John Lithgow
Appearances
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
And I was the only person they could even imagine playing Dick Solomon because it had to be an alien who was completely clueless but could try anything.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
Oh, it was a wonderful cast. Jane Curtin. Jane Curtin, of course. Yeah, and the long process of casting it was so exciting. Was it? Did it take a long time? A long time, because in each case, we had to figure out just what is this comic idea? Right. You know, a general who has to inhabit the body of a woman became Kristen Johnston.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
And the network would be like, wait a second, what? Well, they had already, it was already a go. They came to me to pitch it, and that's exactly what Terry Turner said. He said, well, it's about this family of aliens. And of course, I had been sort of tricked in. Go on. I'd been tricked into the meeting.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
I thought I was just having a meeting with my friends, Bonnie and Terry, but Carsey and Werner, they were all there. And I thought, my God, how do I say no to this fast enough? But in five minutes, he had brought me around. It just seemed suddenly like, what? in the world have I been waiting for?
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
Well, it was a freaky situation because when we finally produced the show, we had done the pilot and it was picked up all right by NBC, but it was picked up as a mid-season replacement. So we had done 13 of them before anybody had seen it. And, you know, well into this, we had realized, oh, my God, we really have something here. We felt like we had the whole diamond in our pocket.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
I mean, you know how cocky you can get when you have been working hard enough on something, you persuade yourself it's great. But we were able to sort of frontline all the great episodes. We had had those 13 episodes to figure out the funny, to figure out what this show was.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
You know, in so many cases, you go back and see the original pilot episode of a great show like Seinfeld, and you realize they hadn't found it yet.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
We had 13 chances to find it, and it was released mid-season in January, and bam, just hit like that.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
It just gives you a chance to find it. And you had the added challenge. We at least had a studio audience. And when they laughed, we knew we were funny.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
Well, as I say, I did have this head start with my curious upbringing. Yeah. And it's true that a lot more people flow in our direction than the other way around. But I think it's because Shakespeare really is the spine of the English school of acting. And I had done a lot of Shakespeare. Yeah. And that's not true of many American actors. Right.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
But in the other direction, there's plenty of American culture. I mean, you get Australian actors and English actors who you can't believe how authentic their language is. I know. Yeah. They don't even need a dialect coach by now. They've been watching friends all their whole lives.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
Well, it was kind of astonishing that they even asked me to do it. But, I mean, so much of it was the way they situated Churchill in that story. It wasn't a historical drama. It was like almost a family drama. It was an extremely intimate and personal look at Churchill with all of his eccentricities and... and infirmities and insecurities. And that's very much what I took off from.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
It was very scary, except that all the English actors welcomed me in. They had more confidence in me than I had in myself. And I just went to work at it. I found, you know, the most interesting thing I did in all my research, what I found was reading all about him as a child and as a boy and as a young man,
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
tremendously insecure, growing up a failure with very neglectful parents and just feeling like a screw-up, like there had been so many expectations of him that he would, so that so many things in his life were pure overcompensation. So you approach your old age, and to me, all the characteristics you had in childhood kick in. I sort of worked from that.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
And kind of constantly recovering one from another like a parabola. You know, I asked Stephen Daldry, the director, why he had cast me. I said yes, and we sat down for breakfast. And his first response was, well, Churchill's mother was an American. And that's true. She was this Baltimore aristocrat. That's right. So there was as much difference between –
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
an American Winston Churchill and Englishmen who are not Winston Churchill. He was quite an anomaly, and I think that came in handy.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
Jay hated that one. I felt like, you know, it was actually Footloose. I go back and look at Footloose now and I think, that was a really good movie.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
There was so much meat on the bone. Herbert Ross, the director, and Dean Pitchford, who wrote it, they really took this story seriously. And I felt I had to take this character, Reverend Shaw, more seriously. And I, who have virtually no religion in me, I actually sought out a preacher. Oh, really?
