Sunday Sitdown with Willie Geist - John Lithgow

Episode Date: December 22, 2019

When you hear the name John Lithgow, you may call to mind a number of different movies, TV series or plays, including “The Changing Room,” “Terms of Endearment,” and “Third Rock from the Sun.” In this week’s “Sunday Sitdown,” Willie Geist talks to the Emmy and Tony award-winning actor about that prolific career on both stage and screen, and his latest transformation into former “Fox News” chief Roger Ailes for the highly-anticipated new movie “Bombshell.” Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hey guys, Willie Geist here with another episode of the Sunday Sit Down podcast. My thanks as always for clicking and listening along. I think I got another great one for you this week in Tony and Emmy winner, John Lithgow. One of the most respected actors anywhere in the world. A guy who's been doing this for about 40 years in Hollywood. He started off as a stage actor in New York City, won a Tony Award in the first production he ever was in on Broadway at 27 years old. And his charmed professional. professional life went on from there. He in the 1980s, of course, did a bunch of movies for which he was nominated for Academy Awards. The world according to Garp was one of them, terms of endearment, of course, and who could forget, footloose, John Lithgow and footloose. Then comes TV in the 1990s. You'll hear him talk about how he was kind of a snob about TV, and somebody said, we want you to be in a sitcom. He said, no way, I'm a very serious theater actor. But he was talked into it, and that was the show on NBC, Third Rock from the Sun in which he starred won three Emmy Awards over six seasons for that show. He's done it all.

His latest performance is in the movie Bombshell, which you've probably heard about. A lot of people talking about. It's about Fox News and particularly about its founder, Roger Ailes, who obviously died a couple of years ago, but before that was the subject of a series of accusations of sexual harassment and sexual assault at Fox News. and John Lithgow plays Roger Ailes underwent a big physical transformation. You'll hear John talk about how it was not the easiest thing for him to do as someone who completely disagrees with the politics of Fox News

and had nothing but, I don't know what the right word is, but bad feelings about Roger Ailes. We'll let him explain that to you and how you get inside a character with whom you don't feel a whole lot of empathy. So here now is the great John Lithgow on the Sunday Sit Down podcast, Thanks for doing this, John. I appreciate it. I think we found our new neighborhood place, perhaps. Fantastic. Right? It's two months old. Yeah. We'll have to try. Just what we needed.

We did need a little something in the neighborhood. Congratulations on bombshell. Thank you. I told you I watched it last night. As someone who works in that industry, I probably watched it with an even more critical eye. And I thought it was so well portrayed and you played Roger Ailes so well, having known him, just a little bit myself. When you heard about this project, And they said, you will become Roger Ailes. What did you think exactly? Well, I was very excited and said yes at the end of, before the sentence was over. Especially with all the elements that were proposed to me that were already in place.

Jay Roach, a marvelous director whom I'd worked with before. He was a friend, Charles Randolph, who wrote The Big Short and somehow managed to tell the story of the financial crisis as an entertainment, and Charlize and Nicole and Margo. All those elements, you know, the fact that they wanted me, I was just ecstatic. So that was a given. I knew it was going to be a huge challenge, and that's what I look for, you know, big huge challenges. The parts that I'm really excited to play are the ones that I don't think I'm capable of playing. the fact that smart people had more faith in me than I had in myself to create this character. To me, that's a real turn on.

What was it about Roger Ailes that you didn't think you were capable of playing? Well, hopefully we look very different. You do, yes, I can confirm that, yes. He's, I don't know, that was it principally. He was just very different from me. I mean, what I knew of him was how Mercurial is. he was, that he had this huge temper, but he was also very seductive and delightful to some people. I just thought he was a wonderful, but very complicated mix of elements in a character.

I guess it was just somehow or rather oblitering everybody else's impression of Roger Ailes and having them except me. It was very much like, like duplicated the experience of being asked to do Winston Churchill like three years before. Or kind of who me, feeling. But, you know, after all,

I played Winston Churchill and everybody thought it was great. I thought it was pretty good. So I thought, oh, I see, I'm now the new Charles Lawton. I guess I'll just have to accept that. It's not a bad place to be. I love Charles Law. You'll take that. What were your preconceived notions about Roger Ailes? You're somebody who consumes news. You're interested in politics.

You follow all of this pretty closely. What did you think of the man before you took on this project? Well, I had mostly negative feelings about him because he is the embodiment of Fox News. He was the creator of Fox News, and I can't stand to watch Fox News. It's against my politics and I think it's it's not fair and balanced it's the opposite of that and I think it's done enormous damage to our sort of our fair and balanced society so I sort of I was angry at ails even before this the ghastly truth of the sort of sexual politics of that institution came to light first with Bill O'Reilly then with Roger Ailes.

