SOA: Tommy Flanagan's 'Glasgow Smile' Isn't The Work Of The Makeup Department
"Goodness gracious," you may well have said to yourself, as many people often do while rewatching old episodes of "Sons of Anarchy." "Goodness gracious, that Chibs Telford, as played by Scottish character actor Tommy Flanagan, sure does get consistently precise prosthetic work done on his face week to week. Incredible," you may have continued to yourself, "that the effects team even went in and applied the prosthetics to Flanagan retroactively in every movie and television show that he appeared in during the years leading up to this." That's the sort of thing that people say to themselves, right? Whatever, it's rhetorical. The point is that you're rhetorically wrong.
That isn't to say that the makeup department on the beloved drama wasn't pulling their weight. It's more the fact that they didn't have to, at least not with Chibs's distinctive facial scars. Those were sort of a bring-something-from-home situation for Flanagan, who's been rocking them since his early 20s. He even has a sick explanation for how he got them: In a knife fight outside a bar in Glasgow, the way that man was meant to get scars all over his face.
Tommy Flanagan didn't need makeup for his Sons of Anarchy scars
Tommy Flanagan, whose credits stretch back to the early '90s and whose not-too-shabby Hollywood debut was in a mildly successful flick called "Braveheart," has always been easy to spot on a crowded screen thanks to his trademark Glasgow Smile. He went into detail explaining its origin story on a decidedly NSFW interview on Michael Rosenbaum's "Inside Of You" podcast.
"I went to a knife fight without a knife," Flanagan explained, "and I wound up looking like this, and they put holes in me." What a hoot.
Flanagan went on, explaining that he had been DJing at a Glasgow club when a group of nogoodniks and ne'er-do-wells (our words, not his) approached him, claiming to have killed his brother. Flanagan took umbrage and a Heineken bottle and met them in the alley, where they proceeded to stick knives in him.
According to his recollection, when he got out of the hospital, Flanagan was convinced by a friend to join the comparatively stab-free world of theater, a decision that would eventually see him not just in both "Smokin' Aces" movies, but also making an appearance in "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle." And that's what you call turning a Glasgow Frown upside down.