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
In the Yellow Pages, I looked up an assembly of God ministry and called up and sought spiritual advice. Wow, wow.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
But I felt I had to find someone who truly believed what he was doing if I'm going to imitate it.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
Yeah, just incredible. What a beautiful movie. That was a fabulous job. That was two months in Rome with Stanley Tucci and Isabella Rossellini. Amazing.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
Well, look, Jason, we're all actors. You know perfectly well we don't do nearly as much choosing as everybody thinks we do. You just wait for good things and good people and good writing. And it's very rare. I honestly feel like... Almost all the roles that you just rattled off, almost embarrassing, it's so complimentary. But none of them are things that I sought out or even knew about.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
I was somebody else's brainstorm. And it's like, I remember Jonathan Demme did a little television film years ago called... who am I this time, about some hapless community theater actor whom everybody kept coming to to play. The roles have always been a surprise to me.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
Well, kind of. And I'm game. I guess I'm best known for being ready, willing, and able.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
And it's very cockeyed. I just saw the premiere of a film I did with Jeffrey Rush last year called The Rule of Jenny Penn. which I urge you to look up. It's about to be released. It's a very narrow release because it's a very bold and crazy film, a psychological suspense thriller, in which I play by far the most outrageous character I've played since Dr. Lizardo.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
And he is the monster in a horror movie. He really is. He's a crazy guy who's out to torment Geoffrey Rush. in a senior care facility in New Zealand. I mean, this is a crazy film, and it is great. I read that script. You know, this wonderful young director in New Zealand named James Ashcroft, he said, I've got to have you play this part. And I was terrified of doing this. I'm like, God.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
take the jump off the cliff i think it usually comes from a conversation or a zoom call with the filmmaker if there's a matter of trust you do it and and i've been wrong before god knows we've all been wrong before but this like i read i read jenny penn and i thought this is horrific who isn't in the world is going to want to see this
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
And I spoke to this guy, James Ashcroft, for an hour and a half. And he just was so persuasive. I just saw so far beyond my first reaction to the script. It's just a matter of being wide open to trusting somebody and being ready to take a chance. Because God knows there are plenty of times when it doesn't work out. But you've got to be bold.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
I just think there's so many factors in every case, and it always surprises you one way or another. It's basically, is this going to be good? Is this going to be fun? Are people going to want to see this? And am I working? Is it good writing with good people? I always say the only hard acting is bad writing.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
Having to share 12 hours a day with a bunch of jerks is not fun. And you just try to steer clear of that. Sometimes you can't avoid it. Sometimes you take things for the wrong reasons and you pay for it.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
That's so sweet of you to ask, Jason. That's a huge factor. I've been married 43 years to my wife, Mary, who's a UCLA professor of history, economic and business history. We are an unlikely couple. God never meant professors and actors to get married because our lives are so different. She is constantly having to adapt. to these crazy right-angle turns I keep taking.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
I mean, just think, being asked to play Dumbledore is contemplating literally years in England. I know. And that just disrupts everything. Right. We have two kids. I have a third by my first marriage, and I have three grandkids with another on the way. And... You know, going to England, how are we going to go back and forth? Their lives are very installed here.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
Family is hugely important to me, and we are quite exclusive. You know, we're a kind of quiet little family, and we get wrenched all over the place. So for a long time, when I was asked to do a play in New York, My first reaction was, where are we going to live? Because I was so used to house sits and sublets and apartment hotels. We finally just splurged and bought a beautiful New York apartment.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
So just so I won't have that reaction, I can think of living a wonderful life in New York when I'm doing a New York play. And I never want to stop doing that. By the way, Sean, I have to ask you, are you going to play Oscar Levant again? Because I missed it. And at the Barbican this summer in London. I will see you. I will see you. Oh, good. I will be there. That'd be great.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
I will be there in the first weeks of Dumbledore. Oh, that's great. And I'm doing a play in the West End that you will be able to see. It's called, I did it at the Royal Court in the fall, and it's moving to the West End in April. What's it called? It's called Giant, a play about Roald Dahl. Oh, wow. Great. Which was a smash hit at the Little Royal Court Theater. But I will finally be able to see.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
That'd be great. You will not be disappointed. It's just so cool. No, because I saw little clips of it and heard so many friends rave about it. I was so upset I had missed it. It's on my list of those things that I kick myself.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
It was for The Changing Room, an English play by David Story, which incidentally was first produced at the Royal Court Theatre, where we did this play, Giant. So this was full of coming out.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
Was there a little bit of that? Well, it was astonishing. I mean, The Changing Room, it was a play that we did, it was the American premiere of this extraordinary play about an English North of England rugby team. It takes place in their changing room. Sort of super realistic. I'll read for that. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
Halfway through my character, there was a scene that won me that Tony Award. I was brought off the pitch halfway through the match, covered in mud and very, very badly injured. smashed nose, blood running down my face. I was taken offstage to an offstage bathtub, scrubbed all the mud off, and was brought back onstage by the equipment manager. I was stark naked and wet and glistening.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
