On a bright, crisp London morning, John Lithgow is standing on a street in Hampstead, amiably waving passersby along as he waits for the photographer to set up. You can see the flash of recognition as they spot this tall, imposing man in a dark hat, smiling in their direction. The question is, how do they know him? He could be the suburban serial killer from Dexter, the conniving Cardinal Tremblay in Conclave, Churchill from The Crown, or the alien in 3rd Rock From the Sun. Lithgow’s career has spanned comedy to musical theater, depictions of murderers to monsters. “You cannot live in this world and consume culture without running into John Lithgow,” says the actor Aya Cash.
Cash is about to star alongside Lithgow in Mark Rosenblatt’s celebrated play about the children’s book author Roald Dahl, Giant, which arrives on Broadway in March after an acclaimed run in London last year. As Dahl, Lithgow captures a man who is witty, charming, and ferociously intelligent—and also one whose legacy is complicated by antisemitism and a streak of malice.
In Lithgow’s telling, director Nicholas Hytner imagined Lithgow in the role because he was the only “gangly actor he could think of that was old, bald, six-foot-four-inches tall, and had Dahl’s lantern jaw,” as Lithgow wrote in the program for the London production. Not at all, says Hytner. “John is brilliant,” he says. “Even though he is the sweetest man, he does have the most extraordinary talent for playing monstrous characters.”
It is Lithgow’s sweetness that is very much on display when we meet. “You dress me how I wish I had the courage to dress myself,” he says to the stylist, insisting on getting a group shot of the crew. He exclaims with delight when the photographer shows him a picture from his first movie—“All that hair!”—and shares his own snaps of his new grandson, and of the pop star Boy George, whom he met on one of his walks around Hampstead.
For the foreseeable future, Lithgow will be based in this north London neighborhood, with his historian wife Mary Yeager, while he is playing Albus Dumbledore in a new HBO Harry Potter series. He is reveling in being back in the British theater community, which he’s loved since he attended the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art on a Fulbright grant in 1967. Born in Rochester, New York, to a retired actor mother and a director father who specialized in Shakespeare, he first arrived in London after graduating from Harvard, and now lives mainly in Los Angeles, spending summers in Montana, where Yeager is from. “On my first night, I bumped into Claire Foy, who was my queen,” he says, referring to their roles in The Crown. “It was just wonderful.” His voice is a rich, rolling drawl, a legacy perhaps of childhood participation in his father’s productions. His 80th birthday party, held in London last year, was “one of the best parties I’ve ever been to because he’s made so many friends in Britain,” says Hytner. “And it’s absolutely not fake, because every now and then he will reveal an acerbic opinion. So you know the warmth, the generosity—it’s real.”
For Lithgow, the gathering had special significance. “As well as I know England, and as many friends as I have here, I still feel like a Yank.” He is in double exile, not only from Los Angeles and from his family—three children and four grandchildren, the youngest just four months old when we meet—but from his retreat in Montana. “It was the first summer since 1990 that I have not gotten there at all, which I really consider a tragedy,” he says with a wide smile.
By now we are sitting in The Holly Bush pub, and Lithgow’s pleasure in the restaurant and the food—sole for him, bass for me, and a glass of dry white wine for both of us—is again irresistible. “All these years I’ve been trying to convince Mary,” for many years a professor at UCLA, “to live in New York, and now here we are in London. She’s wonderfully tart on the subject.”
As he speaks, you sense the depth of his love for Yeager, whom he married 44 years ago after his first marriage ended in divorce. “Being married to an actor like John is living with wonderful surprises all the time,” she tells me. “The careers were challenging, because I was teaching full-time in Los Angeles and he was in New York, going back and forth. I don’t know how we did it, really, but we have reached the young age of 80 together.” Her relationship with Lithgow has thrived in their differences: “I have visited only three sets in his career, because when I see him as someone else, I can’t be there.” But she has seen Giant three times. “I just loved it every time I went.”
In the last few years Lithgow has packed in an extraordinary range of work, from Conclave to independent films like the sensitive Jimpa and the horror film The Rule of Jenny Pen. In February of last year, he reprised a performance in choreographer Christopher Wheeldon’s Carnival of the Animals for the New York City Ballet. “When we first did it in 2003, he would come to ballet class every day in a white T-shirt and black tights,” Wheeldon remembers. “John always wants to immerse himself fully in the worlds that he’s being asked to inhabit.”
That desire shows no signs of letting up. “It’s time to consider: How do I spend my last decade?” Lithgow says. “In the last few years, I’ve grown into my role as a character actor…old men dealing with these primal, mortal dilemmas.” Churchill was prime minister until he was 80, he notes; Roger Ailes, whom Lithgow played in the film Bombshell (2019), faced sexual harassment allegations at 76; and now Dahl takes his place among this roster.