So I had this kind of prejudice against him, but he was also enormously successful, powerful, and charismatic, appealing to a lot of people. He had soldiers who would follow him into battle. So all those things were, I sort of, I liked the challenge of playing someone whom I instinctively disliked. I've heard you say, and I've heard other actors say, that you have to find something to empathize with in a character before you play him. Was there something about Roger Ailes once you began to study him,

where he said, okay, maybe I get a little bit of why he is the way he is, or I understand what motivates him? Yes, indeed. I found an old friend of mine who worked with what Roger in the 70s, worked very closely with him, was kind of his producing partner and his assistant, his producing partner when Ailes was trying to produce theater in New York. That is something that he once aspired to be a Broadway producer. But also he worked as his assistant and associate in the early days of his media consultancy with political campaigns. So I found my old friend, Steve Rosenfield.

I got him on the phone and we talked for 40 minutes. And, Steve. Steve missed Roger, you know, he was very upset that everybody had sort of lost sight of what a kind of captivating man he was, how fun he was. Steve used to just love his company and laugh at his jokes, and the two of them could share jokes that last, you know, they could laugh for 15 seconds straight, out of control. Really startling information. I couldn't wait to rush to the set the next day and tell Jay Roach what I just heard about. about Roger Ailes. That, and we tried to introduce some of that. That sort of buoyancy. And his humor was certainly, could be vicious and cutting and edgy.

But it was also ironic and very witty from all appearances. I mean, I didn't meet the man you did. So I don't know what it was like to be in the room with him. Mainly I thought, I mean, look, Roger Ailes in this film is a supporting player. He's kind of a villain that everyone else reacts to. The film is the story of the women at Fox. It's not about the villainous creator of Fox and leader of Fox. And I embraced that role.

I knew perfectly well. I'm supposed to be the appalling presence. I'm supposed to be the man who's created an unacceptable culture in this huge institution. And the film is all about the reaction of not just these three women, but about a dozen women, to that culture. And it tells all their stories. The great thing about the film, and Jay's approach and Charles Randolph's approach and writing it, was that they told everyone's story.

They told the many, many sides. They mean Margot Robbie. Her ambitions were the ambitions of a Fox News anchor woman, a conservative young woman from Florida who wanted to be Megan Kelly. And to see her victimized by this culture and bewildered and disoriented and thrown off her game, that's only one of like six or seven different stories about women and their reactions to Roger. as I just have described it, it's about women facing a crisis in all sorts of different ways, reacting to a crisis in all sorts of different ways.

And I'm the crisis. So I just, you know, but when I play a part, I try to understand that person. I try to take an empathetic approach, figuring out what drives that person, what makes him good as well as bad, but makes him insecure as well as tyrannical. All these different tensions in the character. And all of us have those tensions. To me, that's a great way to approach any role, not just the role of a villain or a hero. I've always said the best drama comes out of good people who do bad things and bad people who do good things, sometimes inexplicably.

Yeah. I was watching your performance in the word that kept coming to mind was grotesque, this character that you gave grotesque, physically, morally, a man abusing his power whenever he got the opportunity to do it. You're an actor, so you can go any place you need to,

but how do you get yourself into that kind of a character where he really is so not who you are sitting across from me right now? Well, I think it's most interesting if you're playing a grotesque or somebody who does something terrible is to find that part of him who wishes he didn't have to do it.

In other words, he's in the grips of a compulsion and he has to act on that compulsion. But surely there's some parts of him that wishes he didn't have that compulsion. For one thing, Roger, I think Roger was not an unattractive young man, but he was a very unattractive, older man. And I think he was obsessed with how he looked.

It was very hard to find any footage of Roger. He didn't like people to see him. He wanted his people seen. He didn't want to be seen. And I think he didn't want to be seen because he hated the way he looked. And I've played a couple of roles where that was a terrific key into their insecurity. We all have vanity to some degree. but a man who is repulsive to look at, that goes beyond vanity.

There's an element of self-discussed and deep regret. I just tried to approach that with empathy. Now, the power of the film, I'm not sure exactly how Jay and Charles intended to pitch it. But to me, the effect on an audience is very unsettling. because making a character like this at all empathetic is very distressing. We're all accustomed to being appalled by Roger Ailes and any number of other figures who have fallen in the Me Too movement. It's like, ugh.

But what if you're asked to have sympathy with this person? I mean, that, I think that's a difficult thing for an audience to deal with, and yet we all deal with it to some degree. and I think that's the brilliance of the film to throw around an overused word absolutely and there is then of course the physical transformation that you underwent

what was that process like on the day of a shoot well by that time it was all done the process was in the weeks leading up and I had these terrific Confederates Colleen Atwood who designed all of Tim Burton's films. So she knew how to use costume in all sorts of marvelous extreme ways. In the case of Burton's films, they are kind of flamboyant and fantastical, but she knows how to change a person's body. So we worked very hard on the body, first of all, very hard. It was my

second fat suit in three years, and that's a fascinating process to literally change your configuration. Yeah, what is that like to look in the mirror and see something you don't recognize? It's hilarious. It's hilarious and it's exciting because you finally, you get, it changes your own sense of yourself. Right. And it changes the way you move. I looked so hard to find pictures of Roger simply walking down the street so I could see how he moved. And I finally found this extraordinary, literally three seconds of film of him walking out of a building and into a car. And he had this kind of old-ching walk. And I was ecstatic.

