Self-confidence is key to any actor who dreams of making it to the top of the industry. While many are held in the highest esteem by their peers, nobody has a higher opinion of Steven Seagal than Steven Seagal has of himself.

There are very fine margins between conviction and arrogance, margins that the martial artist trampled into dust decades ago when he gradually began to become consumed by the need to cultivate and curate his own legend. This ended up making him a lot more friends than enemies.

Hollywood is full of people who despise Seagal with a passion. There are many tall tales to have emerged from the alleged reincarnation of 17th-century Buddhist spiritualist Terton Chungdrag Dorie over the years, but patting himself on the back for a job well done that ended up winning somebody else a Nobel Peace Prize further down the line has got to be right up there.

The actor made his feature-length directorial debut with 1994’s On Deadly Ground, a movie so fantastic that Michael Caine used it as the best example of why actors should always be careful when signing on for a feature they know is going to be terrible.

One of his two empty-headed contributions to environmentalist action cinema in the 1990s, Seagal’s protagonist, Forrest Taft, stops an unscrupulous oil tycoon from decimating local communities by dumping him into a pool of sludge and blowing up his plant before giving a speech on live television about the dangers posed by corporations to natural habitats.

12 years later, Davis Guggenheim’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth won an Academy Award for ‘Best Documentary Feature’, earned subject Al Gore a Nobel Peace Prize, and played a huge part in increasing worldwide awareness of global warming. As Seagal told Ain’t It Cool, though, he did it first.

“I think On Deadly Ground is a special film in the sense that it did and said everything 20 years earlier that Al Gore did when he got an Academy Award and a Nobel Peace Prize, which is hilarious,” he said. “But it’s a very good movie because of the message and all of that. Major motion pictures that are environmental movies are very few and far between. So that one I like quite a bit.”