Wild Card with Rachel Martin - John Lithgow just wants a good ending

Episode Date: December 5, 2024

Everyone has their own role that made them fall in love with John Lithgow. It could be "Footloose" or "Shrek" or "3rd Rock from the Sun." And as he approaches 80, Lithgow keeps giving us more memorable roles. This year alone, he was in "The Old Man," "Conclave" and "Spellbound." He tells Rachel what makes him so easy to work with and how he's become more comfortable with death.To listen sponsor-free, access bonus episodes and support the show, sign up for Wild Card+ at plus.npr.org/wildcardSee pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Do you think there's more to reality than we can see or touch? More to reality than we can see or touch. I am very simplistic about that. I think of death as death. I don't think there's life after death or a soul after death. I'm Rachel Martin, and this is Wildcard. The game where cards control the conversation. Each week, my guest chooses questions at random from a deck of cards,

questions about the memories, insights, and beliefs that have shaped them. It's coming, and I think the best thing is to have a gracious ending. My guest this week is John Lithgow. I calculate my exit from any film or television or stage play, and I always want to have a good ending. Well, I want to have a good ending to my life, too. We're starting off with a question today. Who is your John Lithgow? We had a staff meeting recently where we all went around and named the character who made us love John

John Lithgow, and the choices were as varied as his career. Mine is Reverend Shaw Moore, the pastor from the movie Footloose, who banned dancing in his small Texas town, and in doing so gave Kevin Bacon one of the best, I'm so mad I need to do gymnastics scenes of all time. Our producer said her John Lithgow is from the 1983 Twilight Zone movie. Our editor said his Lithgow has to be Dick Solomon, the patriarch of the alien family in the massively popular TV show, Third Rock from the Sun. John Lithgow seems to have done all the things.

Theater, movies, TV, good guys, bad guys, lots of bad guys. Or just maybe complicated characters, including Winston Churchill and a very small king in Shrek. This is an actor who is willing to take a risk, play against type, elevate the profound and the ridiculous, and it must be said, the man loves to work. Just in the last few years, he's been in the Hulu series The Old Man, a play about the writer-rolled doll and the movie Conclave that came out earlier this year, as well as the new animated film Spellbound. John Lithgow brings everything he's got to everything he does, and yes, that means I am expecting

big things from him in this moment. It's my pleasure to welcome John Lithgow to Wildcard. Thank you, Rachel. What a wonderful introduction. I haven't decided what's my John Lithgow yet. Oh, good question. That's okay. I don't think you have to pick his one.

So this is how it's going to go. I've got a deck of cards in front of me. Okay? I have a question on each card that I would love for you to answer, but you're going to pick one at random. Okay. Out of three at a time. We will break it up into rounds with a few questions in each round. You have a couple of tools at your disposal.

So you have a skip. If you're just not jelling with a particular question, you can just skip it and I'll replace with another from the deck at random. Okay. You also have a flip. So you can ask me to answer a question before you do. The same one that I've picked? Yeah.

Okay. So that's it. Great. All right, here we go. Round one. First three cards. Here they are. Uh-huh.

One, two, or three. Three. Three. This one. What's an experience from childhood that made you realize your parents were only human. Ah, my God, what a question. The thing my mind jumps to is things that I'm not sure my parents would want me to reveal.

I did, when I was in fifth grade, I did walk in on them, making love at like seven in the morning, under a great big quilt. You know, I didn't see anything fleshly. but it was clear what was going on. It was just movement. And my like 10-month-old baby sister was jumping up and down in her crib right next to them. And I mean, but it was quite startling. Oh, now that I think about it, it was on a Sunday morning.

And it was, I lived in about eight different places as a kid. It was a parapetetic childhood. because my father was in the theater game. So you're moving around a lot. But this particular chapter was in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. And that chapter in my life, we were great churchgoers because you had to be in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Right.

And I remember being in the house and watching my father walk across the backyard in his Sunday best in a tan suit after having seen him and my mother indulgeygrante. Oh, this is after the coitus. That very moment, a post-coital stroll across the backyard. And I remember thinking it in fifth grade, hypocrite. Yes, because I thought this was sinful behavior. It was very puritanical up there in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, you know, the birthplace of American Puritanism. Right.