It's like, oh, good. I know how he walks now. Just from that little glimpse of him. Again, I think he hid from cameras. I don't think he wanted to see people even walk to, to see him walk to a dais on a stage. That was one thing, getting the body right. And then, of course, you fit the costumes on the body,

and they're rumpled costumes. there. He's given up on looking good. That was one thing. And then, of course, there was the face. When I did Churchill, I used no prosthetic makeup at all. Is that right? I stuffed things into my towels and up my nose to change my face from the inside. Wow. And it also changed the way I speak those people. Churchill had an extraordinary way of speaking. So that was all stuffing things into my head. Well, this one, Jay, persuaded me to go along with this guy, Kazuhiru, who ironically had done the prosthetic makeup for Gary Olden when he played Winston Churchill at exactly the same time. And he took that approach, you know, covering his face with prosthesis.

And of course, it worked wonderfully for Gary. But I was kind of cocky and proud that I'd gone without him. And I said, well, all right, persuade me. I'll give you a day. in Kazu's studio. And he did this two or three hour prosthetic makeup, and it was completely breathtaking. I said, you know, just make sure you don't miss with my eyes

and you don't mess with my mouth because that's what I express emotion with. And if possible, let me have my own hair. You kept the hair, right? It was my hair, hideous as it was. They folded, it was like dyed hair that had about two inches of it where the ends. Right. This is this hideous combination of white and dye here.

A long in the back, a little greasy here. Yeah, in fact, Jay called me in the summer months before we shot and said, John, don't cut your hair in the back. What are you talking about? And so even at that, we had to stuff some fake hair in the back until it grew all the way down. Horrible. My wife was revolted by it. But he put this stuff on with this amazing silicon material that he perfected over the years like a chemical engineer. He was so amazing. You didn't see any seams. If I wrinkled my eyes, my own wrinkles would conform with the wrinkles

that formed in the silicon. If I shook my head, this great big double chin where It would wiggle like a turkey. It was so realistic. It was. And that, you know, it's like, oh my God, my work is done. Is that something you have to do every day, the two to three hours? Yeah. Oh, yeah.

On set. Wow. There were six pieces. One, two, three, four, five, six. Wow. And then they would paint and paint and paint these little spray guns using the most extraordinary colors like olive green and magenta and yellow, just the way they duplicated human flesh. I don't know. It's like Velasquez could not have done this. It was just amazing. It was extraordinary because

sometimes you can tell, right? The camera's up like this. Yeah. I was, I did a Q&A in Los Angeles where three or four of us were seated on chairs in front of the screen. And before we started, they showed a scene from the film right behind me, like four feet behind me. There was this gigantic close-up of me. And it was like swimming up next to a blue whale. Slightly terrifying. Yeah. But, I mean, you could get so close and not see any trace of artifice.

It was amazing. You mentioned the women in this film. I think when the trailer came out a few months ago, and there's that scene where everybody, it gets on the elevator. I think a lot of people went, my gosh, again, the physical transformation of these women. But then when you watch the

film, it's obviously so much more than that and the performances. What about Charlize's as Megan Kelly for starters? Amazing. These actors are so great. I mean, yeah,

the transformation was wonderful. Kazu spent just as much time on those beautiful women as he did on the hideous John. In fact, we were all in the trailer, you know, working away for over one and two hours. It was very quiet, kind of like a monastery, just working away, changing our appearances. But they then informed them with these marvelous performances. Charlize and Nicole both had, there was no need to change Margo because she was a made-up character. She was Margot. What do you do with that face?

and working with them was just great. I mean, they're such fantastic actors. My only regret was that I only had one brief scene with Nicole Kidman. But, yeah, it was rare. And Connie Britton, being my wife, that was an amazing performance, who gave a whole different dimension to Rogers' character, just the fact that there was this woman who was so devoted to him

and thought he could do nothing wrong. Right. And really that is the story of Fox News, I think, which was, that's his home life. But in that building, he inspired such loyalty in people. And that's why it was so extraordinary to a lot of people that anyone crossed him, Gretchen and then Megan crossed him in this powerful. Because as you say, despite his massive moral failings, people, boy, they rode right along with him. And when this broke, they got in his corner and said, we got to stick with Roger. Yeah. Was it that the power of his personality, do you think? Was it that they wanted their jobs and their careers to be protected? I think he was different for absolutely every different individual. There were some who were terrified of him. Yes.

Some who had essentially been sort of physically blackmailed into loyalty to him. And there was some who just thought he was a genius and who was the great wizard of Fox. and felt just like Roger that we have to fight for this institution and for its politics. That's the other thing. I had to acknowledge the fact that this was a movie about an institution whose politics are completely different from mine and just acknowledge the fact that there are millions of people who believe this,

who swear by this. I disagree with them, but I can't write them off. We're all human beings. I mean, that's another complication of this now. Sure, sure. Is your impression of Roger Ailes different today than it was before you took on this project? Do you see him differently? I think so. I just learned a lot more about him.

