Cardinal Rules

Writing about actors can be a tricky assignment. Why? Well, occasionally they are pretty unlikeable, and sometimes they are so traumatised by the thought of their words being taken out of context that they come across as padlocked as the Pont des Arts. Then there are some whose careers are so expansive, varied and accomplished that it’s impossible to get it all in, and John Lithgow not only sits in this category, he rules it, a great statesman of the Hollywood pantheon. If you want to see him today, you need to come to London and watch his Olivier-award-winning play Giant. There’s some nominative determinism, if ever I’ve heard it, for Lithgow is a titan of his industry. He may obviously have height (he’s 6’4”) but he also has stature, which he wears like a loose garment when he joins me for lunch at The Connaught and then again for our cover shoot at Claridge’s.

There was a short period when he was considered a budding actor, but it didn’t come until he had shed the other artistic aspiration in his youth — to follow his aptitude as a painter. “I wish I had a nickel for every time someone in one of [my father’s repertory companies] said, ‘Don’t become an actor’. Because it’s a hard life. That was not the reason I didn’t want to be an actor — I didn’t want to be an actor because I did want to be an artist. I was really quite serious about it and was enormously encouraged by everybody, because I had a sort of innate talent. From the time I was six or seven years old, I was painting.” He may have downed brushes for a bit but they will be picked up again in time.

I wish I had a nickel for every time someone in my father’s repertory company said, Don’t become an actor.

As mentioned, his father ran repertory theatre across the United States, including in Ohio, New Jersey and Rochester. To some extent John unintentionally cut his teeth here. “I learned to act by osmosis,” he says. “It just came naturally [that] me and my siblings were around the theatres watching rehearsals for outdoor performances of Shakespeare. Right up until 11, 12 years old.”

He would graduate from Harvard magna cum laude in history and English literature, but on his arrival at Harvard he had been thrust into the college theatre scene owing to the fact that, unlike a lot of his fellow students, he had been blooded on the stage.

With airplane tickets and a Fulbright scholarship in his breast pocket, he crossed the Atlantic to study at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. His return from London saw him return to his father’s company in Princeton, New Jersey. He was perfectly happy doing it, as it was what he had grown up with, as well as being a perfectly respectable jumping-off point. Furthermore, in terms of personal ambitions, Captain Hindsight tells us, they were modest: “I assumed I would just be an American repertory theatre actor.” He was also getting great satisfaction from wearing various hats for the company, such as directing and designing. “I was a theatre polymath,” he says.

He would not have to wait long, though, before brighter lights beckoned. He said to his father that he had to come out from under paternal protection, and he went to New York. Having spent a few years working mainly as a director, in 1973 he starred in The Changing Room on Broadway — specifically, at the now- defunct Morosco Theatre, where A Streetcar Named Desire and Death of a Salesman also played at one point. His performance was rewarded with a Tony award, his first.

The next few decades saw a deluge of roles in all genres. Ten years after the Tony award, he secured an Oscar nomination for playing the trans woman Roberta Muldoon in The World According to Garp. He was bombastic in the cult classic Footloose, wholesome in the aforementioned Harry and the Hendersons, dastardly in Santa Claus: The Movie, and shameless in the best world war II film, Memphis Belle. He was not experiencing this just from studio lots; indeed, 1993’s Cliffhanger was one of his favourite projects to film, he says, “because of the locations”. This period brought him multiple Emmys to add to his trophy cabinet, and helped establish Lithgow as the character actor who could not be pigeonholed. 

Then came 3rd Rock from the Sun, which dropped in 1996, during the great heyday of American sitcoms (Friends, Frasier, Everybody Loves Raymond, Will & Grace). Of all its contemporaries, 3rd Rock was by far the barmiest of sitcoms — an alien family go on an expedition to Earth and pose as humans to better understand the species — with Lithgow’s Dick Solomon playing the patriarch. “I never thought I would do it, but it happened to be created by delightful and wonderful friends of mine,” he says. “I thought, Yeah, all right, what the hell.” It ran for six seasons and earned our cover star a Golden Globe award, and it remains to many a favourite of the old, scheduled-television world.

As much as one might assume there is industry snobbery towards sitcoms, it was never John’s attitude, especially with regards to shows with live audiences. “I think that was the great American invention,” he says. “You see it very rarely now. You will hear canned laughter, you will hear so many bad jokes getting laughs. You don’t hear that on 3rd Rock. I think people laughed their fucking heads off in that studio audience, and you would hear it and you would see it, and you would see expert comedy acting because we were playing the audience. It was all about timing, and the writing had to have that. You absolutely had to be funny.” 