Isn't that something? That is so funny. I can't believe I've just told that story. That's a great story. The story. That's a great story. You know, also on the weekends, my family was very church-going. My dad was like the volunteer minister at our Presbyterian Church. So Sunday, same, same.

Church all the time. And before church, though, the door to their bedroom would always be locked. And I couldn't figure out for the longest time. Like, I don't understand. And I'd knock, knock, I don't understand. Why I came in? So, yeah. Interesting to how church figures into all this in both our lives.

Right. Well, maybe it was a spiritual act for them, perhaps. Then they needed that space. Well, it's very nice to look back on that and very fondly and warmly. Well, yeah, because your parents were humans. Because back in fifth grade, I thought it was purely carnal and utterly sinful and completely human. That's when I discovered that that aspect of them was human. That was a good answer, John Lithgow.

Three more cards. One, two, three. Oh, boy. One on this occasion. One on this occasion. What was a moment in your life when you could have chosen a different path? Oh, it was my entire childhood I had chosen a different path. As I say, I grew up in a theater family but did not want to be an actor.

I didn't even consider it. Because right up until I was about 17 years old, I fully intended to be a painter. I was quite committed to it from as long as I can remember. Everybody praised me for my drawings, literally from first grade. And, you know, if ever I were asked any version of what do you want to be when you grow up, it was always an artist. And I had great encouragement from my parents. So they were not steering you in the direction of the theater or acting, or anything? Not at all.

They weren't discouraging me, although I do remember when I told my dad that I was auditioning for a Fulbright to study acting in earnest in London, his face fell. It's like, oh, my God, no. And I said, Dad, you know, you've produced all these Shakespeare festivals. You've even hired me to act. What did you expect me to want to do? And he said, well, I always thought that it would be a good idea for you to go to business school. And I said, what?

So it's not like he held up your artistic dreams. He was like, oh, I really thought you were going to be a painter. Yeah, and I said, what are you thinking? I would never go to business school. He said, well, as a theater manager, as a managing director or artistic director, I've always felt that my great failing was in the area of business. Yeah. I mean, we all, as parents do that to some degree, I imagine, even though I try not to you.

My kids are sort of young, but, you know, project your own. I've learned the hard way. You know, the theater is tough. So, you know, he struggled in the trenches and maybe he wanted something different for you. He struggled terribly. Yeah. It was a very tough life for him. And I think he just felt the need to spare me that.

Right. And I bet your dad was proud of you in the end. Oh, ultimately. Yes, of course. It's worked out just fine. It worked out. It worked out. Okay.

Last question in this round. One, two, three? Two, of course. Two, of course. Oh, I just love this question. What period of your life do you often daydream about? Daydream about. I think it's my early years in New York Theater, the 1970s.

I would say in any given year in the 1970s in New York, I probably was acting on stage on Broadway on about 300 of the 365 nights. I mean, I just went from one theater job to another and worked with... It sounds exhausting, though. Oh, it was just... I was young. I got everywhere on a bicycle. I acted... God, I did a show in 1975 at Lincoln Center, Triloni of the Wells.

And among the cast were Marybeth Hurt and Sasha Von Scherler, Mandy Patinkin in his first role. and in her first job out of Yale Drama School, Merrill Streep. Wow. We were all thick as thieves. Yeah. And we would have big potluck suppers together. I guess, you know, there's your answer. That's worthy of daydreaming.

Yeah. Things so limitless for you then. Yeah, things seemed, even though it was really tough. And the town was dirty and dangerous and depressing in every way, except if you were a young actor. It was just electric. So this is what you daydream about. Does that in any way mean that theater is still where you feel most at home?

In a sense. In a sense. I mean, I like everything I do as long as I'm employed. But the theater is where you feel like you're using absolutely everything you've got and you're in charge of the story. Okay, we're going to pull back from the game for a moment to talk about what you've been working on recently because it's a lot. You've had a busy year with the old man and the movie Conclave

and most recently Spellbound. Oh, my God. Which is a very sweet film on Netflix. It is this animated story. It's actually about divorce, which I'd never seen touched on in a kid's movie before. But it made me think about another interview that I'd seen you do where you described doing animated work.