He seems like an incredibly sad character to me, a very pitiable character, and it's easy to be revolted by him and angry at him. and his legacy in my opinion Fox would not be as extreme now as it is if Roger were still around one of the amazing things that I learned from my friend Steve Rosenfield

is that Roger could be very tough on his own political candidates, his own clients for being too extreme and not having enough empathy I mean what a, what is startling thing to learn. I mean, it's just possible that Fox would not be so, well, I mean, Fox is a complicated organization. It does have journalists of great integrity. You know,

Chris Wallace is not a unicorn over there. And the institution retains Chris Wallace and company. So I just, and I think that is, who knows, that. That's a counterfactual that we'll never know what would have happened. Also, I think the revelations about Roger completely destroyed him. And quickly. And like that. Yes. And how can you not have at least some empathy with a man?

It was like having a safe dropped on your head. Of course he brought her on himself. But as I say, I did talk to a good friend of his who was a good friend of mine. And he misses Roger. So what can you say? I know. I talk to people who I respect and trust, the kind of people you just mentioned, Chris Wallace,

others over there, who loved him. Yeah. Loved him. I think because of what he meant to their lives and their careers and it advocated for them when other people wouldn't. There are people who still to this day. The man who picked me up from the airport last night had been Roger's driver. Is that right?

He loved the guy. Yeah. And Roger left him something in his will and was always on, you know, life is complicated. Yeah. And people are complicated. Yeah. That's what I love about the acting business, is to just look into the contradictions and conflicts in people. And then you do touch on in the film the beginning of Donald Trump's presidential campaign and Roger's role in that.

the support that came in from the hosts. And it did become like a political operation. Now it's similar now that he's in the White House. But they were on his side. He was good for them. They were good for him, as you all say, in the film. Roger Ailes had a lot to do. It's fair to say with Donald Trump being president.

Do you agree with that? Oh, yeah, for sure. Although Ailes had complicated feelings about Trump. He was quite pragmatic. Trump is good for us. We need him. You know, that's one of me. Make this right.

We need him. That's one of my first lines in the film. They were washing each other's hand, Fox and Trump. I mean, the Trump era sort of hangs over the film like this dark cloud, but it's never very direct. It's always very obliquely and cleverly addressed. But in essence, the film is about. the fall of Roger Ailes and the rise of Donald Trump virtually simultaneously.

Yes, they were at the same time. Well, it's an extraordinary film. You mentioned Churchill. So you have Roger Ales, Winston Churchill, Bill Clinton, we can throw in as well. You're on a run of playing real-life sort of historical figures. Who knew? Is that a choice or is it a coincidence? Well, it's what was offered to me, you know.

And you get offered one, and they come after you for another. They've actually asked me to play Donald Trump in a project. Is that right? I did. Yeah, I turned it down, mainly because I was doing something else. Boy, how would you have gone after that? You could do it. I don't think I would do it.

It's almost too close. And it is getting to be my stock in trade to an extreme. It was very refreshing to play Rudy Giuliani on Colbert, because that was a total travesty. Right. It was in each of these roles, Churchill, Clinton, and Roger, I even did do Trump on this live streaming of the Mueller report. The Mueller report, they were all very, the approach and the concept of the production in each case was very different.

When I played Clinton on stage, this wonderful playwright of ours, Lucas Nath, in his stage directions, he instructs the actors. make no attempt whatsoever to imitate these people. Treated as playing Henry V. In Shakespeare, who in the world knows what Henry VIII actually looked and sounded like, create your own. So that was just sort of me pretending I was Bill Clinton, not impersonating him, which is very different from the approach for Ailes and even Churchill. Those could be tricky, though, can't they?

When people know what someone looks and sounds like, in the case of Roger Ailes or certainly Winston Churchill, you better get that right or they'll know right away. Yeah. I mean, Churchill was the most familiar face and voice in the 20th century. So you're messing around with everybody's expectations. I mean, there's something exciting about that. I mean, in the case of the crown, the difference between me and Churchill was kind of what made that interesting. Right. The more you try to imitate him, the less interesting.

is, it becomes just a study in impersonation. If you tried, you could probably find old interviews of me saying, no, I don't like to play familiar people. I don't like to play real politicians and presidents. Just because of that, I mean, why do something where people know what, first of all, they know what the real person was really like. of all they know how the story ends in every case. But then along come these wonderful projects by these visionary filmmakers who, I mean, Peter

Morgan, who created the Crown, it's miraculous what he's done. With the story of the royal family who are surely the dullest people in the world in all respects. They would cop to that. They would even say, it's my job to be boring. And yet he's made such exciting drama out of that. of that and out of the tension between a dull life, the dull life of a royal, you know, kind of wandering around Buckingham Palace and the extraordinary drama of them acting like human beings. Right.

You know? So, yeah, I've come around. That must have been the Churchill role, though, I imagine as an actor, because there is so much there and he's such a character. Just on his own, that must have just been a joy to play. Yes, and he was also a very comical character. Yeah. He himself played on that.

And that is a show that needs comic relief whenever they can find it. And I was Falstaff in that first season, to all intents and purposes. That's true. Yeah, the crown. Even in the bombshell, one of my favorite scenes in the film is toward the end when we're strategizing me, Alice and Jackson, Yes. As Susan Estrich. Richard Kind.