He toweled me down and dressed me up like I was a baby. A long scene in silence. All you heard was the sound of the crowd roaring offstage. And at a certain point, he hoisted me to my feet and hauled my underpants up. These sort of pathetic briefs, you know. We were all these working class clods, really. But it was a very moving scene. This character was completely out of it.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
I was like inert, could barely see. And one night, he hoisted me up, tugged up my briefs, and my dick was sort of hanging out, just out the bottom, just like, and in front of, you know, 800 people, all sort of stricken in silence. And I thought, how in the world am I going to do this? I'm supposed to be completely inert.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
And I just sort of, thinking nobody would notice, I sort of reached down and sort of flicked it inside my pants. I would say that was by far the most embarrassing. That's a good one. After the voting period had already lapsed. I would remind you, I was given a Tony Award for that.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
Oh, yes. There are lots. I ordinarily don't tell people out of regard for the ones who ended up playing it. But I would say I must have the record for the most Tony Awards won by actors in roles that I turned down.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
There are literally, I think I'm in double figures by now. Wow. And a couple of those do indeed completely torment me. Yeah. Wow. But I have to think that I played a few roles and had great acclaim, and others have turned it down.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
You caught him on a good day, John. Eat my heart out, you know. No, but you're absolutely right. That is a beautiful way to look at it. And as I say, I never tell people that I play... You know, actually, I got a Tony... Sorry, an Oscar nomination for Terms of Endearment replacing another actor. Wow.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
They had shot a couple of scenes with Deborah Winger in Terms of Endearment, and they had to let him go because it just wasn't right. He just didn't feel okay about Deborah Winger having an adulterous affair. So they came after me thinking I'm the perfect adulterer, apparently. And I have never revealed this actor's name just out of respect for him.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
Even though there were perfectly good reasons that I just explained why he wasn't right for the part.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
Let's get Lithgow. You know, when we did Third Rock, we had something that I called the Lithgow rules. If anybody was ever replaced or dropped from the script, if the part was written out or whatever, that actor would have to get two phone calls, one from me and one from our producers, just to say it wasn't you.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
Here are the reasons why. Because, you know, it just has happened so many times in my experience that people are just cut out of films or dropped from... And they don't hear from anybody. They don't hear anything except from a casting director calling an agent, calling an actor and saying, it didn't work out.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
yeah and that's so crushing it is you know it's just because there's always 10 re 10 perfectly good reasons for some for things like that that have nothing to do with the talent yeah yeah and we and we actors we can take it we know there's reasons for it yeah so there's no but we're soft we're soft we need to it is that it is that i've been well i've been you guys probably have too i mean i've been fired from jobs before or my character was written out and i've had and then there have been people who were really kind of mentioned before
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
And it happens to everyone. I would say this to young actors over and over. It happens to all of us. And it had never happened to me. But I was finally, oh my God, I went to the premiere of a film in which I had seven lovely scenes. And I went to the premiere. I was just in New York, and I saw, oh, there's a premiere of this film that I'm in. I'll call them and go to the premiere.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
Well, I sat down and watched my first scene, and it was cut in half. And I thought, well, that's too bad. Well, we'll wait for the next one. The next one was cut from the film. The next one was cut. The next one was cut. All that was left of my character was about the 30 seconds of my first scene in which I had stated the premise of this romantic comedy.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
And I said, God. I sat there with my two kids and just experienced what I'd always told actors. It happens to all of us. Yeah, yeah.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
Oh, you guys, it's real. I've always loved this show and I was very honored to be on it.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
Thank you so much. Well, I'm sure I'll see you in the next 48 hours at something.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
Yeah. Is that true? Well, yes, it's true. I was a theater rat. Actually, the first acting I ever did, I was about two years old, one of Nora's children in a doll's house with my father playing Torvald. Wow. And I remember absolutely nothing about it, but I'm told I was very good. That was the beginning of things.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
Sean, I'm going to see Oscar. Good night, Oscar. The great news. That's what I take away from today.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
Oh, and wait, I haven't told you about my history with Bennett. I was going to go do a deep dive on Bennett Barbecue. Yeah, look at that. Here's the portrait by John Lithgow. You did that? That's my painting of Bennett, yeah. Isn't that pretty good?
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
You look more like the painting than ever. It's like the portrait of Dorian Gray. I was John's muse. How are you guys connected?
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"John Lithgow"
Bennett was like one of my daughter's very good friends at Seeds UES School when they were about seven, eight, nine years old. And I know Bennett's folks all these years.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
Amazing. Circles within circles. But his parents, I put up for a fundraising dinner. I offered to paint a portrait of your child. And they bid, and they won, and so I painted Bennett's portrait. That's crazy. It took me about seven years to paint it. It was a source of great guilt. But I finally showed up. That's amazing.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
You see, I told you I always wanted to be an artist, and it turns out it's not too late. Pretty good one.