You, of course, we should remind people were Lord Farquod in Shrek. And in this interview, you described it as being pretty lonely work, you know? It's just you in this booth and you just do these lines. Well, the thing is it's deceptive. Everybody thinks that I've had this wonderful time working with Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy and Cameron Diaz and Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem and Spellbaum. You never lay eyes on them. You work in complete isolation.

It's not lonely. It's just peculiar. Here you are playing this scenes with a non-actor. It's usually a writer who's just feeding you your cues. You know, you show up once every six months for about an hour and a half and lay down a bunch of dialogue, which is then put into the pipeline. Off it goes to the animators. and they take your spoken language as holy writ.

They animate to what has been edited into the soundtrack of the movie. And about four years later, you find yourself featured in this remarkable thing like Shrek. Yeah, that's amazing. So I know there are roles you haven't played yet, but is there for you a thing stuck in your craw that you're like, why doesn't anyone cast me for this? You know, I've long since realized that the most interesting things for me to do tend to be other people's ideas. They think of things for me that I would never think of for myself.

Yeah, yeah. And as examples, Roberna Muldoon and World Cornady Garp or Winston Churchill in the Crown, who in the world would cast me for Winston Churchill? Or, or rolled on. I mean, telling his story is extremely dramatic and unsettling. It's the stuff of a really, really great new play. But I love that you trust other people to know what is going to work for you. Well, actors don't have a very good sense of themselves.

I mean, imagine the first time you heard yourself on a tape recording. It wasn't your response. Is that what I sound like? Sort of stilt away, yeah. No, no, you're used to your voice by now, Rachel. And I'm used to my image, but a mirror lies. You don't have a real sense of who you are, what your strengths are as an actor, what your weaknesses are. I mean, if you do it long enough, of course, you build a good sense of those things.

But other people see you in very different ways, and they see your potential in different ways. And you can be very deluded if you're going to be very deluded if you're. go off and produce your own material, you know. So we're moving on to round two. Great. Okay, one, two, or three? Three once again. Three once again.

What emotion do you understand better than all the others? Understand. You have a skip and a flip, just reminding you. I don't know. I feel like I would launch into an awful lot of, bull-h-h-h-h-h-h-oh, I like that you are aware of that. I mean, basically, basically, I'm in the emotion business, you know, tracking people's emotions, you know, imitating them and summoning them up.

What do I understand? I don't know. I think I'll skip because I... Let's skip it. I love when people skip. People work too hard at these. I'm like, yes. If it's not there, just...

No, I just, the fact, I just... Skimbing it. You don't have to say anything more. Yeah. Let's say the save time. Let's do number two instead. Okay. So that is, what makes you irrationally defensive?

Now you've got to answer. Oh, God. I say, irrationally defensive. Well, I don't know how to answer that. Have you never felt that? I don't know that I tend to agree with criticism of me a little too readily. I say, yeah, I think you're right about that. I'm a Libra, which I don't swear by astrology, but that makes a lot of sense to me,

somebody who's like a scale constantly balancing and indecisive. And I'm terrible in political arguments. I cannot express my passionate politics articulately. I just fall silent. Why? Because I'm listening too openly to the other point of view. I just don't have a great strong argumentative nature. I'm not all that defensive because I tend to agree with what anybody says.

You must be a dream to work with. No wonder you're working all the time. I'm a real piece. I'm a piece. I'm a piece. I'm a peach to work with, you know, because I love other people. I love other actors, and I love creating things with them. My theory is nobody creates a performance by himself, as it's always at least two people involved.

Anyway, I'm ranging far. That stands as an answer, even though you didn't jive with the premise. It's still, I learned something. Yeah, that's... Three new cards. Mm-hmm. One, two, or three. I feel like going back to that defensive question.

But I... Let's go. Well, there's a little episode in my life that sticks in my mind. Tell me if you would. I was on a Broadway show league softball team. And we had this great team. And there was this inning where like three people in a row hit home run. And we all hung the era.

