AVC: Is it true you went into acting because you hurt yourself and had to take a break from your dance career?
SG: Yes, that's true.
AVC: Had you ever considered acting before that?
SG: When I was little, I had a feeling that I was going to end up being an actress. I spent a lot of time alone, I was a very shy girl, and I would pretend I was telling someone about this new role that I got. I would just talk about it: "I'm doing this movie…" or "I'm playing this girl…" I never took any acting classes and I never went to school for it, because I was dancing all the time. But then I broke one of my toes, and I had really bad tendonitis in my heels already, so I lost all mobility on one of my feet. I danced on it broken for four months. The way I broke it was, I had started taking this little acting class, and I was reading a play, and the phone rang, and I scooped all the pages off the floor, and I ran and jumped over this camel saddle we had in our living room, and I ran right into the fireplace.
AVC: Did you say a "camel saddle"?
SG: Yes. [Laughs.]
AVC: Why did you have a camel saddle in your living room?
SG: My grandpa was a world traveler. He was a pilot in the Air Force, and he picked up these camel saddles, and we had them in our living room. [Laughs.] But I jumped over one, and I had this script in my hand, and I couldn't see what I was running into, and that's how I smashed my foot. So it was actually the play that got me in trouble in the first place. It was meant to be.
AVC: How did you prepare yourself to switch from dancing to acting?
SG: It was one of the most painful things I've ever done, because when you're raised as a ballet dancer, you think that's the only thing people notice about you. That's all I ever did. And it was terrifying, I thought "People won't even recognize me, people won't know how to describe me any more, people won't know how to say, 'Summer Glau, that girl who dances…'" Because that's who I always was. No one understood why I did it at the time. I was always the kid on scholarship, I was a soloist with my company, I'd been working with the symphony since I was 14. It was probably the craziest thing I'd ever done. I just had a feeling that it was going to work out for me. And the thing about being a ballet dancer is, there comes a point when you have to decide "How much am I willing to sacrifice to keep dancing?" And I knew that it was going to be extremely difficult if I wanted to move into a big company. It was going to be extremely difficult to have the career I dreamt about as a little girl. It's so competitive; it's a lifestyle—not just a job. You have to completely give yourself over to it.
When I was 19, it was a turning point for me—I was in so much pain every day, and I came into L.A. for the summer, and I had a friend who was dancing at the theater, and I thought, "Well, I can still dance—I just can't put on my shoes, I can't wear my pointe shoes all day long. So I came out here thinking it would be a getaway for the summer, and I ended up auditioning for jobs and booking them right away. I still danced. I danced tango for a year until I got some acting work. And then that was it. It was the right fit for me. I moved my things out here and went for it.
AVC: Do you keep up on ballet at all?
SG: I still dance. I still dance, probably three times a week, unless I'm working on a crazy job, and then I just don't have any free time at all. Right now, I definitely dance. I don't do ballet, because for me, it's kind of hard to look at myself dancing when I don't do it all day long, every day. There's this certain caliber of dancing I was striving for when I was younger, and it's very hard for me to go back and just do it for fun. But I take all other kinds of classes: I take jazz classes, modern classes, and I love doing that instead of going to the gym. The gym is not very much fun.
VC: You worked in commercials, but your one-shot on Angel was your first actual TV role, wasn't it?
SG: It was. It's so funny, too. I was out of town, I missed the dance audition; Joss had actually held the dance audition first, before the acting audition. He wanted a dancer, but I missed it. I'm a good ballet dancer, and I would have done well in the audition, but I missed it! And then I went in and read for him, and it was the biggest audition I ever had—and I thought he didn't like me. I thought he was making fun of me, and when I left the room, I said to myself, "Well, that's someone I'll never see again." And then he ended up casting me without seeing me dance, and the choreographer panicked. I had to dance Giselle, and that's a role I didn't even get to dance in real life. It's one of the most elaborate in classical ballet, and he just told me, "Well, I just hope you don't have wooden legs." Sure enough, it all worked out. I did it, and the choreographer was relieved that I was a true ballet dancer. That was my first experience. Joss gave me my first guest-star on a TV show, he gave me my first series regular on a TV show, and he gave me my first lead in a film.
