Amid the hustle of New York's urban core on a Wednesday in 2022, James Cromwell walked into a Starbucks, affixed his hand to a surface, and complained about the extra fees on plant-based alternatives. “How long until you cease raking in huge profits while customers, creatures, and the environment suffer?” Cromwell boomed as other protesters broadcast the demonstration online.
But, the insouciant patrons of the establishment paid little heed. Maybe they didn’t know they were in the company of the tallest person ever nominated for an Academy Award, performer of one of the most memorable monologues in the hit series, and the only actor to utter the words “space adventure” in a sci-fi franchise film. Police arrived to shut down the store.
“Nobody paid attention to me,” Cromwell reflects three years later. “Customers entered, listen to me at the top of my lungs speaking about what they were doing with these vegan options, and then they would move past to the far corner, get their order and stand there looking at their cellphones. ‘We’re facing doom of the world, folks! It’s going to end! We have 15 minutes!’”
Unfazed, Cromwell remains one of Hollywood’s greatest actor-activists – or maybe activist-actors is more fitting. He protested against the Vietnam war, supported the civil rights group, and took part in civil disobedience protests over animal rights and the environmental emergency. He has forgotten the number of how many times he has been detained, and has even served time in jail.
Currently, at eighty-five, he could be seen as the avatar of a disappointed generation that demonstrated for peace abroad and social advances at home, only to see, in their later life, a former president turn back the clock on abortion and many other achievements.
Cromwell certainly appears and speaks the part of an old lefty who might have a Che Guevara poster in the loft and consider a political figure to be not radical enough on the economic system. When visited at his home – a wooden house in the rural community of Warwick, where he lives with his spouse, the actor his partner – he rises from a seat at the fireplace with a friendly welcome and extended palm.
Cromwell measures at 6ft 7in tall like a ancient tree. “Probably 10 years ago, I heard somebody smart say we’re already a fascist state,” he says. “We have ready-made oppression. The key is in the door. All they have to do is a single action to activate it and open a source of trouble. Out will come every exception, every exception that the legislature has written so diligently into their laws.”
Cromwell has witnessed this scenario before. His father a family member, a famous Hollywood director and actor, was blacklisted during the McCarthy era of political persecution merely for making remarks at a party complimenting aspects of the Russian theatre system for nurturing young talent and contrasting it with the “used up” culture of Hollywood.
This seemingly innocuous observation, coupled with his leadership of the “Hollywood Democrats” which later “moved slightly to the left”, led to John Cromwell being called to give evidence to the House Committee on alleged subversion. He had little of importance to say but a committee emissary still demanded an expression of regret.
John Cromwell refused and, with a large payment from Howard Hughes for an unproduced work, moved to New York, where he performed in a play with Henry Fonda and won a theater honor. James muses: “My father was not harmed except for the fact that his best friends – a lot of them – avoided him 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 accomplished actors. Despite this deep lineage, he was initially hesitant to follow in their footsteps. “I resisted for as long as possible. I was going to be a mechanical engineer.”
However, a visit to a Scandinavian country, where his father was making a picture with a famed director’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.’”
Creativity and ideology collided again when he joined a performance group founded by African American performers, and toured an playwright’s play Waiting for Godot for predominantly Black audiences in Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and an area. Some shows took place under armed guard in case white supremacists tried to attack the theatre.
Godot struck a nerve. At one performance in a location, the social advocate Fannie Lou Hamer urged the audience: “I want you to listen carefully to this, because we’re not like these two men. We’re not sitting idle for anything. Nobody’s giving us anything – we’re seizing what we need!”
Cromwell says: “I didn’t know anything about the deep south. I went down and the lodging had a sign on the outside, ‘Coloreds only’. 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 proprietor 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 clenched hand. I would have done something rash. a company founder informed the man that he was violating our civil rights and that they would investigate fully of it.”
But then, mid-anecdote, Cromwell stops himself and addresses the interviewer directly. “I’m listening to myself,” he says. “These are not just tales about an actor doing his thing maturing, trying to get the girl, trying to keep his nose clean, trying not to get hurt. People were being killed, people were being assaulted, people were being fired upon, people had crosses burned on their lawns.
“I feel strange recounting it always with the points that I think an interviewer would be interested in: ‘My story’. 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.”
Subsequently, his wife will confide that she is among those lobbying Cromwell to write a memoir. But he has minimal interest 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 loved 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 movie about a pig that yearns to be a sheepdog. It was a unexpected success, earning more than $250 million worldwide.
Cromwell paid for his own campaign for an Oscar for best supporting actor in the film, spending $60,000 to hire a publicist and buy trade press ads to publicize his performance after the studio declined to fund it. The risk paid off when he received the nomination, the kind of recognition that means an actor is given roles rather than having to go through auditions.
“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 director: ‘What was it about the audition that made you give me the part? I did it no otherwise than I’ve done anything.’ He said: ‘James, 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 chip on my shoulder 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, popes and a royal in Stephen Frears’ The Queen, as the industry tried to pigeonhole him. In Star Trek: First Contact he played the spacefaring pioneer Dr Zefram Cochrane, who observes of the Starship Enterprise crew: “And you people, you’re all space travelers on … some kind of cosmic journey.”
Cromwell views Hollywood as a “seamy” business driven by “greed” and “the bottom line”. He criticises the focus on “asses in the seats”, the lack of genuine debate on issues such as racial diversity and the increasing influence of online followings on casting decisions. He has “no interest in the parties” and sees the “game” as secondary to “the business transaction”. 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 his character asks an actor’s a role, “Have you a parting word, boyo?” before shooting him dead. Spacey, by then an Oscar winner, disagreed with director and co-writer a creative over what Vincennes should reply. A subtly resistant Spacey won their disagreement.
This prompted Cromwell to try a alteration 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 background and his propensities, I said: ‘You expletive, fuck you, you piece of shit! You don’t know what the {fuck|expletive