Everybody's waiting at the home plate. And I got up, and I also hit home run and went around all three bases. And nobody got up. Nobody made it for us. It's like, well, that's the end of the home runs. And I went and sat down, perfectly contented. Okay. And they all looked at each other like, come on.

What's the deal? We were trying to humiliate you, man. they had planned this joke on me. Oh my God. I didn't even notice that it was a cruel joke. You were just like, oh. Yeah, well, I've got my home on too. Does that mean you don't need affirmation?

I think it means I'm clueless, you know. You can't be humiliated. I'm on your side. What can I tell you? That's a great superpower, John. I don't know. Okay. Three more.

One, two, three. Let's do two again. Two. What feels unreachable to you? What feels unreachable? Though there are some things that I am so bad at. Technology, for one thing, mathematics. Are you?

Money. I just can't get it together, and yet it terrifies me. You know, oh, my God. I don't think about money at all. Until I do. And when I do, it's like, oh, my God, have I run out of money? I don't even know. You know, it's, you know.

Hopefully you have a person you can call. Well, I have a wife who's an economic historian who thinks about money a lot, but I'm telling you, the shoemaker's children go barefoot. Neither of us knows what's going on. Well. But I hope I'm, I hope and assume I'm okay. I think you probably are without speculating on your finances, but I digress. Okay, we're into round three.

This is the final round. Three more cards. One, two, or three. Three? Do you think there's more to reality than we can see or touch? God, these questions, they're deep philosophical questions. I feel like when you say that, it's causing you great pain. I've just never been asked these questions before.

It's kind of amazing. More to reality than we can see or touch. I have a pretty simple version of reality. You're immediately making me look around me, like what's real and what isn't, and everything I see is real. So that's the best I can do on that one. Really? Okay. All right, wait a minute.

I am allowed to ask you that same question, so Rachel. I want to hear your answer to this because I have no idea how to answer it. So I think this is a question about death. I think it's a question about what happens to us when we die. That's what I think of when I think of this question. Wow. Yeah, I guess this is where I get woo-woo because I just feel, especially after a person dies who you're close to.

I think there is a time the time right after that happens or for the first couple of months when you feel that person at least that has been the case for me and it's just undeniable things happen synchronicities coincidence whatever

but there's an actual energy that I have felt and so that has made me open to the idea that there are things I don't understand and that there could be more to reality than I can see your touch. It's so interesting. My mind didn't go to that great demarcation between being alive and being dead, being alive and sensing reality everywhere and being dead and no longer existing. But I am very simplistic about that.

I think of death as death. I don't think there's life after death or a soul after death. I had an extraordinary death experience two years ago. I directed that wonderful New Yorker, Doug McGrath, in his one-man show that he had written for himself. He had a wonderful little off-broadway success with it, It was in his third week of a run. He was going to do it as long as he wanted in a tiny theater downtown.

And he didn't show up at the theater one night because in his office by himself at about 4 in the afternoon, he'd laying down, had a heart attack and died at age 64. It was such a traumatic thing to experience. He died painlessly and almost courteously. He didn't make anybody else suffer over his. death except over the fact that it had happened like that. Mm-hmm.

Did that change anything for you and how you think of it? The endness of it all? I was startled at how soon I was able to absorb it as just having happened and the new reality. This lovely man who was quite a dear friend having worked together so closely, he was simply gone, and I knew that he was gone. and the brain simply adjusts. But I guess I'm going to ask another follow-up question.

Did it make you any more or less comfortable with your own demise? More, more. More comfortable. I just know it's coming. Yeah. It's coming. And I think the best thing is to have a gracious ending. You know, I calculate my exit from any film or television or stage play.

