John Lithgow Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters | GQ

i gave a commencement speech two days ago and they showed a little series of clips of me when they introduced me you know they were watching a long clip from third rock from the sun ah and a little bit from footloose and ah dexter they showed shrek and they went berserk [Music] shrek you know you're just in a sound booth giving a bunch of raw material to a bunch of strangers behind a glass booth uh the only person with me was one of their staff who was there only to feed me my lines i never acted with eddie murphy or mike myers or cameron diaz i only acted with him and he did such a great job as the gingerbread man that he became the voice of the gingerbread man there's a little piece of trivia for you run run run as fast as you can you can't catch me i'm the gingerbread man you're a monster i'm not the monster here you are you and the rest of that fairytale trash poisoning my perfect world now tell me where are the others i went and recorded stuff and i met with these animators and the directors and they were delightful people but they would describe these visual jokes to me like the funniest thing you already like he's he's very small you know we forget you're big he's small there's a scene where the first time we see him we would put him in a horse on a horse in armor and the armor is for a tall man but when they take him off the horse they take him out of the arm it turns out he's short i thought that sounds very funny uh like who are these people i was the only actor who had ever visited them and i walked through this place this is still a year before the film came out to all these computer cubicles where all these animators were working one was in charge of nothing but milk being poured out of a pitcher into a glass one was in charge of only leaves blowing in the wind one was in charge of mud when a wheel went through the mud working on this for months in this technology that not many people had used yet and i suddenly realized i am in something history making and i didn't even know it third rock from the sun i absolutely loved third rock it was uh it was the creation of bonnie and terry turner a comedy writing married couple whom i knew from saturday night live i'd hosted it in three times in the 80s they presented this character who was brilliant in every way except knew nothing about human behavior or emotions and they had constantly got everything wrong but he could try out anything he could sing cole porter in close harmony he could play the piano after just spending about seven seconds figuring out the difference between the black and the white keys at heart third rock and the sun had a very serious premise it's like figuring out how to be an acceptable human being you know you know there i have very few rules in my career but the the last one i hadn't broken was never do an episodic tv and my agent called and said your friends bonnie and terry are in town and they want to have breakfast with you and i said oh great so i went off to have breakfast with bonnie and terry at the four seasons it fell to terry to pitch this series to me and the first sentence he spoke was it's about this group of four aliens and about five minutes later he'd persuaded me to do this it was such a fantastic premise for a a nutball character actor and they had written it with me in mind and if i hadn't done it they wouldn't have done it this was just the moment when i was thinking i got to do something other than these these cornball villains yes we can lie on our taxes i can't believe that no human has ever thought of this before okay wait a second you guys what if we get caught how can we get caught all those other dopes out there are telling the truth about their taxes the writing staff was so incredible they were so smart they had such a great combination of smart and stupid in their humor it was just this pendulum swing they went back and forth a lot of them had come out of the simpsons families would watch these together and the kids would love it for one reason and the grown-ups would love it for a totally different reason but they would laugh at the same jokes dexter i got a terrific pitch from clyde phillips he and john goldwyn the producer sat with me at caa and banished my agents they said no nobody else can hear this and you can't tell anybody about this but we are going to tell you about the trinity killer where no one said they were thankful for me did you jonah and they told me the entire detailed unfolding story but i kept on saying well wait a minute whatever what happened to the baby you know things like that and they would have to tell me and i would kept on saying more and more more to the point where they had given me way way much more information than they intended but they were trying to persuade me to take the part and having heard all of that i said no i won't tell anybody any of this but no i'm not doing that so and then my agent and my lawyer got on my case and said john you've got to do this so i said yes and had a great time doing it but the curious thing was i gathered i met all these wonderful actors in dexter this whole company of actors they had kept all this information from them so i was the only person who knew harry and the hendersons i read it and couldn't quite take it seriously it