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Amid the bustle of midtown Manhattan on a Wednesday in May 2022, James Cromwell entered a coffee chain, affixed his hand to a surface, and protested about the extra fees on plant-based alternatives. “When will you stop making excessive earnings while customers, animals, and the planet endure harm?” Cromwell declared as fellow activists broadcast the protest online.

However, the insouciant patrons of the coffee shop paid scant attention. Perhaps they didn’t know they were in the company of the tallest person ever nominated for an acting Oscar, performer of one of the best speeches in Succession, and the only actor to utter the words “space adventure” in a sci-fi franchise film. Police arrived to shut down the store.

“No one listened to me,” Cromwell reflects three years later. “They would come in, hear me at the top of my lungs speaking about what they were doing with these vegan options, and then they would go around to the far corner, place their request and wait looking at their devices. ‘It’s the end of the world, folks! It’s going to end! We have 15 minutes!’”

Undeterred, Cromwell remains one of the industry’s greatest activists who act – or maybe performers with principles is more accurate. He protested against the Southeast Asian conflict, supported the Black Panthers, and took part in civil disobedience protests over creature welfare and the environmental emergency. He has forgotten the number of how many times he has been detained, and has even spent time in jail.

But now, at eighty-five, he could be seen as the avatar of a disillusioned generation that demonstrated for peace abroad and social advances at home, only to see, in their twilight years, Donald Trump turn back the clock on reproductive rights and many other gains.

Cromwell certainly appears and speaks the part of an old lefty who might have a revolutionary poster in the loft and consider a political figure to be too soft on the economic system. When visited at his home – a log cabin in the farming town of a New York town, where he lives with his third wife, the actor Anna Stuart – he rises from a chair at the fireplace with a friendly welcome and extended palm.

Cromwell measures at over two meters tall like a great weathered oak. “Perhaps 10 years ago, I heard somebody smart say we’re already a authoritarian regime,” he says. “We have turnkey fascism. The mechanism is in the lock. All they have to do is the one thing to turn it and open Pandora’s box. Out will come every exception, every exception that the Congress has written so assiduously into their legislation.”

Cromwell has witnessed this scenario before. His father a family member, a famous Hollywood filmmaker and actor, was blacklisted during the 1950s purge of anti-communist witch-hunts merely for making remarks at a party complimenting aspects of the Russian theatre system for nurturing young talent and comparing it with the “exhausted” culture of Hollywood.

This apparently harmless observation, coupled with his presidency of the “Hollywood Democrats” which later “moved slightly to the left”, led to John Cromwell being called to testify to the House Committee on alleged subversion. He had nothing substantive to say but a committee emissary still demanded an apology.

He refused and, with a generous payment from a wealthy businessman for an unrealised project, moved to New York, where he performed in a play with a fellow actor and won a theater honor. James muses: “My father was not touched except for the fact that his best friends – a lot of them – avoided him and wouldn’t talk to him because he had been called to testify. They didn’t care whether the person was at fault or not – similar to today.”

Cromwell’s mother, Kay Johnson, and his stepmother, Ruth Nelson, were also successful actors. Despite this strong background, he was initially reluctant to follow in their path. “I resisted for as long as possible. I was going to be a mechanical engineer.”

However, a visit to a Scandinavian country, where his father was making a picture with Ingmar Bergman’s crew, proved to be a pivotal moment. “They were producing art and my father was engaged and was working things out. It was very heady stuff for me. I said: ‘Oh, I gotta do this.’”

Creativity and ideology collided again when he joined a performance group founded by African American performers, and toured Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot for mainly African American audiences in a southern state, Alabama, Tennessee, and an area. Some performances took place under security protection in case extremists tried to attack the theatre.

Godot struck a nerve. At one performance in Indianola, Mississippi, the civil rights activist a historical figure urged the audience: “I want you to pay attention to this, because we’re not like these two men. We’re not waiting for anything. Nobody’s giving us anything – we’re taking what we need!”

