John Lithgow Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters

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 oh long clip

from Third Rock From The Sun,

ah and little bit from Footloose and ah Dexter.

Mm.

They showed Shrek and they went berserk.

[upbeat 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.

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.

[Movie Character] Run, run, run as fast as you can.

You can catch me,

I'm the gingerbread man.

[Gingerbread Man] You're a monster.

[Movie Character] I'm not the monster here,

you are.

You,

and the rest of that fairy tale trash

poisoning my perfect world.

Now tell me,

where are the others?

And 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.

Like he's very small.

You know,

you're big,

he's small.

There's a scene where the first time we would see him,

we would put him in a horse,

on a horse in armor and the armor is for a tall man.

But yeah,

when they take him off the horse,

they take him outta the armor,

it turns out he's short.

I thought that's sounds very funny.

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.

[upbeat music]

Third Rock From The Sun.

I absolutely loved Third Rock.

It was the creation of Bonnie and Terry Turner,

a comedy writing married couple whom I knew

from Saturday Night Live.

I had hosted it in three times in the eighties.

They presented this character who was brilliant

in every way except knew nothing

about human behavior or emotions.

And they 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 From The Sun had a very serious premise.

It's like figuring out how to be

an acceptable human being.

[laughing]

You know?

You know I have very few rules in my career,

but 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 wanna 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 nut ball 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 at just the moment when I was thinking,

I gotta do something other than these cornball villains.

Yes we can lie on our taxes.

[audience laughing]

I can't believe that no human

has ever thought of this before.

[audience laughing]

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.

[audience laughing]

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 that 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 grownups would love it

for a totally different reason,

but they would laugh at the same jokes.

[upbeat music]

Dexter.

I got a terrific pitch from Clyde Phillips.

He and John Goldwin,

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 gonna 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, 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.

[laughing]

So,

and then my agent and my lawyer got on my case and said,

John you gotta 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 Bigfoot movie.

The most persuasive thing was when I met with Bill Deer

and he showed me the renderings for Harry

and Steven Spielberg was plenty persuasive.

He was the executive producer.

So I said yes,

and 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's Circus.

Another actor playing the halfway thankless role

of a creature,

you never hear his voice.

And it's fun.

You know it's gonna be kookie,

but you've gotta 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 outta here,

to run away and he won't go

cuz 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 just how heart rendering is this gonna be?

Well I have a cousin 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 Hendersons,

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.

[upbeat music]

The Crown.

When we rehearsed The Crown,

we didn't even rehearse scenes.

We just talked.

We talked and talked about the history

and the relationships.

I asked about my height.

You know,

I'm six four.

Churchill was five foot seven.

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 Steven.

This was about with 10 of us just sitting around the table

and I made little melon balls and I stuck them in

and we did read a scene and I thought

it was extreme 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

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 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.

He's an eccentric.

They just loved the idea.

They said 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 Steven 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.

[upbeat music]

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 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,

hymn number 397.

We took it really seriously.

Just the emotional life of this family

motivating the role of Shaw Moore

and his particular almost tyrannical hold

he had on his 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.

[upbeat music]

Cliffhanger.

Your friend just had the most expensive

funeral in history,

now it's only you.

[Radio Operator] Come in rescue unit rescue.

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 like skiing on weekends and staying in a chalet

in Cortina d'Ampezzo and then two months in Rome

working at Cinecita' in a studio right next to where

Fellini was making a commercial for Bonco 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 Sly Stallone.

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 Qualen,

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 Service man,

maybe a South African,

or how about an English man.

No you know,

it was literally that.

And I said you know,

I don't think I can master South African overnight.

[laughing]

And I think we should make it something other than American.

Let's just go,

let's go the Allen Rickman route.

But it was fabulous.

You know,

I wish I had a nickel for every time someone's

asked me to say do you know what love is?

The payoff is sacrifice.

[gun sounds]

You know,

it was like the works.

[upbeat 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 a big,

a very early fork in the road.

That's when this 22 cast play,

22 actors,

men,

all set in a kind of semipro rugby locker team

and 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.

This scene 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 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.

[upbeat music]

Bombshell.

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 broadcast news,

with the creation of Fox News,

even though I think Fox News

would 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 Briton playing his wife,

cuz you believed absolutely in her love for him

and her devotion and loyalty to him.

The smartest thing I did was to track down

an old friend of mine from the seventies

who used to work as Roger Ailes 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 had something he didn't want to have to do.

It was the same with the Trinity Killer.

[upbeat music]

The Old Man.

Copy 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.

[door closing]

I've got another name that we have to track down,

but I want you guys to do it,

no one else.

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 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.

[crying]

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 the payoff is simply wonderful.

And in this past year it's been Jeff and De Niro

and DiCaprio and Julianne Moore.

That's been my bumper crop 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,

they're past and they're 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 COVID.

It 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.

It's just a wonderful guy to act with,

of course,

but also just to get to know.

Interestingly enough,

we 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 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,

reach the punchline,

and we would hear the laughter of about 40 people.

[laughing]

[upbeat music]

M. Butterfly.

I read this script and it was like,

my God I 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 Wong so much in tune with each other

and BD Wong in his very first Broadway show.

He won every single award there was to win

for playing Song Liling,

the man whom I've 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 like an explosion going off.

[upbeat music]

The World According To Garp.

I'm sorry,

I mean all I did was just touch her.

Oh it's all right.

She can't bear to have a man's hand touching her.

Boy she got problems.

Yes she does.

I mean it's gonna 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 really kind of

the essential friend 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.

He said it just won't work.

It'll be just too much,

pushing it too much.

But eight months passed.

I was in despair,

cuz 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 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 eighties,

Bob Fosse and Brian DePalma.

A lot of these great old timers came out of fifties

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 Undercheck

sort of wandering around figuring out everything

before 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 ah,

was playing the damsel in distress.

Ooh!

[kids shouting]

Kill him, kill him, kill him.

Help, help, help.

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 not that used to the camera.

I feel that I was,

I just didn't was I overdue?

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 it 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,

it 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 Roe v. Wade and abortion right now,

how it's been politicized and how fanatical people

are on the subject.