Yeah, Rudy Giuliani. That took me a minute to realize it was in. Yeah, and Connie Britton and me. These are four actors who are well known for playing flat-out comedy. And it's a serious scene all right. But we would reach the end of that scene. My last line in that scene is the line that reveals the depth of Roger Ailes' paranoia about Barack Obama. And yet that line is the last line of a scene from a sitcom.

I say it in all earnestness. And they look at me deadpan like, are you out of your effing mind? And then they cut away. It's a hugely funny moment, even though it's completely serious. Now, Jay Roach, who is also known for Austin Powers and directing Will Farrell and Mike Myers, all these nutball comedians.

he had the very good sense of hiring extremely good actors, a lot of whom had great comedy chops. So their sense of timing, I mean, you look at Richard as Rudy Giulio. It's real as hell, but it's hysterically funny. It is, and I watch those films like this one, and sometimes you worry that, okay, they put too much makeup on or they're trying to be something, and I already know how to, as you say. But I think you really did.

You nailed it in all those cases. Hey guys, thanks for listening to the Sunday Sit Down Podcast. Stick around to hear more from John Lithgow after the break. Welcome back to the Sunday Sit Down podcast. Now more of my conversation with John Lithgow. I'm interested going back just a bit, John, to your earliest days growing up in a theater family. Is there any chance that you were not going to become an actor, given your family, your background? I was intent on not being an actor.

Really? Yeah. I didn't intend to be an actor. I was mainly because I was so interested in being a painter. I was very serious about it. And went to the Art Students League here in New York when I was still in high school. I had some really wonderful art training in public schools. I went to eight different public schools because of my father's checkered career

and got great art training. And I was really good at it. But I went off to college and fell in with the theater gang. And I was an accomplished actor. I'd been acting in my dad's Shakespeare productions, all my childhood, his Shakespeare festivals. And I was a campus star. And, you know, in college, if you're better than everybody else in any conceivable field, that's probably what you're going to end up doing.

Well, you were a natural, I assume. Maybe you didn't realize you were absorbing all these. theatrical skills, but there they were. I mean, I was a plummy Shakespearean actor. I had to shed a little bit of that affect and learn. I became a kind of hybrid English and American actor. In fact, after college, I went over to England to drama school and studied Shakespeare in earnest.

So I am a bit of a curiosity, really. an American actor with an English training and background, which allows me to play Winston Churchill and Roger Ailes, handily enough. But, no, I just, I love it. I loved it growing up, even when I didn't intend to do it. And after a couple of rocky years when I couldn't buy a job, I suddenly won a Tony Award, and I've been working ever since.

Well, that was your Broadway debut. Yeah, right? Yeah. So you come to Broadway, and a few weeks later, you're standing with a Tony in your hand. Exactly, exactly. How did that, I mean, that must have just blown up your world because most people have that story of grinding for 10 years before they even get on Broadway. And there you were. It was an extraordinary fluke, as a lot of these awards are, you know, Hang Noor from the killing fields was a doctor in Cambodia who had never acted in his life.

and he won an Oscar for us. You know, the awards business is crazy, but I did a regional theater production of a new English play called The Changing Room, which got a lot of national attention, and was brought to Broadway intact with our Longworth Theater production. And, yeah, I had my Broadway debut.

I never thought I'd be on Broadway. I thought I would live a life in repertory theater like my dad did. and boom, two weeks later, I won a Tony Award for it. It must be the shortest period of time between a Broadway debut and a Tony. And I was 27 years old, and I really haven't struggled for work ever since.

I was going to say, once you have that Tony, things go your way on Broadway, I imagine. There was a certain feeling of, oh, got that over with it. Right out of the gate. Yes, right. And then was your vision on movies after that, after a certain time, or you were just happy to be right where you were? I was in New York theater actor.

I was in 12 Broadway shows in the 1970s. I've been in 25 by now, but that was the first chapter of my career. It was almost exclusively New York Theater. Then I fell in love with the UCLA professor, and I couldn't persuade her to come to New York. So I went to L.A. And in very close order, I did. World According to Garb, the Twilight Zone, Terms of Deerment, Footloose, and Buckaroo Bonson. All in two years.

That's incredible. And suddenly I was a movie actor. That's incredible. And I never thought I'd be in movies. So it's been, you know, life has been just nothing but surprises. Well, you know, you were nominated and won the Tony Award right out of the gate. and you had a Hollywood, you're nominated for a couple of Academy Awards, pretty well out of the gate for your film career. Two years in a row.

What stands out to you about that time in your life and your career from 1981 or two to the mid-80s? Well, it was an overwhelming sea change in my life. My first marriage had ended about three years before, and I had been very kind of lost and disoriented in my personal life. And I, you know, Mary and I, I met her in 1980 and we've been together ever since. So that, and I moved to Los Angeles and became a known quantity as a movie actor. So it was a period of overwhelming change and almost all of it for the better. So, yeah, it was just, and Los Angeles is a kind of happy place to live. I miss New York desperately and come like a gravitational pull.

I keep coming back to New York and to New York theater. But I'm as bicostal as an actor can possibly be. It seems like to me, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, the 70s were about Broadway for you, the 80s were about film. And then in the 90s, along comes this TV show, right? Third Rock from the Sun. Did you as a classically trained theater actor and now a movie star think, I'm not going to do TV for a while?

