In the middle of the hustle of midtown Manhattan on a Wednesday in May 2022, James Cromwell walked into a coffee chain, affixed his hand to a counter, and protested about the surcharges on plant-based alternatives. “When will you stop raking in huge profits while patrons, creatures, and the planet endure harm?” Cromwell boomed as other protesters broadcast the protest live.
But, the insouciant customers of the coffee shop paid little heed. Maybe they didn’t realise they were in the company of the tallest person ever nominated for an acting Oscar, performer of one of the best speeches in Succession, and the only actor to say the words “space adventure” in a Star Trek film. Police arrived to close the store.
“No one listened to me,” Cromwell reflects three years later. “They would come in, hear me at the full volume talking about what they were doing with these non-dairy creamers, and then they would go around to the far corner, place their request and wait looking at their cellphones. ‘We’re facing doom of the world, folks! Everything will cease! We have 15 minutes!’”
Unfazed, Cromwell remains one of Hollywood’s greatest actor-activists – or maybe activist-actors is more accurate. He protested against the Vietnam war, supported the civil rights group, and took part in nonviolent resistance protests over creature welfare and the climate crisis. He has lost count of how many times he has been arrested, and has even spent time in prison.
Currently, at eighty-five, he could be seen as the symbol of a disillusioned generation that demonstrated for peace abroad and social advances at home, only to see, in their later life, Donald Trump reverse the clock on reproductive rights and many other gains.
Cromwell certainly looks and sounds the part of an veteran progressive who might have a revolutionary poster in the loft and consider Bernie Sanders to be not radical enough on capitalism. When interviewed at his home – a wooden house in the farming town of a New York town, where he lives with his third wife, the actor his partner – he rises from a chair at the hearth with a friendly welcome and extended palm.
Cromwell measures at 6ft 7in tall like a great weathered oak. “Probably 10 years ago, I heard somebody smart say we’re already a authoritarian regime,” he says. “We have ready-made oppression. The mechanism is in the lock. All they have to do is a single action to turn it and open Pandora’s box. Out will come every loophole, every exception that the legislature has written so assiduously into their legislation.”
Cromwell has witnessed this scenario before. His father a family member, a renowned Hollywood filmmaker and actor, was blacklisted during the McCarthy era of anti-communist witch-hunts merely for making comments at a party complimenting aspects of the Soviet arts system for nurturing young talent and contrasting it with the “exhausted” culture of Hollywood.
This seemingly innocuous comment, coupled with his leadership of the “a political group” which later “shifted somewhat to the left”, led to his father being called to testify to the government panel on Un-American Activities. He had nothing substantive to say but a committee emissary still demanded an apology.
He refused and, with a generous cheque from a wealthy businessman for an unrealised project, moved to New York, where he acted in a play with Henry Fonda and won a theater honor. James reflects: “My father was not harmed except for the fact that his closest companions – a lot of them – cut him out and wouldn’t talk to him because he had been called to testify. They didn’t care whether the person was at fault or not – similar to today.”
Cromwell’s mother, a relative, and his stepmother, Ruth Nelson, were also successful actors. Despite this strong background, he was initially hesitant to follow in their path. “I avoided for as long as possible. I was going to be a technical professional.”
But, a visit to Sweden, where his father was making a film with Ingmar Bergman’s crew, proved to be a pivotal moment. “They were creating something and my father was involved and was working things out. It was very heady stuff for me. I said: ‘Oh, I gotta do this.’”
Art and politics intersected again when he joined a performance group founded by African American performers, and toured Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot for mainly African American audiences in Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia. Some shows took place under security protection in case white supremacists tried to firebomb the theatre.
Godot struck a nerve. At one performance in a location, the civil rights activist a historical figure urged the audience: “I want you to listen carefully to this, because we’re not like these two men. We’re not waiting for anything. Nobody’s giving us anything – we’re taking what we need!”
Cromwell says: “I didn’t know anything about the deep south. I went down and the rooming house had a sign on the outside, ‘Segregated accommodation’. I thought: ‘That’s a relic, obviously, back from the civil war.’ A wonderful Black lady took us to our rooms.
“We went out to have dinner, and the owner of the restaurant came over and said: ‘You’ll have to leave.’ I’d never been ejected of a restaurant before, so I immediately stood up with my fist balled. I would have done something rash. John O’Neal informed the man that he was violating our legal protections and that they would investigate fully of it.”
However, mid-story, Cromwell stops himself and addresses the interviewer directly. “I’m hearing my words,” he says. “These are not just tales about an actor doing his thing growing up, trying to get the girl, trying to keep his record spotless, trying not to get hurt. People were being killed, people were being beaten, people were being fired upon, people had symbols of hate on their lawns.
“I feel uncomfortable recounting it always with the points that I think an interviewer would be interested in: ‘Personal narrative’. People ask if I should write a memoir because I have all these stories and I’ve done a lot of different things as well as acting.”
Later, his wife will confide that she is among those lobbying Cromwell to write a autobiography. But he has little appetite for such a project, he insists, since he fears it would be formulaic and “because my father tried it and it was so bad even his wife, who adored him, said: ‘That’s really awful, John.’”
We push on with his story all the same. Cromwell had been accumulating film and TV roles for decades when, at the age of 55, his career took off thanks to his role as a agriculturalist in a beloved film, a 1995 film about a animal that aspires to be a herding dog. It was a surprise hit, earning more than $250m worldwide.
Cromwell funded his own campaign for an Academy Award for best supporting actor in the film, spending $60,000 to hire a PR representative and buy industry ads to publicize his performance after the studio declined to fund it. The gamble paid off when he received the nomination, the kind of recognition that means an actor is given roles rather than having to go through tryouts.
“I wouldn’t be here if I had not gotten a nomination,” he says, “because I was so sick of the dance that had to be done when you did an audition. I finally asked a filmmaker: ‘What was it about the audition that made you give me the part? I did it no differently than I’ve done anything.’ He said: ‘Jamie, it has nothing to do with your performance; we just want to see that you’re the kind of guy we want to spend four weeks with.’
“It was the insecurity which, because I knew him, didn’t show as much as it did when I went in to audition with a stranger who I identified as my father. I had the thing from my father – there he is again in me, telling me I’m not good enough, I’ll fail in the reading. I was just extremely sick of it.”
The recognition for Babe led to roles including presidents, religious figures and a royal in a director’s a film, as the industry tried to pigeonhole him. In a sci-fi installment he played the interstellar pioneer a character, who observes of the spaceship crew: “And you people, you’re all space travelers on … some kind of cosmic journey.”
Cromwell views Hollywood as a “seamy” business driven by “avarice” and “the profit motive”. He criticises the focus on “attendance numbers”, the lack of genuine debate on issues such as racial diversity and the increasing influence of social media popularity on hiring choices. He has “disinterest in the parties” and sees the “industry” as secondary to “the deal”. He also admits that he can be a difficult on set: “I do a lot of arguing. I do too much yelling.”
He offers the example of LA Confidential, which he describes as a “genius piece of work”. In one scene, Cromwell’s menacing Captain Dudley Smith asks Kevin Spacey’s Jack Vincennes, “Have you a parting word, boyo?” before shooting him dead. Spacey, by then an Oscar winner, disagreed with filmmaker and co-writer Curtis Hanson over what Vincennes should reply. A subtly resistant Spacey won their battle of wills.
This prompted Cromwell to try a line change of his own. Hanson objected. “Sure enough, he stands behind me and says: ‘James, I want you to say the line the way it was written.’ But not having Kevin’s experience and his propensities, I said: ‘You motherfucker, curse you, you piece of shit! You don’t know what the {fuck|expletive