just struck me as a big bigfoot movie the most persuasive thing was when i met with bill dear and he showed me the renderings for for harry and steven spielberg was plenty persuasive he was the executive producer so i said yes and uh yes it was a bigfoot film but it was as good as it gets for one thing there was a beautiful actor named kevin peter hall who played harry and he was like andy circus another actor playing the halfway thankless role of of a creature you never hear his voice it's fun you know it's going to be kooky but you've got to play it for real there's a moment in toward the end of harry and the hendersons that every kid remembers where harry is in great danger and i have to tell him to get the hell out of here to run away and he won't go because he wants to stay with our family leave us alone i pretend to be furious with him and i smack him in the face and he looks at me with this terrible feeling of betrayal and you know we intended this to be a heart-rending moment but we were still in this big bigfoot movie so how just how heart-rending is this gonna be well i have a cousin who's who went through a very unhappy divorce and the nine-year-old boy acted out really and resisted and he was terribly upset the seven-year-old girl had no response at all like a zombie until she saw harry and the innocence and that scene she just exploded with grief and she was beside herself for weeks and it unlocked her and she it was something she absolutely had to go through the crown when we rehearsed the crown we didn't even rehearse scenes we just talked we talked and talked about the history and uh the relationships i asked about my height you know i'm 6'4 churchill was 5 foot 7. i said what do we do about that and steven said just ignore it don't think about it at all he felt the same way about makeup it's like just give the audience little credit you don't have to give them total accuracy in the course i was a little concerned that we were spending so little time talking about the actual performances here i brought an apple and the apple baller to the rehearsal and i said here let me just show you something that i have been working on stephen this was about with 10 of us just sitting at the table and i made little melon balls and i stuck them in and when we did read a thing and i thought it was extremely effective but bit by bit my entire mouth was filling up with like apple cider that was the end of that but they were way ahead of me they had already thought about making these uh silicon plumpers whatever for have we not enough qualified pilots to take him where he needs to go no he wants to fly himself it's a boyhood dream it's what he's always wanted why was government not consulted because it's a private matter and i am in favor nothing you or his royal highness do is a private matter and the father of the future king of england risking his life needlessly is quite unacceptable please i went to drama school in london many years ago so there's this sort of english thread i'm i'm about as english as an american actor can get to a point of pure pretension you know when you think about churchill he's as different from every other englishman as an any american is it's he's an eccentric they just loved the idea they said we've all we've seen all the sirs play churchill we've seen burton do it and albert finney do it and there was a whole raft of them that year and all of them englishmen churchill's mother was an american for one thing that's the first thing stephen told me when i asked him why'd you cast me and he had this affinity for america i may be terrified of playing this role but they think it's a great idea so i'll go with that footloose you know i'm not a religious person i grew up in eight different places there was never even the opportunity to become part of a religious community even if my family were so inclined which they weren't but i i felt i had to find someone and i went and got some spiritual counseling from a very very kind and empathetic and smart man who talked to me about his deep relationship with jesus and i really needed to hear that missing from your lives praise the lord in singing we took it really seriously just the emotional life of this family motivating the role of shaw moore and his particular almost tyrannical hole he had on this community finding the roots of that it was because his own son had died in a car accident on a crazy night and he was not going to let this happen again and it made him far too protective of his daughter and his religiosity took second place to this just emotional inner emotional life and his fear we took that film seriously and a lot of other people did too cliffhanger [Music] your friend just had the most expensive funeral in history now it's only you i have to tell you cliffhanger was the best job i ever had we were four months in italy i worked maybe a fourth of the time we were high up in the dolomites for two months and it's like skiing on weekends and staying in a chalet in cortina dampenzo and then two months in rome working at china chita in a studio right next to where fellini was making a commercial for banco di roma you know pretty much my own flat out action film and i was even in the big climactic brawl with the hero and the hero was sliced alone it was like wow at the total top of the action film food