When you have a high-calibre actor and a smart man like John Lithgow on a video conference call, you know you’d get answers that are eloquent, well-thought-out and informative.
And he doesn’t disappoint.
In just 30 minutes, the 74-year-old New Yorker proved why he’s a force to be reckoned with in whatever medium he’s in, be it on film, the stage, television or this Zoom meeting.
Pleasant and polite, the American actor happily delves into many points of his acting career during this interview with the South East-Asian media, even though they might be questions he would’ve heard many times in a career that spans almost five decades.
Having studied in Harvard College and then London Academy Of Music And Dramatic, Lithgow – whose parents were also theatre actors; his father produced Shakespeare plays – has been acting since the early 1970s starting with performances on Broadway in New York City... even acting alongside Meryl Streep in three plays.
In 1972, the 1.93m Lithgow made his film debut in Dealing: Or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues.
Since then he has appeared in many films including The World According To Garp and Terms Of Endearment, two films which earned him a nomination each in the Oscar’s Best Supporting Actor category.
His latest were last year’s Pet Sematary and Bombshell.
He also memorably played Winston Churchill in The Crown, as well as a serial killer in Dexter.
If one is keeping score, Lithgow has received two Tony Awards, six Emmy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, three Screen Actors Guild Awards and has been nominated for two Academy Awards and (wait for it) four Grammy Awards, two of which are for Best Spoken Word Album For Children.
During this call, Lithgow tells StarLifestyle how playing Dick Solomon for six seasons changed his life: “It made me much, much better known.
"When people get that familiar with you in their homes, they feel like you’re a part of the family. I’ve been greeted like an old friend on the street ever since. And that’s a lovely thing.”
Lithgow’s most recent television role was in the first season of HBO series Perry Mason, as the lawyer Elias Birchard “E.B.” Jonathan and, mentor to the titular character played by Matthew Rhys.
The eight-episode series, inspired by Erle Stanley Gardner’s popular novels, is available on HBO Go.
You know what I was planning to do? I was planning to be an artist. I was much more interested in painting.
I grew up in a theatre family, and I certainly did a lot of acting as a young man in my dad’s Shakespeare festivals. But I never really imagined myself as an actor.
I was never ambitious to be an actor. I was painting all the time and quite serious about it. I went to art school as a teenager.
Unfortunately for me and my art, I went to college at Harvard and fell in with a theatre gang. And I was a celebrity actor almost immediately, mainly because I was already an experienced actor.
(At) all these student productions, it was like a professional had arrived. I think because of that, as I’ve often said, if you hear enough applause and laughter at a young age, you’re doomed; you’re going to be an actor whether you want to, or not.
But I still do art.
As a matter of fact, this book I’ve just written, it’s my second book of satirical poems in a year about current politics in America, and I’ve done all the illustrations. So, I urge you to go have a look at that.
I always invoke the role that I played in a brand-new play on Broadway in the late 1980s.
It was called M Butterfly, which was written by David Henry Hwang, who is our essential Asian American playwright.
And it was the first major play written by an Asian American about very essential issues between the East and the West.
A wonderful bold play, a big hit on Broadway, that won the Tony Award that year. It’s become a major part of the American canon ever since. And the role was terrific.
I found that a real life-changing experience. I always say it was the most important new play, the boldest new play I’ve ever been in, in New York.
And of course, The World According To Garp, 3rd Rock From The Sun, The Crown, and Dexter; those were my other life-changing performances, just because they attracted so much attention.
You know, I do a lot less choosing than you would think. The really good jobs are few and far between. When you see a good piece of work, and there are good people involved, you say yes.
And very often it’s a big leap of faith. Very often people are asking me to play parts that I myself don’t think I’m capable of playing, that I’m in fact afraid to play.
Just imagine me being asked to play Winston Churchill (The Crown), or Roberta Muldoon (The World According To Garp) or Roger Ailes (Bombshell).
In every case, it was like, “Are they crazy?” But it’s very good for an actor to stay wide open to experience and allow yourself to be someone else’s brainstorm.
I’m a very, very lucky actor because quite early on, I established myself as a character man, someone who plays very, very different roles.
It was a perfectly wonderful experience. For starters, it was six years long, which feels like six years of laughter.
It was quite an unexpected choice. I was as surprised as anyone. When I was offered to play the star of a sitcom, even I surprised myself when I accepted as it’s not something I was ever going to do.
I considered myself a much more serious actor than that.
But it was a show created by two very dear friends, husband and wife, Bonnie and Terry Turner, and they had created it with me in mind. If I hadn’t done it, they would not have done it.
I had worked with them two or three times on Saturday Night Live in the 1980s, where they were writers.
And they were just looking for someone with very special kind of crazy sense of humour... somebody equally comfortable being serious and being very zany.
As they described it, they were looking for somebody who was a combination of Bugs Bunny and Errol Flynn.
When they pitched it to me, the wonderful concept of an alien who’s capable of doing anything, he just doesn’t understand what he’s doing, that struck me as so hilariously funny.
And it was also an opportunity for me to do just about everything that I can do.
I could sing, I could dance, I could speak in all the different languages. I do believe I even spoke some Chinese in the course of those six years. So, it was just a constant treat.
I would say the answer is yes. I do remember very vividly when I was a young actor, and I got the chance to act with people like Jason Robards and Henry Fonda, and it was like meeting your heroes. Both of them were so extraordinarily welcoming and encouraging.
And I do begin to realise, in my old age, I hold that position in the lives of a lot of young actors and actresses.
And I love that I am kind of a mentor figure, and I take that role very seriously.
Whenever I meet young actors and they ask me for advice, like young acting students who have not even gotten a start yet in the business, I always tell them, “I bet we’d work together sometime.”
And there have been about 10 occasions when I’ve worked with some young actor who has reminded me that I told him that outside a stage door, or just after a rehearsal.
It’s a very difficult business and young actors need all the encouragement they could get.
Well, in so many ways, I have no access to it. I am terrible at social media. I do my best (because) everybody wants me to promote everything I do on social media, and I do feel like an old man.
(But) I love working with young people... they are exhilarating to me and the fact that they consider it an honour to (be working with) me, I consider it such an honour to be regarded that way.
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