Or were you excited by this opportunity? I was never going to do a sitcom. I was such a snob. And I did do Saturday Night Live. I hosted Saturday Night Live three times in the 80s, a long time ago. And on the writing staff were this married couple, Bonnie and Terry Turner. And we just became great friends. They're good Ohio folks, you know, Ohio in Georgia.

And we just somehow clicked, had a lot in common, became great friends. And a few years later, in L.A., my agent called and said, your friends, Bonnie and Terry Turner called, they want to have breakfast with you? And I thought, how wonderful, they're in town, you know. And I showed up at the Four Seasons Hotel to have breakfast with them, and Tom Werner and Marcy Carsey Carsey and Karen Mandebock. the whole Carsey-Learner crew, and I thought, I have been ambushed here.

This is a pitch. How am I going to say no and get the hell out of here? And Bonnie and Terry were kind of embarrassed. They knew they had snookered me. And it fell to Terry to pitch Third Rock from the Sun. The first sentence out of his mouth was, well, it's about these four aliens. Oh, my God.

This is so embarrassing for them. You know, I'm going to just have to, right? How do I politely say no? Just finish my breakfast and say, you've got the wrong guy. And five minutes later, they persuaded me to do it. Really? I mean, it was such a brilliant concept.

And it was a concept, they were only interested in doing it if I would do it. Because it was for, as they said, it had, the character had to be a combination of Errol Flynn and Bugs Bunny. Someone who could switch on a dime. He just had to be quicksilver. It's a role constructed for a character actor

who will do anything, who is ready, willing and able to do absolutely anything. And it was so smart. It was this wonderful combination of smart and stupid. And because I adored the two of them and I trusted them and their judgment. And because Bonnie, in the course of that breakfast, she literally quoted by heart a line,

a paragraph this long that she'd written for a specific episode where Dick Solomon had to deliver a eulogy at the funeral of a dead professor whom everybody had hated. And it was this, he hadn't known what to say, So he just turned to astrophysics and talked about time and space and objects and everything coming to an end. It was so breathtaking and moving. And I realized, wow, this is a show that can go anywhere. Well, it went six years is where it went.

I ran home and I said to Mary, I think I've got the perfect job for the last. six years of our kids secondary school. Oh, wow. So it worked out that way. I can work like a banker in Los Angeles and do this show. So it was partly lifestyle. You like the idea, but the lifestyle was nice. A lot of it had to do with just being home. Just being home. I mean, doing a four-camera sitcom really is the best middle-class actor job there is. You work from 10 until 4 every day. Every two weeks you have a week off for the writers to catch up. All your actual acting is done on one night in front of a live audience, which is so pumped

up and preaching to the converted and making them laugh so hard. It's a joyful job. And you do more laughing. I did more laughing in those six years than about four of my lifetimes. How did that change your life because you were a respected stage actor, respected film actor, Now you're in the popular culture in a totally different way. I lost all that respect. It was gone like that and good riddance.

You were happy to lose it? It was like taking off a wetsuit. A relief. Well, it was just so giddy and wonderful. And yes, I don't know. It gave me a viability in a lot of things. I mean, in the last couple of years, I've done some very serious work. but I've also done Pitch Perfect 3 and Daddy's home too, you know?

Yes. It's like it just gives you a wonderful way of shifting gears and surprising people. What in the world is he doing now? Yes. But isn't that a neat thing for you because the scope of your career has been so long that if I said I was going to come interview you, my wife or my mom would say, oh, terms of endearment. And my kids who are 12 and 10 would say, oh, Daddy's home too. Yeah.

To be able to have touched that many groups. Then there are three-year-olds and four-year-olds who read my children's books. Yes, yes. I cultivate all audiences. Yes. You really have gotten into that sort of kids market with books. Yeah. What is it about talking to children and writing for children that you like so much?

I really do adore it. I don't get to do much of it anymore just because my day job is sort of swamped me. But I used to do loads of concerts with major orchestras. and it all started entertaining my own kids and performing in their school rooms and assemblies and school benefits and it got kicked into a serious pursuit during Third Rock when, you know, if I wanted to do something,

people would hire me to do it. I literally called Carnegie Hall after I'd done my first music CD for kids. And I asked him if I could perform with the New York Pops orchestra on the stage of Carnegie Hall because I had this music for kids. All these silly novelty songs and my own songs. I sent them the CD. And six months later, I was having my Carnegie Hall debut. That's incredible.

Kids are the most fantastic audience. They're a very difficult audience because they're so distractible. It's hard to just keep them focused and attentive. But if you can do it, it's just exhilarating. It's all, you know, when you act for grown-ups, for adults, an actor aspires to a suspension of disbelief, that corny old phrase, for a little moment persuading them that you're not just pretending that this is real. you never really achieve it.

