For a long time, I couldn’t shake the impression of actor John Lithgow as a kind, unassuming, neighborly presence with a warm grin, or what you might call a “dad next door”-type. If you grew up watching movies in the 1980s like I did, it seemed like Lithgow was in everything. From the bank manager in “Terms of Endearment” to the strict local minister of “Footloose,” to a transgender, ex-NFL player in “The World According to Garp,” and even an early example of a plane passenger wilding out in “Twilight Zone: The Movie.”
But Lithgow, now 77, has enjoyed one of the most diverse careers of any actor of his generation. He’s played a wide variety of characters and not all were nice guys, including an infamous Fox TV executive and a serial killer or two. Take a brief glimpse into his background and you’ll discover a deep, lifelong commitment to his craft; from growing up around his father’s regional theater productions to his education at Harvard and subsequent Fulbright scholarship at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, to many successful Broadway, movie and television roles. Lithgow has won six Emmy awards, three Screen Actors Guild awards and two Tony Awards, while nominated for two Academy Awards. Currently, he is starring in FX’s “The Old Man,” and will be featured in Martin Scorsese’s movie, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” later this year.
The actor, children’s book author, and advocate for the arts came to Richmond to speak at the Richmond Forum on March 18th in a program titled, “The World According to Lithgow,” which begins airing on VPM PBS this week. A few weeks ago, Style Weekly caught up with him via Zoom to ask more questions about his career and learn about his upcoming, one-hour PBS documentary, “Art Happens Here,” about the importance of art education in public schools. Actually, it turns out that I wasn’t wrong when I imagined him as a kind, gracious gentleman in my youth. Or as Larry David might say, he’d be the perfect “middler” at a dinner party.
Style Weekly: So how did you enjoy the Richmond Forum?
John Lithgow: I had a perfectly wonderful time. It’s incredible. They have it down to such a science. Their program listed their whole history since 1987 and it gave me such stage fright [laughs]. Impossible acts to follow.
That’s true. Some pretty big names have spoken there. Did you enjoy getting to meet local actor, Scott Wichmann, who interviewed you?
JL: Oh, I’m so glad you asked about him, he was one of the great treats of visiting Richmond. I mean, I loved the city. I had never been there before. But Scott, from all appearances, he and his wife [Eva DeVirgilis] are the Lunt-Fontanne of Richmond. Clearly, he deserves it. I haven’t seen him act, but he’s a man of such wit, skill, timing, and sense of humor and humanity. I really was impressed with him. We’ve stayed in touch since that event. He’s on my little list of friends for life now.
Congratulations on your latest television show, “The Old Man.” I read just this morning that if you won a best supporting actor Emmy, you’d be only the third person ever nominated for three different shows.
JL: Wow, that’s awfully flattering. I don’t really keep track of such things.
I actually interviewed your costar Jeff Bridges several years ago and was amazed at how much he reminded me of his Dude character from “Big Lebowski.” But you were filming with him when he was going through a very intense time with his health [lymphoma diagnosis]. What was that experience like?
JL: You’re absolutely right, he’s the most amiable, companionable man. He’s like an unstoned Lebowski. He’s a wonderful acting partner, a wonderful person, and a big reason why I wanted to do the series at all. If you’re familiar with the series, our two stories in the first season are completely separated. So I didn’t get to act with Jeff at all for the first 2.5 months of shooting, at which point the pandemic kicked in. There was another eight months before we could resume. When we resumed, I shot for five days, then Jeff got his diagnosis and went into treatment, and we delayed for another 10 months. So when I finally worked with him, it was 2.5 years after we started working on this. And it was so worth waiting for … We started shooting again a couple weeks ago. It’s all him and me in Afghanistan, and boy, are we having fun … He’s a real rare one.
Jeff told me that he took pains to play widely different characters over his career, so he’s never associated with any one thing. Your approach strikes me as similar. You even said in the Forum speech that you almost got to play the Hannibal Lecter role in “Silence of the Lambs,” right? I’m having a hard time picturing you eating someone’s face.
JL: If Tony Hopkins had turned it down, it would’ve been me. I certainly didn’t turn it down. But it made a very, very strong impression, that role. So I think it would’ve been a double-edged sword. Of course, I would’ve loved to have done it, but you would’ve known me as Hannibal Lecter, that would’ve been your first question … When I did the Trinity Killer, it was almost as bad. But the very fact that I was known as the goofball on “3rd Rock from The Sun,” or the earnest bank manager in “Terms of Endearment,” that I was known as this comfortable, unthreatening presence, that made the Trinity Killer absolutely terrifying. So I’ve learned to make good use of my persona, whatever it is.
