John Lithgow: ‘I’m Mr Supporting Player and there’s nothing wrong with that’

“This is an embarrassing admission to make,” says the actor John Lithgow, in his distinctive sonorous tones. “But I wish I’d had more chances to play the tent-pole role. I am Mr Supporting Player, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I’ve had a wonderful time and I know how enviable my career is. But there has been no Raging Bull role for me.”

We have been talking about the broad range of Lithgow’s roles, which have included an uptight pastor (Footloose), a friendly extraterrestrial (Third Rock from the Sun), a serial killer (Dexter), a cartoon lord (Shrek), a prime minister (Winston Churchill in The Crown) and a president (Bill Clinton in the Broadway production of Hillary and Clinton). My question about the kinds of parts he hasn’t played, and perhaps wishes he had, has led to a brief moment of soul-searching. “There’s something in every actor that wants to be the character that the entire story is based on,” he continues, “and I haven’t done much of that. But that doesn’t make me a malcontent by any means. It’s an embarrassing confession but it’s true.”

Lithgow, 76, is talking via Zoom from a wood-lined office at his lakeside summer house in north-west Montana, where he and his family — he has two adult children with his second wife, the historian Mary Yeager — have gathered for a break. As we speak, the rest of the clan are watching a football match in the next room. Such is their enthusiasm that Lithgow briefly pauses our conversation to ask them to keep the noise down.

He latest role is in The Old Man, a new Disney Plus series in which he stars alongside Jeff Bridges. Lithgow plays an FBI bigwig, Harold Harper, tasked with bringing in Bridges’ rogue CIA agent, who has recently surfaced after decades under the radar and with whom he has a shared history. Early on, we learn that Harper is grieving the deaths of his son and daughter-in-law in a car accident, and that he and his wife have been left to raise their young grandson. Lithgow notes how “you don’t often see this particular set-up of an extremely complicated, intense and suspenseful relationship between old men”.

In portraying Harper’s grief and the secrets of his job, Lithgow is required to convey a lot while saying very little. “It’s true that my character reveals everything in the silences,” he says. “This is an unusual role for me as I’m known for my excess. But this is a character who has to restrain and repress almost everything.”

Lithgow never intended to become an actor. When he was growing up, his father ran the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey, for 10 years, in between putting on Shakespeare festivals around the country. Though he would often be deployed to plug gaps in a cast — “As a small child I played Mustardseed in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which, to my mind, is the definitive performance” — Lithgow had made up his mind to be an artist.

But as he got involved working behind the scenes, he warmed to the idea of a career in theatre. “Although I never saw myself on Broadway,” Lithgow says, “and I never pictured myself on television, let alone the movies. Even now, I feel like a theatre actor who does movies. What I bring to acting performance is theatre chops.”

After studying history and English literature at Harvard, Lithgow came to London to study drama. Then, in 1972, he moved to New York, where he spent two years relentlessly auditioning while working a series of menial jobs. For a while he drove a taxi, though, he says, “at 6ft 4in I was too tall for it. In a New York City cab, there’s no leg room for the driver, so it was killing me.” In 1973, he made his stage debut proper in David Storey’s The Changing Room, for which he won the first of two Tony awards and many nominations. After that, his career “was like a rocket taking off. It was a fantastic time, and I have not had to worry about finding work ever since.”

The variety that has characterised his acting career is no accident. The actor’s distinctive voice means you rarely forget you’re watching a Lithgow performance, and yet his calling card as a performer has been his adaptability. “The hope, as an actor, is to take on a role which is as different as possible from the last one, because then you have a better chance of surprising an audience.”

Lithgow recalls a period in the late 1980s and early 1990s in which he played back-to-back villains, in film and on the stage. “Some of them were psychopaths and some were just arrogant pricks. And I was getting a little tired of this, and anxious that this was my lot. I felt I was turning into a middle-aged Basil Rathbone. And it was in that moment that, out of nowhere, I was asked to play an alien in this completely farcical, nut-ball comedy called Third Rock from the Sun. And it couldn’t have been a better choice as it wrenched people out of their expectations.”

Lithgow may have missed out on the tent-pole roles but, in recent years, he has found himself in the running for “a whole new category of parts. I’m talking about ageing and infirmity: losing your stamina, your vitality and your viability. And, of course, there’s your mortality.” He felt it most keenly when playing Churchill in The Crown. “By the time my episodes were completed, Churchill was 80 years old, so he was 12 years older than I was when I was playing him. So here I was already feeling my age and playing somebody who’s really feeling his age.” Lithgow’s main concern on The Crown, however, was his height, given he is eight inches taller than Churchill. To get around it, the set designer built an extra-large door for 10 Downing Street. “Meanwhile, I developed a conspicuous stoop.”

During the pandemic, he passed the time writing a trio of poetry books lampooning Donald Trump called Dumpty. More recently, he set his sights on Rudy Giuliani, performing sketches on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in which he impersonated the former New York City mayor. “I’m glad you saw it, it’s my pride and joy,” Lithgow beams. But he is not keen on actors making pronouncements on politics: “It’s just not my mode at all. Maybe it’s spinelessness on my part, but I prefer a more devious method, which is satire. I’m an entertainer and so I see it as my job to entertain.”

‘The Old Man’ is on Disney Plus from September 28, disneyplus.com