Though Dahl is beloved as a children’s writer, his reputation has been colored by debate about whether you can separate a man’s art from his personality. His books, including James and the Giant Peach (1961), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), The BFG (1982), and Matilda (1988), have been adored by generations. Perhaps more than any other author, he shifted the morality tale of midcentury children’s literature to something more cheekily clever. His sensibility could veer into savagery; villains were often violent and hateful. And more seriously, he made statements that were antisemitic. In 2020 his family apologized for his antisemitic opinions, but he never did.
Giant, which won three Olivier Awards last year (including best new play), depicts a lunch in 1983 at Dahl’s home in the English village of Great Missenden. There, a representative from his American publisher (an invented figure played by Cash) and managing director of his British publisher, Tom Maschler (a real-life figure played by Elliot Levey), are meeting Dahl and his fiancée, Felicity “Liccy” Crosland (Rachael Stirling), to attempt to head off a disaster caused by a book review Dahl has written concerning Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
The lunch is imagined, but the review and the contentious opinions expressed by Dahl are real. In one line, quoted in the play, Dahl writes: “Never before in the history of man has a race of people switched so rapidly from being much-pitied victims to barbarous murderers.” A furor erupted. In Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl (2010), his biographer Donald Sturrock describes how even Crosland was shocked by Dahl’s excess. “His rhetoric, though sympathetic to the Palestinians, got the better of him,” Sturrock writes.
The first draft of Giant was written before the attacks of October 7, 2023, but the ongoing hostilities in the Middle East make the play’s historical arguments—about the rights of Israel, about the rights of Palestinians—seem frighteningly relevant. The strength of the play has less to do with its topicality, however, and more to do with its nuanced examination of bigotry and of Dahl’s generosity and wit, as well as his anger and venom. “What makes someone translate the world into literature, drama, or music isn’t the faculty that makes them a decent human being,” says Hytner.
“It’s an unbelievable role,” Lithgow says. “Like red meat…. There is this canard that Dahl didn’t actually like children. But, whether he loved them or not, he was passionate about entertaining them.” For Lithgow, the departure point was to recognize Dahl’s life was full of tragedy: His father died when he was very young; he was sent to boarding schools where he was abused; his first wife, the actor Patricia Neal, had a stroke and he nursed her back to health. A son suffered brain damage in a freak accident, and his seven-year-old daughter Olivia died from a complication of measles. “These terrible, terrible losses,” in Lithgow’s words, shaped his view of the world.
Lithgow has never shied from taking on roles that contemplate damage or prejudice. He received his first Oscar nomination for playing a deeply sympathetic transgender character in The World According to Garp (1982); in 2014’s tender Love Is Strange, his character was one part of a same-sex couple who marry after 39 years together. “You always feel a great sense of pride and relief when you’re grappling with what people should be thinking about,” he says.
We’re nearing the end of a lunch that has stretched across two hours. Lithgow, who describes himself as “kind of cocky about my youthfulness,” admits that it is a bit daunting filming Harry Potter. “There’s the makeup, hair, 20-pound costumes, high-heeled shoes, and long, long hours.” He pauses. “I hope I make it to the wrap party,” he laughs.
His buoyancy reasserts itself as he talks about the culture that showrunner Francesca Gardiner created, with some 200 young cast members “going to the greatest prep school—the Harry Potter backstage.” Creating that environment has counterbalanced the controversy around the series—open letters and social media posts accusing J.K. Rowling of transphobia. “I spend a lot of my life oblivious,” Lithgow says, explaining how the reaction took him aback, “and perhaps that is what enraged people who considered me a straight ally of all things genderfluid. Ultimately I am working on a project based on a remarkable canon of books that have meant so much to millions of people.”
Lithgow himself has written nine picture books for children. “My stuff is fun, entertaining, loopy, and interactive,” he says. “His children’s writing is entirely generous,” adds Hytner. In the end, Lithgow is a man who loves using his intelligence and skill to find his way into almost any role. It accounts for his career’s longevity. “We actors don’t choose nearly as much as you think we do,” he says, smiling wryly. “You wait for good things, good writing, good people…. You have to be a journeyman if it’s lousy and do everything you can to make it not lousy.”
Then something like Giant comes along. His smile this time is of pure pleasure. “I can’t wait to play this part again on Broadway. Everybody is gripped by this play, throttled by it. I just feel, Oh boy, I’ve caught a big fish.”
In this story: grooming, Hiroki Kojima; tailor, Nafisa Tosh.
Produced by North Six.