And I always want to have a good ending. Well, I want to have a good ending to my life, too, that no one grieves over and is appropriate. Well, people will grieve. So I can't believe I'm talking about these things. I've had three cancers in my life, first in 1988, 2004, and then only a couple of years ago, in every case, dealt with immediately and put an end to, you know, melanomas that could be removed, detected early and removed. A prostatectomy that

eliminated prostate cancer from my life. But I'm almost glad that I had the shocking experience of being told you have a malignancy. To have realistically contemplated, oh my God, this might really, I might die of this. I think it was a,

It was a useful experience to have in terms of just putting your whole life into perspective. Three new cards. All right, okay. One, two, or three. Two, please. What is something that consistently gives you hope? Ah. Well, my little granddaughter.

You have a granddaughter. I have a four-year-old granddaughter. I also have a 16-year-old grandson and a 19-year-old. year old granddaughter. They're well on their way. A four-year-old really gives you hope. Yeah. I mean, it's easy for people to say, oh, the child in my life gives me hope. But why? What is it about this person that gives you hope? I guess it's, I only see her on average about once every four months. And in those four months, I see such extraordinary growth. When I come back, she's this extraordinary progress, her mind developing her coordination.

And what about that as hopeful? Just watching it happen and just feeling the excitement of it and loving it so much. Can't wait to see her again, you know, to see what's happened now beyond seeing her on FaceTime, which is delightful enough as it is. it's the best answer I have for that. It's a good one because children growing, it will just keep happening. No matter what's happening in the world and the chatter and the despair, focusing on a child, doing what she's supposed to do, growing.

Every time you see her and changing, that's an inevitability that's a beautiful thing to watch unspool. Yeah, I mean, the opposite side of that, and you swing back and forth between optimism and pessimism is fearing for the first. future, fearing for climate change. What's it going to be like if the worst predictions are true 50 years from now when she's 54 years old?

So, you know, they go hand in hand, hope and fear, I think. You just have to be accustomed to that in your life and deal with it. Yeah, I agree. We end the show the same way every time, and this is how we do it.

We're going to take a trip in our memory time machine. Uh-huh. Okay? Yeah. You pick one moment in your past to relive. You would not change one thing about this moment. You just want to linger in it a little longer. What moment do you choose?

Well, I will tell you that the most important person in my life is my wife, and I feel very lucky that that's the case. And I feel, and she's a, she's a, she's a, feisty woman, she will count on me saying something that involves her. But I'm going to describe something that does not. It's a bait and switch. Yeah, a total bait and switch. I acted the role of King Lear on stage in Central Park. It was a good production. I was a good King Lear, I think. at the very end of the last performance, there was a big square platform,

which was the central stage of this piece. And when I made my first entrance as the king, people beat on the platform. It was very kind of dark ages. And when I came out for my curtain call with everybody else, We all bowed. And at a certain point, they all disappeared, and they jumped off this stage and came around.

And they all beat on that stage with just me all by myself, while the audience were standing and applauding. Now, this is, it makes me sound like a real whore for applause. But I was so full of emotion. I mean, I just played frigging kids. King Lear. So, you know, your emotions are just percolating to the point where you're bursting,

the death of Cordelia and the death of King Lear. And then coming out for that curtain call and having those wonderful actors paying that tribute, it was just overwhelming. It was so, such a combination of King Lear's grief and John Lithgow's joy, you know. Just astonishing. You can see John Lithgow now in Spellbound on Netflix and in the movie Conclave. John Lithgow, thank you, thank you. Oh, Rachel, this is great.

Friends for life, friends for life. Oh, gosh. It was really, truly so fun. If you like this episode, go listen to my episode with Ted Danson, who is also a gem of a human being and someone who doesn't take any of the beauty and goodness in his life for granted. I think he will be inspired, maybe even moved, by hearing him talk about his relationship with his wife, Mary Steen Virgin. Next week on Wildcard, we talked to Alana Glazer, who's got a new Netflix special coming out on December 20th. What's a place you consider sacred?

The bath. Love it. Love the bath. My husband and I have, like, solved many problems, or so we thought in the bath. This episode was produced by Romel Wood and edited by Dave Blancher. It was mastered by Robert Rodriguez. Wildcard's executive producer is Beth Donovan, and our theme music is by Rom Teen Arablui.

You can reach out to us at Wildcart at npr.org. We're going to shuffle the deck and be back with more next week. Talk to you then.