Scott Glenn doesn’t like being called a badass. He trains with members of SEAL Team Six and says, “I know what badass really is.” And while we respect that, the man is 75 years old and trains with SEAL Team Six, so his ass is plenty bad. He open-water spear fishes, which requires him to punch sharks. He rides motorcycles. He does martial arts with knives. He only stopped ice-climbing because his doctor told him to. He stopped skydiving at the request of his wife—but he might pick it up again.

Were you active growing up?

“When I was a kid, I had scarlet fever. I wasn’t supposed to have survived it. When I got out of bed, my bones were so soft that they kind of bent. I had a slight limp for probably three years after. We’re talking about age 9. So before that happened, I wasn’t a physical kid at all. Scarlet fever attacks all of your senses, so they don’t let you read. You’re left alone with your imagination. And I remember having all these fantasies and telling myself: When I get out of this bed, I’m gonna make all these things come true. So it made me physical. After I recovered, if somebody was playing pickup softball or football, I just said, “Me,” and got the shit kicked out of me. The bully who beat up everybody in class—I’d fight him!”

So what do you do now?

“One of the sports I do—my wife thinks I’m nuts—is open-water spear fishing, what we call blue-water hunting. We get in a boat and we go offshore, normally about 30 miles. So when you jump off the boat, there are no reefs and the bottom is no longer fifty or a hundred feet, it’s thousands of feet. It’s sort of like being in outer space. And it’s all free diving. No tanks or anything like that. Statistically, they call it the third most-dangerous sport in the world.

And I do motorcycle touring, and hiking. I used to be an ice climber, but I don’t do that anymore because it puts too much vibration on one of my shoulders. What I do more than anything is kata, basically martial arts, with a heavy, very sharp knife. I’ll do it in slow motion, going from right hand to left hand. You don’t want to do it too fast, because what I’m holding is potentially lethal.”

So you’ve done skiing, skydiving, motorcycle racing, ice climbing, open-water spear fishing. Is there anything I’m missing?

“Um…well—are you a member of PETA?”

I am not a member of PETA.

“I hunt. And I don’t hunt for trophies. We’ve lived for over two years on an elk I shot about two and a half, three years ago. And I won’t shoot another one until we’re done with that. But I’ll go out again at four in the morning with my buddies and do that.”

So the only activities you’ve stopped are ice climbing and skydiving?

“Skydiving is something I might—I promised my wife and kids I’d put that on hold for six years or something. But that time’s run out.”

Have you been hurt more doing these things, or doing the stunts in your movies?

“I’ve never been bitten by a shark, though God knows I had to poke a lot of them in the nose. I’ve never really been seriously hurt skiing. But in Urban Cowboy I sat on a bull in the let-out gate, and the bull was in the gate for way longer than its Pavlovian response tells it it’s gonna be in there, and it decided to just get out while I was on it. I got a concussion and a cracked collarbone from that. A horse came over backwards on me in Silverado and broke my wrist. I was doing a TV show and I broke the knuckles in my right hand once, slamming my fist into a wall that was supposed to be breakaway, and they never replaced it with the stuff that was supposed to break away.”