John Lithgow interview: ‘They're using free speech to stifle free speech. It's crazy times'

Telegraph

14-04-2025

'Good morning from darkest California – well, darkest America,' says John Lithgow, popping up on Zoom from his study in Los Angeles, in a blue jacket and thick black Hockney-esque glasses. A shadow briefly falls across his features before he remembers that he needn't discuss Donald Trump straight away. 'Oh Lord, let's not get off on that,' he says, avuncular charm restored.
Luckily there is much else to discuss. At 79, Lithgow is capping off a remarkable career with an extraordinary late career. Not for him the beach or the golf course. As he approaches his ninth decade, he has a mix of stage and screen parts that would force actors half his age to double their agents' fees. He has just come off a gruelling tuxedo-and-canapé tour as part of the ensemble in Conclave, the papal drama based on Robert Harris's bestselling novel. The film ended a run of award wins with an Oscar for best adapted screenplay. 'I hadn't been nominated for an Oscar for 40 years,' he says. 'Every year I would sulk because I wasn't in a contending film. This year I was in the game because of Conclave and I couldn't stand [the awards tour].'
In January he also attended Sundance Film Festival for Jimpa, in which he stars opposite Olivia Colman; soon after, The Rule of Jenny Pen, a care-home horror with Geoffrey Rush, was released. He's played a serial killer in Dexter, Winston Churchill in The Crown, and he'll be Dumbledore in the new Harry Potter TV series. He is just back from New York, where he narrated a ballet version of The Carnival of the Animals. The man simply will not slow down.
We are speaking because this summer he is returning to a previous part, one of his best-received performances in any format, as Roald Dahl in Giant, which is transferring to London's West End after a triumphant run at the Royal Court last autumn. Soon after our conversation, it will win him an Olivier Award for best actor. Written by Mark Rosenblatt and directed by Sir Nicholas Hytner, the play is set in 1983, a key moment in Dahl's life. The Witches is about to come out, but Dahl has written a strident book review criticising Israel's invasion of Lebanon the year before, which included offensive tropes. His Jewish publishers arrive at his home to discuss damage limitation. They come up against Dahl's charm and humour but also a streak of vicious anti-Semitism.
'It's been dizzying,' Lithgow says of his recent streak. 'It has all come to a head at this particular moment. Old age is a fine thing, it turns out. With fascinating roles, these extraordinary parts that come along – Churchill and Roald Dahl – all of them dealing with the issues of growing old, which are amazing things to dramatise.'
It is difficult to think of another actor so physically well suited to a part as Lithgow is to Roald Dahl, despite one being the
public-school-educated British son of Norwegians, the other an all-American. The author was 6ft 6, Lithgow is a shade under at 6ft 4. Like Dahl, Lithgow has a wispy horseshoe of hair enclosing an otherwise bald dome. There is a certain similarity to their faces, too, although Lithgow cannot match Dahl's wonky nose, bent permanently out of shape by youthful injuries, including crashing his Gloster Gladiator during the Second World War.
'It was definitely my resemblance to Roald Dahl that got me the role,' he says with a laugh. 'For one thing he was freakishly tall, as am I. There are a couple of tall actors over there [in the UK], but they are not as much like him as me. My hair is exactly like Roald Dahl's. Spray it with brown colour and it's kind of remarkable.'
If it was superficial similarities that led Hytner to approach Lithgow about the part, it was the actor's brilliance that propelled Giant to the West End. 'I'm so damned excited, I have been from the very beginning,' Lithgow says.
The play's origins were fraught. Rosenblatt developed it with Hytner's support, and they spoke to several theatres before David Byrne, the new artistic director of the Royal Court, leapt at the chance to stage it. 'Byrne knew this was exactly the play for the Royal Court, particularly considering its recent history, its problems with the issue of anti-Semitism,' Lithgow recalls. In 2022, the theatre apologised to the Jewish community after a play, Rare Earth Mettle, included a fictitious scheming billionaire called Hershel Fink. A play about anti-Semitism would be a tonic.
Hytner, the former director of the National Theatre, had never staged anything at the Royal Court before, but could see the logic of putting it on there, too. A deal was thrashed out days before 7 October, 2023. Then, Hamas killed around 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals, and took more than 250 hostages. Could the show go on?