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"John Lithgow"
Oh, well, thank you, Bennett. I'm glad we squeezed that in. Yes, absolutely. So good to see you, John. Okay, you too. Bye-bye now. Bye, guys.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
How great was that show? Fantastic. I love that show. I love Laurie Metcalf.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
No, from a very young age I thought I should be an artist. I wanted to be an artist. I sort of had a facility and parents that encouraged that and bought me wonderful art supplies and I had great public school art teachers and I was very serious about it. Did it start with drawing? drawing and painting and printmaking.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
But meantime, just as a, like, my dad produced summer Shakespeare festivals, and that was my summers, was hanging around, watching rehearsals, being in the plays as, like, a fairy in Midsummer Night's Dream or a foot soldier. In fact, by the time I was a teenager, I was playing bits and pieces in Shakespeare in repertory, like seven plays a summer. A crazy childhood in Ohio.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
Not at all. I mean, you're right. I had the great good luck to just hear that language all the time. But it is learning another language. Or at least feeling that it is a natural way of communicating. Right. You certainly can't paraphrase. No. You have to be precise.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
Although, you know, there's wonderful Shakespeare that completely breaks all the rules. There was a wonderful production of Much Ado About Nothing in New York in my 1970s theater days with Sam Waterston and Kathleen Widows. And it was set in Teddy Roosevelt's America. Oh, interesting. It was kind of ragtime music. It contemporized the dialogue a bit?
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
Yeah, coming back from World War I. And it was as spirited, it captured the spirit of Shakespeare better than most productions.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
She was, but I never really knew her as an actor. She retired early and just sort of kept track of the family. I mean, we literally lived in about eight different places. Wow. We were like a vaudeville troupe, except it was Shakespeare.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
English, history, and literature. Very scholarly major, but I fell in with the theater gang immediately, and that's when it happened. That's when I decided. You know, I was already like a seasoned actor by pure osmosis.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
I had just been around actors that I and my siblings were like best friends with all these young theater actors, mainly sort of graduates from Carnegie Tech who'd come down to do my dad's Shakespeare festivals. I had lived in that world, so it just came very naturally. And I was a campus star at Harvard.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
And if you're a star at anything at Harvard, you'd better go with the flow because that is a competitive place. I wasn't good at anything but acting there.
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"John Lithgow"
Did they go into the same field? No. Both my sisters were teachers and wonderful teachers. And they directed student theater. Oh, really? And they were... older brother was an airline pilot. Wow. Who then retired and worked for the FAA.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
Oh, my God. Charter flights. I was never in an airplane that he was piloting. No? On purpose? Maybe that was against the rules. I don't know.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
First flight. My favorite airline pilot story, beyond my brother's many, many stories, when I was in World According to Garp playing Roberta Muldoon. Amazing. Way ahead of its time. I wasn't cadging for applause, gentlemen.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
Well, at a certain point early in the flight, the flight attendant came back, this woman in a Delta pilot's uniform, and she crouched next to me and said how much she appreciated me as Roberta Muldoon and said, Roberta and I have a lot in common. Ah. And it was one of many amazing transactions with trans people way back. This was 40 years ago.
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"John Lithgow"
John, just while we're on the flight thing, John, do you remember we met on a flight?
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"John Lithgow"
Yeah. I would have kept that. In fact, I always regretted that I hadn't recalled that when we actually worked together, because we did work together. We sort of did and didn't when we did live in front of a studio audience.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
I was on the same evening as Will and Jason, although they were in The Facts of Life and I was in Different Strokes. So we didn't really interact except at the parties.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
No, but that was the first time we met. Yeah. And, Sean, you and I used to be neighbors on the lot at Radford. That's right. Third Rock. Yeah. Back in the day.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
I absolutely loved it. Just, you know, I consider those... It was like the six happiest years as an actor. Yeah. Yeah. Just interacting with this great writing staff, the Third Rock staff was so terrific and it was so inane. Just spending all your time figuring out the funny and entertaining a studio audience on just like three days rehearsal.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
Yeah, and Third Rock, of course, was just flat-out nutball farce. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was great. I never thought I would do that. In fact, something happened, and I forgot it ever happened. I was asked to be Frasier on Cheers. Oh, wow. Oh, my God, I didn't know that. And I turned it down out of hand.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
I honestly didn't even remember it had happened until Jimmy Burroughs reminded me years and years later when he directed Third Rock. Just because at that point, you know, I had a few movies under my belt. I had a couple of Oscar nominations.
SmartLess
"John Lithgow"
It was so beneath my dignity. I was such an asshole, a pretentious asshole. But, you know... I worked on Saturday Night Live. I hosted Saturday Night Live three times in the 80s. And two of those times, Bonnie and Terry Turner were on the writing staff. They pitched it to me. And when they pitched it to me, suddenly it seemed like so much fun.