chain it was like as good as it gets do you know what real love is crystal no sacrifice as eric quaylen i had no idea as a matter of fact i think i had been cast as the sort of second villain my role was supposed to be christopher walken but he bailed and they sort of moved me up like the night before it was so we and i remember sitting around with rennie harlan trying to decide what nationality eric qualen was was he an american secret serviceman maybe a south africa south african or how about an englishman you know it was literally that and i said you know i i don't think i can master south african overnight and i think we should make it something other than american let's just go let's go the alan rickman route but it was fabulous you know i wish i had a nickel for every time someone's asked me to to say do you know what love is the payoff is sacrifice you know it was like the works [Music] the changing room i came out from under the wing of my dad who had hired me for my first acting work and i was not getting hired as an actor at all but i was getting hired as a director in fact i was even offered the job of associate artistic director of a very estimable rep company and i accepted it i just was getting nowhere and two weeks later that long wharf job came through and i pulled out pissed them off no end but that was the big a very early fork in the road that's when this 22 cast play 22 actors men all set in a is kind of semi-pro rugby locker team and a changing room in the north of england of course it was quite notorious because of these 22 actors 15 of us at some fleeting moment appeared stark naked i was the most nude of any of these men the scene where i was uh where i was injured i had to be sort of the mud had to be bathed off me off stage then i was brought back glistening and naked and and dried and dressed as if i were a little baby it was an extraordinary scene but right out of the gate appearing that nude on broadway that was almost more than my mother could handle on the other hand i've appeared nude about five times since then in an extremely varied career and every time i've won some major award so let that be a lesson to all you young actors [Music] bombshells i hate being the story i'll call trump you go on vacation stay above it all he won't dent your ratings nobody stops watching because of a conflict they stop watching when there isn't one there was a reflexive revulsion to even the name roger ailes not just because of his misconduct charges but because he represented everything that's gone wrong with with broadcast news with the creation of fox news even though i think fox news would not not be quite the horror it is today if roger ailes was still alive the challenge was sympathy for the devil you know finding what it is about this human being that is the source of both his power and people's loyalty and even affection for him my great confederate was connie britton playing his wife because you believed absolutely in her love for him and her devotion and loyalty to him smartest thing i did was to track down an old friend of mine from the 70s who used to work as roger ale's producing partner when roger wanted to be a new york theater producer not many people know that but it's true he even produced the premier production of hot l baltimore pulitzer prize-winning play and i talked to my old friend steve about roger back in those days and steve was a very good friend of his loved his company loved his sense of humor said he was a man capable of sharing a laugh for 20 seconds you know but that was invaluable you sort of had to have that information you know the most fascinating thing about doing a person with an ugly compulsion is to contemplate how he felt about his own compulsion surely he it's something he didn't want to have to do it was the same with the trinity killer [Music] the old man copying me on all the raw data you pull in i should have my eyes on everything as well and do me a favor close the door i've got another name that we have to track down but i want you guys to do it no one else okay he is a company man the thing that's fascinating about him is the enormous emotional baggage he carries to me there's a great tension between his impassive public face and the way he has to operate in his job with the fbi he and his wife have suffered a catastrophic loss they've lost a grown-up son and a daughter-in-law in a car accident and they've inherited a five-year-old grandson to take care of that's the very first that's information you learn in the very first scene you see him you see him playing with chuck with a child sitting on the edge of a bathtub sobbing for mom and dad in case somebody figures out how to bring them back someday finally i got to work with jeff and it was completely fantastic you know you get to be my age and you finally get to work with a lot of people you've been waiting to work with for a long long time and and and the payoff is simply wonderful and in in this past year it's been jeff and de niro and dicaprio and julianne moore that's that's been my bumper crop of of new colleagues this year but jeff is the best of all i mean we had the best time because you really do get a scene in which you learn everything about them their past and their present and their current crisis and it's a long long scene in a car driving across the