick Flag. But revenge is only interesting for a little while, and then it's got to come to a head.”
Grillo also was taken aback when he was in this season’s opening-credits “Peacemaker” dance sequence, a follow-up to the brilliantly bonkers fan-favorite opening from Season 1 in 2022.
“I show up and it is like a Broadway production, brother − I'm not kidding you,” Grillo says. “I panicked, man. Give me a motorcycle, I'll jump on it. Speedboat? I'm in, I can figure that out. This frightened me. And once we started doing it, forget about learning the steps by yourself. Now you've got to do it in sync with 30 people.”
On the second day of the dance shoot, Grillo was pranked by Gunn, who put a picture of the actor as his 1990s “Guiding Light” character Hart Jessup on a big screen in the background and had the crew wear “Hart Jessup” T-shirts. “That just was like, 'Welcome to the family,'” Grillo says. “And so that day in the dance, I had a little pep in my step.”
As much as he loves working with Gunn, Grillo also adores filming scenes with Stallone for "Tulsa King." It blew his mind when Stallone “called me out of the blue” and asked him to play Bill, a Kansas City mobster. Rocky and Rambo meant the world to Grillo growing up, and now “we've become peers," says Grillo, who is scheduled to begin production on the show's fourth season in October. "We're on the phone all the time, exchanging ideas about how to make the scenes better. He's one of the greatest human beings I've ever met in my life.”
Grillo figures he "must have done something good in the universe to have these very different people who are exceptional believe in me. And even at my age, there's still an 8-year-old boy inside of me that's looking up going, ‘Thank you.' I've always kind of been under the radar and doing cool little low-budget stuff, (and) it's starting to kind of ball together and come into a place for me creatively that I've not experienced."
He says his pal Liam Neeson had his own similar moment at age 56 with "Taken." "It changed the trajectory of his entire life and career – and bank account," Grillo says. "I stopped counting how many times the Earth goes around the sun, and I'm just leaning into the daily excitement of it all.”
And when you’re an important cog in the DC universe as Grillo is now, you never know when you’ll be needed. When Grillo mentioned to Gunn at the “Peacemaker” premiere Aug. 13 that he wanted to bring Rick Flag’s white hair from “Creature Commandos” back for Season 3, the filmmaker balked.
“He goes, ‘Nope, you're not.’ And I go, ‘Why?’ He goes, ‘Because we’ve got something else coming, and you’ve got to look the same,’” Grillo says. "So something's percolating. And I love that he doesn't tell me, because I'm a blabbermouth."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Frank Grillo is a bona fide action hero. But he panicked on John Cena's 'Peacemaker'
Reporting by Brian Truitt, USA TODAY / USA TODAY
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
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