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In the middle of the bustle of midtown Manhattan on a Wednesday in 2022, James Cromwell entered a coffee chain, glued his hand to a counter, and complained about the extra fees on vegan milks. “How long until you cease raking in huge profits while customers, creatures, and the environment suffer?” Cromwell boomed as other protesters broadcast the protest online.

But, the unconcerned patrons of the coffee shop paid scant attention. Perhaps they didn’t know they were in the presence of the most statuesque person ever nominated for an acting Oscar, performer of one of the best speeches in Succession, and the only actor to say the words “star trek” in a Star Trek production. Police arrived to close the store.

“No one listened to me,” Cromwell reflects three years later. “They would come in, hear me at the full volume speaking about what they were doing with these non-dairy creamers, and then they would go around to the other side, place their request and stand there looking at their cellphones. ‘It’s the end of the world, folks! It’s going to end! We have 15 minutes!’”

Unfazed, Cromwell remains one of the industry’s greatest activists who act – or maybe activist-actors is more accurate. He protested against the Vietnam war, supported the civil rights group, and took part in nonviolent resistance protests over animal rights and the environmental emergency. He has lost count of how many times he has been detained, and has even served time in jail.

But now, at 85, he could be seen as the symbol of a disillusioned generation that marched for global harmony and progressive goals at home, only to see, in their twilight years, a former president turn back the clock on reproductive rights and many other achievements.

Cromwell certainly appears and speaks the part of an old lefty who might have a revolutionary poster in the attic and consider a political figure to be not radical enough on the economic system. When interviewed at his home – a wooden house in the rural community of Warwick, where he lives with his spouse, the actor his partner – he stands up from a seat at the hearth with a warm greeting and extended palm.

Cromwell stands at over two meters tall like a great weathered oak. “Probably 10 years ago, I heard somebody smart say we’re already a authoritarian regime,” he says. “We have turnkey fascism. The key is in the door. All they have to do is a single action to activate it and open Pandora’s box. Out will come every loophole, every exception that the legislature has written so diligently into their laws.”

Cromwell has witnessed this scenario before. His father a family member, a famous Hollywood director and actor, was banned during the McCarthy era of anti-communist witch-hunts merely for making comments at a party praising aspects of the Russian theatre system for fostering young talent and contrasting it with the “exhausted” culture of Hollywood.

This seemingly innocuous observation, coupled with his leadership of the “a political group” which later “moved slightly to the left”, led to his father being called to testify to the House Committee on alleged subversion. He had nothing substantive to say but a committee emissary still demanded an expression of regret.

He refused and, with a large payment from Howard Hughes for an unproduced work, 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 harmed except for the fact that his best friends – a lot of them – cut him out and wouldn’t talk to him because he had been called to testify. They didn’t care whether the person was guilty or not – sort of like today.”

Cromwell’s mother, a relative, and his stepmother, another actor, were also successful actors. Despite this strong background, he was initially hesitant to follow in their footsteps. “I avoided for as long as possible. I was going to be a technical professional.”

However, a visit to Sweden, where his father was making a picture with Ingmar Bergman’s crew, proved to be a pivotal moment. “They were creating something and my father was involved and was working things out. It was very exciting stuff for me. I said: ‘Oh, I have to do this.’”

Creativity and ideology intersected again when he joined a performance group founded by African American performers, and toured an playwright’s play Waiting for Godot for predominantly African American audiences in a southern state, another region, a state, and an area. Some shows took place under security protection in case white supremacists tried to firebomb the theatre.

Godot struck a chord. At one performance in Indianola, Mississippi, the social advocate Fannie Lou Hamer urged the audience: “I want you to listen carefully to this, because we’re not like these two men. We’re not waiting for anything. Nobody’s offering us anything – we’re seizing what we need!”

Cromwell says: “I didn’t know anything about the southern US. I went down and the rooming house had a sign on the outside, ‘Coloreds only’. I thought: ‘That’s a relic, obviously, back from the 1860s conflict.’ 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 ejected of a restaurant before, so I immediately stood up with my clenched hand. I would have done something rash. a company founder informed the man that he was violating our legal protections and that they would investigate fully of it.”

But then, mid-anecdote, Cromwell stops himself and addresses the interviewer directly. “I’m hearing my words,” he says. “These are not just stories 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 dying, people were being assaulted, people were being shot, people had crosses burned on their lawns.

“I feel uncomfortable recounting it always with the points that I think an interviewer would be interested in: ‘My story’. People ask if I should write a memoir because I have all these stories and I’ve done a lot of various activities as well as acting.”

Subsequently, his wife will reveal that she is among those urging Cromwell to write a autobiography. But he has little appetite for such a project, he insists, since he fears it would be formulaic and “because my father tried it and it was so poor even his wife, who loved him, said: ‘That’s really awful, John.’”

The conversation continues with his story all the same. Cromwell had been accumulating film and TV roles for years when, at the age of 55, his career took off 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 surprise hit, earning more than $250m worldwide.

Cromwell paid for his own campaign for an Oscar for best supporting actor in the film, spending $sixty thousand to hire a PR representative and buy industry ads to promote his performance after the production company declined to fund it. The gamble paid off when he received the honor, 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 routine 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: ‘James, 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 chip on my shoulder which, because I knew him, didn’t show as much as it did when I went in to audition with a unknown person who I identified as my father. I had the thing from my father – there he is again in me, telling me I’m not good enough, I’ll fail in the reading. I was just fucking sick of it.”

The recognition for Babe led to roles including leaders, popes 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 spaceship crew: “And you people, you’re all astronauts on … some kind of star trek.”

Cromwell views Hollywood as a “unsavory” business driven by “avarice” and “the profit motive”. He criticises the focus on “asses in the seats”, the lack of genuine debate on issues such as racial diversity and the increasing influence of online followings on casting decisions. He has “no interest in the parties” and sees the “game” as secondary to “the deal”. He also admits that he can be a handful on set: “I do a lot of disputing. 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 Jack Vincennes, “Have you a parting word, boyo?” before killing him. Spacey, by then an Oscar winner, disagreed with filmmaker and co-writer a creative over what Vincennes should reply. A subtly resistant Spacey won their battle of wills.

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