moroccan desert which happened to be in santa clarita we couldn't go to morocco as it turned out because of covet took us six days to shoot this scene so that's six days in a car with jeff bridges and he was so much fun just a wonderful guy to act with of course but also just to get to know interestingly enough we had we had mics on so the entire crew of about 40 people were basically listening to jeff and i become old old friends over the course of six days we would we would be talking very very earnestly and intimately about issues in our lives and then suddenly realizing wait a minute we're sharing this with everyone or there was an entire afternoon where we were telling jokes and we would tell each other a joke reached the punch line and we would hear the laughter of about 40 people and butterfly i read this script and it was like my god it just like caught fire in my hands wildly theatrical and full of so many challenging ideas but rehearsing that play that fast and that boldly with you know with him and david huang so much in tune with each other and bd wong in his very first broadway show he he won every single award there was to win for for playing sunglee ling the man whom i fall in love with without knowing he's a man we performed it in washington dc at the national theater a theater way too big for it it got a terrible review in the washington post the only paper that matters in dc it called the play preposterous and in fact the premise is preposterous we were convinced we were take taking a dog to new york and it was like new york audiences had been waiting for this play for 20 years it was it was like an explosion going off the world according to garf i'm sorry i mean all i did was just touch her it's all right she can't bear to have a man's hand touching her or she got problems yeah she does i mean it's going to be kind of hard to avoid being touched isn't it yes it is that's why she's here my name's roberta i'm garp you're jenny's son yes i am oh i just finished reading your novel i think it's wonderful i adore i had read the novel like everybody else never occurred to me this would be a movie it struck me as a book you couldn't possibly make a movie out of particularly because of one absolutely key scene just thought you just can't do this scene in a movie it was a very radical choice to make this this really kind of the essential friend of the of the hero a transsexual as they were referred to then interestingly enough when i first met with george hill to just basically read for him he ruled me out immediately for being too tall particularly because i was so much taller than robin williams she just won't work it'll be just too much pushing it too much but eight months passed i was in despair because i thought i was the only one to play this part i went back and i screen tested for it with three other actors among them jeff daniels by the way just by chance i had read this book called conundrum the memoir of jan morris the travel writer who had actually undergone trans surgery and and i just sort of spouted the things that i remembered from reading this book two years before and he was like my god you new york actors you do so much research not at all it was such a privilege to work with george roy hill he's one of three or four of those mount rushmore kind of filmmakers i got to work with back in the back in the 80s bob fosse and brian de palma a lot of these great old-timers came out of 50s television where they rehearsed actors to perform live in front of the whole nation we simply rehearsed it like a play with george and his cinematographer merrick undercut sort of wandering around figuring out everything before the even the first day of shooting and i remember the first scene i shot was a scene in which i as roberto was tied to a tree and garp and his kids were clowning around with me and i was playing the damsel in distress [Applause] [Music] and at the end of that day of shooting i went to george and i said george rehearsing is one thing this i mean i'm i'm not that used to the camera i i feel that i was i just didn't i was i overd was it too much just i mean how do you feel and he said well i'm glad you brought that up and my heart just sank into my stomach and then he roared with laughter and he said ah no i was fine if there's ever any problem i'll be sure to tell you and that was like the last direction he ever gave me he was just such an old-timer such an old marine the movie is first of all he was so ahead of its time you see it now and you think my god this was a movie made for right now i mean just think of what's happened on the whole issue of robi wade and abortion right now how it's been politicized and how fanatical people are on the subject

Channel: GQ

Views: 1,134,056

Keywords: 3rd rock from the sun, celebrity, dexter, farquaad, films and television, films and tv, footloose, gq, gq iconic characters, gq john lithgow, gq magazine, iconic, iconic characters, john lithgow, john lithgow dexter, john lithgow films, john lithgow garp, john lithgow gq, john lithgow iconic characters, john lithgow movies, john lithgow roger ailes, john lithgow shrek, lithgow, lord farquad, lord faruaad, m butterfly, the crown, the old man, the world according to garp

Id: xI44Aeol9j0

Length: 27min 23sec (1643 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 01 2022