Do you feel like you’ve been offered better roles as you’ve aged?
JL: Well, that’s the very good thing about longevity in an actor’s life. Things get more interesting, especially if you’ve made an impression as one kind of actor when you were young. I really feel like I’m in a marvelous new chapter: I’m playing old men, some even older than I am – I played Winston Churchill at age 80, Roger Ailes, this role in “The Old Man,” King Lear on stage – these are wonderful challenges and beautiful projects are being made around that. “Love is Strange,” a wonderful little movie I did with Alfred Molina, is one of my favorite films. So many things come into play. In the case of Churchill, a kind of second childishness, a certain fear or anxiety about your immortality, or losing your viability. If you can still handle the difficult process of acting at my age, the world is your oyster. You have so little competition, for one thing.
Do you think the same is true for women in Hollywood, I’ve always heard there’s a double standard.
JL: There is a huge double standard. It all has to do with what product is being created. The great thing is, women – through the good offices of people like Geena Davis, Frances McDormand, these tough, terrific talented women – a lot of things are now being made, produced by, directed by, and played by women. [Movies] that are telling women’s stories. “Women Talking” by Sarah Polley is the perfect example.
But there’s a big difference between us and Britian in this area. I think because the whole acting profession [there] is based on theater training, there is respect for women as they age. They are literally made dames of the empire. There isn’t this great anxiety to stay young.
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I read that you moved around a lot as a child, do you think that prepared you for the chameleon-like nature of acting?
JL: I think, for sure. The two big influences on my life as an actor were number one, my father who produced regional theater, classical repertory theater, notably Shakespeare festivals, which is sort of training by osmosis if you’re growing up with that. But also the fact that, yes, we were a gypsy wagon, I went to eight different public schools. I was constantly being the new kid in town, constantly doing everything I could to win over an audience. By the time I was in the 11th grade, the last public school I went to was Princeton High School in Princeton, New Jersey, I was either going to be a politician or an actor, I was so good at winning people over. And I would not become a politician.
The whole time I was interested in visual arts, and as I said in the [Richmond] speech, I had wonderful arts training in public schools – something which there’s not nearly as much of now, ironically, as there was 60-70 years ago.
One of my favorite roles of yours is Roberta Muldoon in “The World According to Garp” (1982). You received letters from trans kids after your performance because it was so helpful to them. Also you once wrote about actors’ huge egos for The New Yorker; are those affected now that these roles are cast using individuals from those communities, or does it not matter?
JL: Well, it’s a delicate issue, of course. But the very good news is that transgender or LGBTQ+ people are recognized, respected and regarded, and hired to play these roles. I played Roberta in “Garp” and Walter in “Love is Strange,” an old gay man who experiences gay marriage, to his amazement, in his late 70s. These are not roles that I would be cast in anymore, and I think that’s a good thing. I am not hard up for roles, gay and trans actors are – and women. We’re talking about a curious imbalance. All of it has to do with what art is being created.
The beautiful thing about the role of Roberta Muldoon is that it opened horizons. Nobody had seen a deeply sympathetic character who had undergone that transgender process. [She] was the most warm and sympathetic character in that movie. It’s a wonderful thing as an actor to play a part that you feel is performing that service, without preaching. Just telling an emotional and engaging story which happens to resonate in an important way in society.
You’ve also had this second career as a children’s author – what’s been the most rewarding part of that for you?
JL: It’s just a delightful thing. There’s just something about entertaining children. We actors, the Holy Grail is achieving the suspension of disbelief. That is, making an audience think they’re seeing something actually happen in reality. It never happens with adults, because there’s something in them that knows perfectly well: “I’m watching a play in a theater, by actors who are pretending.” Or an opera, or listening to music: “This music may be moving me deeply, but those musicians up there aren’t tearing up or bursting with emotion” … Well, kids, suspension of disbelief – it’s just like that! [Snaps] They completely believe it’s absolutely real, which makes it completely wonderful to entertain them.
[Also] it had so much to do with my own children and grandchildren. I don’t get to do nearly enough of it. I have the good fortune of being over-extended in my day job as an actor … You want your children to be happy, especially when they’re in school. Because if you’re happy, you’re a more eager learner. That’s why sports and the arts are so great, they keep kids engaged and give them this communal experience, collaborative very often, and puts them in contact with wonderful teachers.