'I immediately thought, 'My God, can we still do this play? The landscape has changed so much,'' Lithgow says. 'Things are so violent and changeable. But as the days passed it became clear that it was an even deeper play now. It's a history play about an event from 40 years ago, but it was completely amazing how it resonated with what was happening. [Soon after the play opened], Israel invaded Lebanon again. It was just uncanny. Of all the plays I've been in, this is the most contemporaneous with what's going on, what people are thinking, what people are fighting about.'
World events proved politically relevant, but in recent years Roald Dahl had already become a lightning rod for anxieties about whether you can separate art from artist, and meaning from intent. In early 2023, a Telegraph investigation revealed that new editions of his work were being heavily edited on the recommendation of 'sensitivity readers'. The text of some of Dahl's most famous stories, including The Twits and The BFG, was being cut, changed and in some cases rewritten to align more closely with modern sensitivities.
Some of the changes were understandable. Others, such as removing a description of a spider's head as 'black', were ridiculous. The ensuing outrage drew responses from then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Salman Rushdie, who decried the changes. Even Queen Camilla appeared to speak out against them. Penguin, Dahl's publisher, announced it would issue another set of unaltered 'classic' texts. Today the editions sit side by side in bookshops.
'I thought it was a terrible idea,' says Lithgow, who has a sideline in writing children's books. 'You just don't do that to an author. Now it's so confusing, there are two different versions you can choose from, so you're not really hearing Dahl's voice uncluttered by this controversy. I thought it was awful. I was on Salman Rushdie's side.' He continues, 'That's another thing that's in the air at the moment. They're using free speech as a way to stifle free speech. It's crazy, ironic times.'
Dahl himself was known to make changes. In the original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the Oompa-Loompas were dark-skinned slaves from 'the deepest and darkest part of the African jungle', a description Dahl changed in time for Hollywood adaptations. But he was also particular about his work.
'He was meticulous and almost anal about his writing,' Lithgow says. 'He didn't want people messing with it at all. The position of the comma was of high importance to him, which is why The Telegraph 's article was so to the point. He was spinning in his grave when they bowdlerised his material.'
One question hanging over Giant, and the changes to recent editions, is the extent to which Dahl's cruelty is germane to his strengths as an author. At his best, his stories have a memorable viciousness to them: Miss Trunchbull forcing Bruce Bogtrotter to eat an entire chocolate cake; George feeding experimental medicine to his grandmother; James's parents being eaten by a rhinoceros.
'It was really interesting, having gotten to know so much about him as a person, to go back and look at his writing,' Lithgow says. 'There was this kind of gleeful delight he took in creating monstrous and cruel characters. It's like he was trying out all of his own issues and making it delightful, wildly theatrical and very comical.'
He has not heard from any of the surviving Dahls directly; in 2020 the family apologised for the author's anti-Semitism. 'I think everybody with the name Dahl was nervous about the play,' Lithgow says. 'But in my mind, you can't say he comes off well, he's the villain, but he's enormously charming and articulate. It resonates with the real Roald Dahl, I believe.'
Taking on one of this country's best-loved children's authors, albeit a problematic one, continues a tradition of Anglophilia that dates back as long as Lithgow has been acting, which is 60 years or so. Performing is in his blood. He was born in 1945, the third of four children of Arthur, a theatre producer, and Sarah Jane, a retired actor. The family went wherever there was a play to put on. John was born in Rochester, New York, before they moved around Ohio and then to New Jersey.
'I grew up in a theatre family and the theatre my dad did was producing Shakespeare festivals in Ohio,' he says. 'I was already this curious Anglo-American hayseed from childhood. I had been in 20 Shakespeare plays by the time I was 18. I remember an LP of John Gielgud doing his Ages of Man. I knew all those speeches by heart. I heard Olivier and Maggie Smith do the National Theatre production of Othello on record, and Robert Stephens and Maggie Smith doing Much Ado About Nothing.'
He wanted to be an artist, so it was almost embarrassing to win a place at Harvard, but he was hardly about to turn it down. He majored in history and literature, but theatre was the priority. By the time he graduated, he had been anointed as a future star. Praising his Tartuffe, student paper The Harvard Crimson wrote: 'If John Lithgow weren't the star of this show it wouldn't be worth seeing. He is. It is. See it. When you grow up you can tell people at cocktail parties you saw him before he was.'
