Danny Glover revealed he has Alzheimer's in a Today interview alongside his family

Danny Glover has Alzheimer's, and he wanted you to hear it from him.

The 79-year-old actor sat down with his family and former NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt for a Today interview that aired July 1, and told Holt he was diagnosed with the disease a few years ago. He has been living with it quietly ever since. The timing points back to January 2022, when Glover received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the Governors Awards. According to the interview, the diagnosis landed just before that night.

Glover did not dress it up. "I'm sure as it advances, things are going to be different and changing," he told Holt. When Holt asked whether his family had him covered, he answered "Absolutely," and added, "They've got my back."

That is the whole reason for the sit-down. This was not a leak or a tabloid catch. Glover and his kids decided to say it out loud, on their terms, while he can still tell the story himself.

His daughter Mandisa put it plainly. "I think it's really important for him to have control of his own narrative, of his own life story," she told Holt. "And the time is now. What better time but now for him to speak for himself?"

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His youngest brother, Martin Glover, has worked alongside Danny for much of his career and is now part of the circle helping him. "He took me under his wing, and I love him to death," Martin said. "And I'm here to help him now."

Part of the point of going public, Glover has said, is to take some of the shame out of a diagnosis that a lot of families still handle in whispers. He is still active and still turning up around his native San Francisco, the city where all of it started. He got into acting in his early 20s at San Francisco State, where the poet and playwright Amiri Baraka pushed him toward the stage. Five decades on, that career runs through the Lethal Weapon movies, The Color Purple, Beloved, and the activism that earned him the humanitarian Oscar in the first place.

There is no tidy tragic button to put on this one. Glover told Holt he can live with it, and for now he is. He just wanted to be the one who said so.