Cromwell says: “I didn’t know anything about the deep south. I went down and the lodging had a sign on the outside, ‘Coloreds only’. I thought: ‘That’s a relic, obviously, back from the civil war.’ A kind Black lady took us to our rooms.

“We went out to have dinner, and the owner of the restaurant came over and said: ‘You’ll have to leave.’ I’d never been thrown out of a restaurant before, so I immediately stood up with my clenched hand. I would have done something stupid. a company founder informed the man that he was violating our civil rights and that they would get to the bottom of it.”

But then, mid-story, Cromwell stops himself and breaks the fourth wall. “I’m listening to myself,” he says. “These are not just tales about an actor doing his thing growing up, trying to get the girl, trying to keep his record spotless, trying not to get hurt. People were being killed, people were being beaten, people were being shot, people had crosses burned on their lawns.

“I feel strange recounting it always with the points that I think an interviewer would be interested in: ‘Personal narrative’. People ask if I should write a book because I have all these stories and I’ve done a lot of different things as well as acting.”

Subsequently, his wife will confide that she is among those lobbying Cromwell to write a autobiography. But he has minimal interest for such a project, he insists, since he fears it would be predictable and “because my father tried it and it was so bad even his wife, who adored him, said: ‘That’s really awful, John.’”

We push on with his story all the same. Cromwell had been accumulating film and TV roles for years when, at the age of 55, his career skyrocketed thanks to his role as a agriculturalist in a beloved film, a 1995 film about a animal that yearns to be a herding dog. It was a unexpected success, grossing more than $250m worldwide.

Cromwell paid for his own campaign for an Academy Award for best supporting actor in Babe, spending $60,000 to hire a PR representative and buy trade press ads to publicize his performance after the production company declined to fund it. The risk paid off when he received the nomination, the kind of recognition that means an actor is offered scripts rather than having to trudge through tryouts.

“I wouldn’t be here if I had not gotten a nomination,” he says, “because I was so tired of the dance that had to be done when you did an audition. I finally asked a director: ‘What was it about the audition that made you give me the part? I did it no differently than I’ve done anything.’ He said: ‘Jamie, it has nothing to do with your performance; we just want to see that you’re the kind of guy we want to spend a month with.’

“It was the insecurity which, because I knew him, didn’t show as much as it did when I went in to audition with a stranger who I identified as my father. I had the thing from my father – there he is again in me, telling me I’m not worthy, I’ll fail in the reading. I was just fucking sick of it.”

The acclaim for the movie led to roles including leaders, religious figures and a royal in a director’s a film, as the industry tried to pigeonhole him. In a sci-fi installment he played the spacefaring pioneer a character, who observes of the Starship Enterprise crew: “And you people, you’re all space travelers on … some kind of star trek.”

Cromwell views Hollywood as a “seamy” business driven by “avarice” and “the profit motive”. He criticises the focus on “attendance numbers”, the lack of genuine discussion on issues such as inclusion and the increasing influence of social media popularity on hiring choices. He has “no interest in the parties” and sees the “game” as secondary to “the business transaction”. He also admits that he can be a handful on set: “I do a lot of arguing. I do too much shouting.”

He offers the example of LA Confidential, which he describes as a “brilliant piece of work”. In one scene, Cromwell’s menacing his character asks an actor’s a role, “Have you a parting word, boyo?” before killing him. Spacey, by then an Oscar winner, disagreed with director and co-writer Curtis Hanson over what the character should reply. A subtly resistant Spacey won their battle of wills.

This spurred Cromwell to try a line change of his own. Hanson objected. “Sure enough, he stands behind me and says: ‘Jamie, I want you to say the line the way it was written.’ But not having Kevin’s experience and his tendencies, I said: ‘You expletive, fuck you, you piece of shit! You don’t know what the {fuck|expletive