After Harvard, Lithgow threw himself into 1960s London, as a Fulbright scholar at London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (Lamda). 'It was a very immersive time,' he says. 'It was swinging London. Mainly I was drunk on English theatre.' These were exciting days in that world. Olivier's National Theatre had just begun; Peter Hall and Trevor Nunn were at the RSC. The capital's stages were thronged with future stars: Derek Jacobi, Anthony Hopkins. 'Michael Gambon was basically a spear carrier,' Lithgow recalls with astonishment.
Lithgow even managed to act his way out of the Vietnam War, convincing a recruiter at a US airbase in England. 'I figured as long as I was on a government grant I wouldn't be drafted into the army, but they drafted me anyway. I took it upon myself to make sure I got out of the army. That was my version of protest. Nobody in my Harvard class [went]. You either ran to Canada or London or faked your way out of it. It doesn't sound courageous, but it's the way it was.'
When he made it back to the US, an English play – David Storey's The Changing Room – made his name. 'It got all this national coverage and came straight to Broadway. I won a Tony Award two weeks after debut. Boom, I was a known quantity in the acting business. That was my last period of unemployment. I don't take it for granted at all. It's a murderous profession.'
Since that big break in 1973, he has happily alternated between film, TV and stage, combining his physical stature with comic timing and gravitas. He always looked vaguely middle-aged, which helps with the sense of consistency. In 1983 and 1984 he was nominated back to back for the best supporting actor Oscar, for The World According to Garp and Terms of Endearment. For six years from 1996 he starred in the sitcom 3rd Rock from the Sun, about a family of aliens trying to live a normal life in Ohio. He played patriarch Dick Solomon, who knew 'everything about everything except nothing about human behaviour', he says. 'I was constantly thinking of him as a child with a child's responses, using those breathless instincts. You grow old and you begin to use more and more of those.' As 3rd Rock wound down he could be heard in Shrek, voicing Lord Farquaad.
In 2014 Lithgow played King Lear in New York. For many actors, Lear is a bookend; for him it was the start of more than a decade playing fascinating older men. Churchill followed when The Crown began in 2016. Lithgow's height was less of an advantage; his acting more than made up for it. 'When I finished playing him he was 80,' he says. 'I'm about to turn 80. He was prime minister at a time when he was dealing with what an 80-year-old deals with. So much in the last presidential election was these two cranky old men, of completely different polarities politically, fighting in the arena.
'The most fascinating thing about Churchill was his very difficult, unhappy childhood, and how it informed his life psychologically,' he adds. 'Those things kick in again when you grow old. It's very interesting to examine a character in old age. In playing Dahl, his body was destroyed when he was in his early 20s. He lived with terrible pain his whole life. That informed his whole character. Churchill lived a life of overcompensation. Dahl was bitter as hell. He lived a life of pain and resentment.'
Speaking of bitter old men, conversation turns back to Trump. Lithgow has written two books of satirical Trump poems, Dumpty and Trumpty Dumpty Wanted a Crown, but has also said he's turned down the chance to play him several times. At the Olivier Awards, he attacked Trump's second term as a 'pure disaster' for arts in the US.
'Every morning is alarming,' he tells me of Trump's presidency. 'It's a very hard time. It's exciting in its way, though, people are thinking in terms of how to fight back. I'm one of those rare people who thought Joe Biden did an incredible job.'
For the duration of Giant 's West End run, Lithgow and his wife Mary Yeager, a retired academic, will live in Chelsea – when it was at the Royal Court he could hop on the 19 bus up the King's Road. One of his sons works as a sommelier at The Connaught, but is moving to Lithgow's LA home while his father is in London. His daughter is a midwife in Arizona. Another son, Ian, is an actor and therapist in New York.
While the going is this good, he has no intention of stopping. 'I'm amazed I still have the energy of a younger man. I always thought an 80-year-old was pretty decrepit. I'm much older than Dahl was when I'm playing him. I'm proud of myself for having lasted this long and still being in the game. I played tennis last week. It took me four days to recover, but still… In a sense I take on these big challenges as a way to work out, to make sure I still have all the goods.'
He says there is even a chance he may stay on in London after Giant 's West End run. Perhaps he could join the exodus of Americans reportedly fleeing Trump to the UK. After 60 years of Anglophilia, it would be fitting if he finally made it here for good.
Giant is at the Harold Pinter Theatre from 26 April