I think live-audience sitcoms were the great American invention. You will hear canned laughter now.

In the age of streaming T.V., Lithgow will seldom be off your screen. Even older shows, such as Dexter, which officially ended in 2013, are still proving a great hit on Netflix — you can see the sinister side of Lithgow as the Trinity Killer, a character with such menace that you cannot believe it comes from our benign John. Then again, that one scene in Bombshell, where his Roger Ailes coldly sexually harasses/abuses/assaults Margot Robbie’s Kayla Pospisil, in no way disguises his capacity to act the degenerate.

Parts of his back catalogue, as well as very recent projects — like his role as the up-to-no-good Cardinal Tremblay in the wonderful Conclave — have followed the trend of releasing via streaming at a similar time to the cinematic release. Conclave, of course, bounced back to the top of the charts after the death of Pope Francis in April. (Life did not so much imitate art here, as the American candidate, of course, ended up as Pope Leo XIV.) 

For many Britons he was welcomed into our collective consciousness (and hearts) by taking on the unenviable task of playing another Churchill, in Peter Morgan’s mega mini-series The Crown. This was compounded by the fact that Lithgow is an American, and all eyes would be on him among snobby and supercilious Brits. As you might know, he emerged triumphant from that creative frontline, with a superb performance that put him on top of the Churchill totem pole.

On modern leadership through the prism of Churchill, he says: “I have so much to say on the subject. He was just courage and integrity. The moment that absolutely required him, like Volodymyr Zelenskyy — it’s the same story: eight years ago he was a sitcom star and here he is, the modern-day Churchill. I’m seeing green shoots. I hope to God that the United States will meet this moment with courage and integrity, because there’s an awful lot of cowardice, and integrity is out the window, and authenticity, and truth.” He says the current U.S. administration is, “Lying, absolutely lying to people with whom [they] have this agreement — ‘You know perfectly well I’m lying but I’m going to say it anyway, and you’re going to go along with it’. I mean, that’s horrifying.” 

Churchill was courage and integrity... I hope to God the U.S. will meet this moment with courage and integrity.

Giant is his current triumph, and a reunion with the fêted director Nick Hytner. Lithgow plays the celebrated children’s author Roald Dahl, and the play tackles the author’s antisemitism in the weeds of his free-flowing river of creative genius. The play is quite hard to watch at times — it has fizzing dialogue that contains the most extraordinary bigotry — and yet in many ways Lithgow’s Dahl seems lovable and simply a nut that needs cracking.

Cancel culture and the question of separating art from artist is a subject germane to Giant. Should we be a culture that conjoins the two and judges the work in light of the author’s shortcomings? “I think not,” Lithgow says. “[Dahl’s] books are still exciting and thrilling for young people, and they are very challenging. I simply approached it as a fascinating man who indisputably had things about him that are reprehensible. 

“It’s the best role I’ve had in years, if not ever. Just so playable, so emotionally accessible. It’s an unsettling play, but I love that. I love the fact that it throws people off and provokes so much thought. That’s what I do. I’m in the empathy business. These parts in every part I play, I’m on their side. Purely because I’ve been looking for everything that motivates them. What do they want? What do they fear? What do they hate? What do they love? Just take those things and understand them and make them and try to get an audience to understand them even if they’re horrified by them. The whole thing is to accept the fact that human beings are capable of anything, and just plumb the depths of that truth.”

The whole thing is to accept that human beings are capable of anything, and to plumb the depths of that truth.

He has said that his casting as Dumbledore in HBO’s Harry Potter series will be his final big project. If indeed he is staring at the final curtain call (professionally speaking), legacy will surely be on his mind, like a second-term president. How does he want to be remembered? “It’s hard to be objective about it, but I hope that I dignify the acting profession. I hope they see me as a committed actor. I mean, I’ve made crass choices and I’ve done stupid things. I think all actors swing between arrogance and self-contempt, because we’re very proud of what we do and sometimes we’re embarrassed by it. We’re all insecure people, otherwise we wouldn’t rely on other people to write our material. But I think that we do perform a very important service. We tell stories, and people absolutely require stories. They’re hungry for them. I just hope that I have dignified the profession.”

For anyone on the hunt for someone who deserves such an epitaph, who has let the showbusiness world consume him without becoming a showbiz caricature or overused chestnut, who is admired and respected by contemporaries and audiences alike, you have found your Huckleberry.

Read the full story in Issue 100, available now.