Adults, they know they're watching a fiction, but they like fiction. They like to get close to a suspension of disbelief, even though they're never all the way there. They know that Hamlet isn't really dead, that he'll get up for the curtain call. Children are 100% ready to suspend their disbelief. They think what they're seeing is real.

so entertaining them is just it's just an ecstatic experience I would do these corny things like wear a hat on stage for the first song and then forget to take it off and I say oh I'm so sorry I do this all the time

I put the hat on I sing the song but I forget to take my hat off make sure you tell me if I do it again and then of course I wear a different hat for every song and every time I forget to take it off and they shout at me, take off your... It's the most important thing in the world. And then I take it off.

I say, why didn't you tell me? We did! And it makes them feel so smart, you know. You're the fool. I'm the fool. It's wonderful to play the fool for children. Oh, how fun. Stick around to hear more from John Lithgow on the Sunday Sit Down podcast,

including what kind of work he still wants to do. do in his career. Is there anything he hasn't done? Welcome back to the Sunday Sit Down podcast. Now more of my conversation with John Lithgow. It seems like you've touched just about every base that can be touched as an actor and you satisfied all these different curiosities that you have. Is there something out there still that you haven't done? Is there a piece of work? Is there a kind of work that it would excite you? Well, I sort of wait for other people to have bright ideas. I don't know.

I wrote a book this past year that would... Oh, you're so smart. Look at that. Exactly. And I'm at the ready. That was something brand new. But I, you know, things have come along my way that I just never expect it. I almost feel it's best to just keep my mind blank and let other people

have bright ideas and then take off from there. Christopher Weilden, the great ballet choreographer. I worked with him on Sweet Smell of Success when I did my first Broadway musical. He was a great choreographer. He knew about my rhyming children's books and called me a year after we did the show and said, I'm doing a ballet of Carnival of the Animals by Saint-Saint-Saint with the New York City Ballet. Would you write a narration that turns those 14 little musical sketches of animals into a story ballet and I said of course of course and I wrote this between the two of us we came up with a story of a little boy who gets locked into a natural history museum overnight and dreams

that all the people he knows are animals in a sort of nutcracker vein like the librarian is a shy kangaroo and the boys on the wrestling team are the jackasses. And of course, there's music for all those things. And the elephant is Mabel Bunce, the school nurse, which I imagine is a kind of Dame Edna male ballet dancer, supported by four mice. And the stanza was,

Mabel Bunce, the school nurse, lumberes into the hall, the scourge of each virus and germ, though Nurse Bunce was decidedly wider, than tall. Her size didn't hamper her movements at all when she daintily waltzed at the elephant ball, a flirtatious and pert packaderm. And then ba-b-bum-bum-bum-bom-bom-bom-bom-bom-bom-bbom-bbbom-bbbom-bbom-bb. You know, the familiar sasson. Chris loved this and said, you've got to be Mabel Bunce. You're talking to a solo artist with the New York City Ballet. You know what I love, though?

You have the same joy in your voice talking about that piece as you would about some huge film that you're in. Oh, yeah. I mean, what a special other... You remember George Plympton? Of course. Yes. Yes. Playing football with the Detroit.

Exactly. Yes. Well, that's kind of what I've been able to do. Perform with major symphony orchestras and perform with the New York City Ballet and perform at Carnegie Hall. and perform at Carnegie Hall, things have just come my way. And I don't know, in all of these, I'm a sort of clown. I'm a very, in each of these areas, I'm a very good actor.

Like I baked on the great British bakeoff, you know, just because they asked, and I thought, whoa, my great failing in life is that I'm almost incapable of saying no. If somebody asks me to do something, chances are I'll say yes. I think of something right now. And I get myself in such trouble as a result. All they have to do is take you to the four seasons,

give you a five-minute pitch. Yeah, exactly. And you're in. Yeah. In for six seasons. But look what that led to. I mean, and honestly, this was something I was never going to do.

And it changed my life in all sorts of ways. I got to work with John Cleese and Billy Connolly and Bill Irwin Kathy Bates and Christine Baransky all of them doing nutball comedy I mean what a luxury we were talking a minute ago about your prodigious talent

as an artist could I prevail upon you to sketch something would that be too much to ask well what do you want me to sketch I don't know do you have anything oh now this is a ambush. See? Bonnie and you got, Bonnie and Terry Turner have got nothing on you. Well,

all right. Something in our neighborhood maybe? I tell you what I'll do. Here's a nice orange color. Let me do our president for you, shall I? Oh boy, sure. Oh my God, because I've done him a bit. Where do you start with the hair? Of course. Yeah. I don't, I can't guarantee this is gonna, you really have Sabot. sabotaged me, but I will do my best. Putting it to the test, but we just talked about that you're up for anything. Pretty good so far. In trouble for this.

Oh, I see it. Look at this. No, it's not too bad. I think you've done it. Look at that. I ambushed you and you did it. There we go. That's our president. There he is.

Hail to the chief. That back hair is almost ailsian. Well, yes. I mean, that was, that was a choice. It was it. That's fantastic. Let's show us. How about it? Go sell that.

He's got a unique little. Central Park South. That's right. I'll sign this for you. Oh, that's fantastic. Okay. There we are. Frame that.

Leaving with a souvenir. Thank you, John. Fantastic. It's great. Enjoyed it. My big thanks to John Lithgow for a great conversation and for that autographed souvenir. You can see John's new film, Bombshell, in theaters now. And joining me now on the Sunday Sit Down podcast is the producer of this podcast, Maggie Law. Hey, Maggie.