Speaking of suspension of disbelief: When I was a kid, I remember watching you in “Twilight Zone: The Movie” [1983], in “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” That early story of passenger mania completely freaked me out. I wondered how you could even go on a commercial flight after that without making people around you nervous?
JL: Yeah, I’m the patron saint of flight attendants [laughs]. They remember that almost as vividly as you do.
Can you say anything about the upcoming “Killers of the Flower Moon” film [about the Osage murders in the 1920s and the birth of the F.B.I.]? Is this your first time working with Martin Scorsese?
JL: Yes, I finally got that experience. Apparently, it’s a fantastic film. It’s going to premiere in Cannes and be released in October. I’ve heard from a lot of people involved with it that it’s epic. I think it’s going to be one of Marty’s real legacy films, and it’s about an important subject, so …
What pushed you into becoming an advocate for the arts?
JL: It came very naturally. First of all, I’ve noticed what everyone has noticed. Arts and education have dwindled drastically mainly because priorities have been skewed by the great urgency to concentrate on STEM subjects. No doubt about it, those are extremely important and kids have got to be well educated in those areas. But whenever a school district or school board is confronted with financial issues, the first thing to go are the arts programs, even before sports. In my mind, sports and arts education in public schools play a similar role. They are a big part of kids’ development.
I have my own kids and grandkids, I see it. I also have two sisters, an older and a younger, who are both retired. They were both wonderful educators. They were English and history teachers – but they did a lot of theater, like my dad. They directed Shakespeare and great big musicals in public schools. And my older sister became the arts administrator of the gigantic [Los Angeles] unified school district and created fantastic programs in all five of the major arts … She did wonderful things to get professional artists accredited to be part-time public school teachers, which were win-wins. It was great for teachers, kids, great for the school system. And it was almost completely dismantled after 2008, when the state of California had to pull back.
As I also said in Richmond, there has been this terrific ballot initiative [Prop 28] to take almost a billion dollars, a small percentage of the state of California’s education budget and transfer it to the arts, yearly and in perpetuity. The pendulum is beginning to swing in another direction. Interestingly enough, “Art Happens Here,” this PBS documentary we’re producing for PBS SoCal in Southern California, we’ve been developing it for three or four years, ever since I was co-chair of an arts commission for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. [And] it was one of the most fun gigs I’ve ever done. It wasn’t acting, but it was putting on a great show, on behalf of arts education.
Did you identify one singular problem that you felt deserved the most attention when you were on the commission?
JL: It was a general commission to simply research and examine the state of arts in America today. We narrowed it down to two areas: Arts and the creative work force: artists do struggle in our society, it’s very hard to live with such little income. That was one area, the other area was arts and education, and how it appeared to be dying on the vine. The [AAAS] is an honorific, but it’s also a research institution. It creates these commissions and make recommendations, but is not technically supposed to enter into the political arena and advocate for specific programs. But we made very strong recommendations, particularly in the area of arts education. Some of them are being enacted.
Even though the commission ended almost three years ago, we all continue to do stuff. Whenever there’s the possibility of going to Washington and speaking to the congressional arts caucus, I’m ready and available. All of us, Deborah Rutter of the Kennedy Center and Natasha Trethewey, our two-time poet laureate, we’re all continuing to advocate. Wonderful things are happening. They’re actually reconstituting the president’s commission on the arts and humanities. That was a terrible loss when it was decommissioned about four years ago.
Will “Art Happens Here” be seen outside of California?
JL: I think there’s a pretty good chance. It’s in the late stages of post-production. In fact, I’ve been working with the producers and director on the narration just in the last 24 hours, but haven’t recorded it yet … I do think we’re going to create an absolutely wonderful documentary that will hopefully be spread all over the U.S. through PBS.
The arts have got to be appreciated as hard work and demanding tremendous discipline and focus. But they also teach those qualities, and those qualities are transferrable to every area of life and every other area of a kid’s education. That’s why I feel like it’s such a strong argument.
VPM PBS screenings of The Richmond Forum featuring John Lithgow will be airing on Tuesday, May 9th at 8 p.m. Thursday, May 11 at 8 p.m. Sunday, May 21 at 7 p.m. Tuesday, June 6th at 9 p.m. and Monday, June 12th at 9 p.m.