Hi, Willie. And the producer of the interview with John Lithgow for Sunday today, Todd Cross. Todd, good to see you. My pleasure. Thank you. So we should explain what was just happening to our podcast listeners to kind of paint a visual picture. you knew that John Lithgow was something of an artist, as he told us in the interview, that he still had that good hand with a pencil. And so you had a sketchpad off to the side.

And you said, if it feels right, slide it in front of him and let's see what he can do. Yes. And thank you for doing that, Willie. And thank you to John for being so willing to give it a try. It seems that artistry and painting and drawing has been a theme in his life. Yeah. Certainly from the very beginning, even in some of the roles that he's played, Winston Churchill was quite the painter. So I couldn't resist and not suggest to add that end to our conversation.

I could see it on his face. He was surprised at first and then pleasantly surprised, almost immediately said, oh, sure, I guess I could. I thought it was so funny. Right beforehand, too, he was like, I'll pretty much say yes to anything. And you were like, so, like the light bulb goes off, right? Like, well, do you want to do a drawing first? Yeah, you know what I'll do? I'll post it on social media.

So people can see it because he did reach in for the orange pencil. He made the point of doing that. And he did a pretty good sketch of President Trump. In a very short amount of time. In a quick amount of time. On the spot. It was under a minute. Bam.

Such talent. And to Maggie's point about doing anything, Todd, I thought part of what impressed me about John. And I sort of knew this going in, but it was fun to hear him talk about it, is how enthusiastic he is about everything he does. He was talking about a friend said, could you write a point? poem for the Nutcracker, the group of children are performing. Yes, I would love to. He just loves to create. He loves to act and to make art. And it seems to me, obviously I didn't know him way back when, he's as joyful about what he does as he was when he started. Exactly. Such exuberance for the serious roles to the fun, silly roles, everything in between. Yeah. And that's kind of what I like when he said,

you know, I can go do Shakespeare one day and then do Daddy's Home 2 the next day. And he enjoys those two things equally, which I thought was cool. You actually got some time with him when John arrived at the restaurant near his, in his neighborhood here in New York City. You got to talk to him and you'd actually met him before. Exactly. My goal was to put him at ease, but certainly for John, he didn't need my help in that department. But we talked briefly, and I reminded him that I actually met him five years prior. We worked on a video production project for the Manhattan Theater Club, where he put together a video tribute. for one of his favorite directors, Daniel Sullivan.

And I have fond memories from that day where he came in and we put together a sketch that was based on, what's it called, the master theater? Masterpiece theater? Thank you, Masterpiece Theater. Where he sat in a large chair with a Roman bus behind him, with candles glowing, reflecting over a large book over his friend's career. So it was a nice moment, and I got to chat with him

about that. Yeah, he's, Maggie, you know, because you've been on tons of these with me and you've produced some of them now, too. Is there is that sort of warm up period before the interview with a lot of it. And as Todd says, John Lithgow needed zero warm up. That's nice. I mean, I feel like, yeah, usually, I mean, they're always kind of like going through a press day or something, so it's nice to have those like five minutes or so to kind of warm up to somebody or have just chit chat a little bit before you do the big interview. But he doesn't, it didn't seem like he was somebody who needed to be warmed up. No, it felt. He came ready to play.

He had just dropped in, walking around his neighborhood with a copy of the New York Times under his arm and sat down for a chat with us. I love it. Incredibly warm guy. And when you sit down, Todd, and, like, look at the body of work. It's stunning. I mean, I said 40 years. That's just the on-screen stuff. That doesn't even go back to the theater at the beginning of his career.

Exactly. Those amazing movies through the 80s, they are close to my heart, some of my favorites. And he continues to be doing fine work today. Maggie, you're too young for footloose, I think. I'm a little too young. Very aware. Yes. Unfortunately, have not seen it.

Third Rock from the Sun. Third Rock from the Sun. Yeah. 90 sitcoms I've definitely seen. And what's funny about him is I could tell my 10-year-old son, I was going to see John Lithgow, and he would say, oh, Daddy's Home too. So he has this range, this incredible range of audience from 1970s New York City Theater to 10-year-old George Geist in Daddy's Home, too, who thinks that's the only thing he's ever been in. I'm glad you brought up third rock also because I'm afraid I don't think I appreciated the show as much as I should have back then. And doing research for your conversation, looking up the clips again, it was hilarious.

Yes. I know. I didn't actually watch it in real time. I probably watched it more since than when it was actually on. But it is. He's incredibly funny in it. I guess there's a reason he won the Emmy three times for that. But I mean, it's amazing that he could do that and then play Winston Churchill in the Crown.

It's just, yeah, it's impressive. He's amazing. Todd, thank you very much. That was a fun one. Maggie, thank you as always. And thanks to all of you for tuning in again this week. If you want to hear more of the full-length conversations with my guests every week, make sure you click subscribe so you never miss an episode.

And, of course, don't forget to tune in to Sunday today every weekend on NBC. I'm Willie Geist. We'll see you right back here next week on the Sunday Sit Down podcast.