The first time James Cromwell got arrested was in 1971. “I sort of—he thought I did, I didn’t think I did—assaulted a police officer on a subway train who was hassling a woman,” he recalled recently. He was taken to a station house beneath Times Square, where a sergeant asked what he did for a living. “I said, ‘I’m an actor.’ He went, ‘You working on anything now?’ Like, You’re unemployed, you’re a fucking actor. I said, ‘Yeah, I’m doing a play.’ ‘What’s the play called?’ I said, ‘AC/DC,’ which is a wonderful English play, very abstruse. Of course, he thought it meant bisexuality.” Cromwell was let off with a warning.
He was arrested again a few months later, at the May Day protests in Washington, D.C., along with thousands of other people. Confronting a cop, he felt a baton against his throat, was tossed into a paddy wagon, and spent the night in jail. From his hotel room the next morning, he saw a chaotic scene—tear gas, anarchists clashing with police—that came to mind this past January, when he was protesting Donald Trump’s Inauguration. “It was like the seventies,” he said. “Nothing’s changed.”
Cromwell’s penchant for civil disobedience may seem out of character. With his woolly voice and “American Gothic” look, the six-feet-seven actor is often cast as salt-of-the-earth types (“Babe”) or as flinty authority figures (“L.A. Confidential”). But this summer he’s been in the news for rabble-rousing. In July, he was arrested at SeaWorld San Diego for interrupting an orca show wearing a T-shirt that said “SeaWorld Sucks.” Days earlier, he served three days at the Orange County Correctional Facility, after refusing to pay a fine stemming from a 2015 sit-in at a new power plant in Wawayanda, New York. He spent his prison time on a hunger strike, and read five hundred pages of “The Pickwick Papers.”
“One of the questions people ask you when you go in is ‘Are you anxious about being raped?’ ” Cromwell, who is seventy-seven, recalled. “I said, ‘Not unless they’re a whole lot hornier than I think they are.’ ” He was at a hotel in Albany, about to speak at a rally against the Wawayanda power plant, which would run on fracked gas piped in from Pennsylvania. (Governor Cuomo has banned fracking in New York State, but protesters were demanding that he deny the plant a water permit.)
The actor’s father, the Hollywood director John Cromwell, was blacklisted in the fifties, but James didn’t become politicized until 1964, when, at twenty-three, he joined the Free Southern Theatre and toured Mississippi and Louisiana, playing Pozzo in a mixed-race production of “Waiting for Godot.” After the Kent State shootings, in 1970, Cromwell recalled, “I said to myself, ‘Why the fuck am I doing crappy Shakespeare?’ ” He joined a defense committee for the Black Panthers, and at one point used his father’s apartment, on East Fiftieth Street, as a safe house for Elbert (Big Man) Howard. Restless, he hitchhiked around the world and wound up in India, where he became a disciple of Neem Karoli Baba. (“This is all illusion,” Cromwell said, tapping on a wooden post.) He returned to California, intending to become a parole officer, and was cast in “All in the Family.” But his career didn’t take off until 1995, when he played a pig farmer in “Babe” and was nominated for an Oscar. Working with pigs got him into animal rights. In 2001, he was arrested while occupying a Wendy’s in Virginia.
Cromwell’s phone rang (the ringtone was him saying, “That’ll do, pig”), and he headed to the protest. On the way, he ran into another speaker, Dennis Kucinich. “I gotta go check on the sound system,” Cromwell told him.
“You need a sound system?” Kucinich said with a laugh.
Several hundred people had gathered in West Capitol Park, with signs that said “Protect NY Water” and “Make Earth Great Again.” An activist named Pramilla Malick introduced Cromwell, saying, “He is never afraid to speak truth to power.”
“You really are beautiful,” Cromwell told the crowd. He mentioned a statistic that he’d just read: “Do you know what has the most impact in reducing our carbon footprint?”
“Going vegan!” someone yelled.
“Unfortunately, it’s not,” he said. “This is what it is: don’t have children. Can you believe we are saying to the people of this world that in order to be able to live in it you have to give up your children?” There were tentative cheers.
Cromwell and Kucinich led the crowd to deliver a petition to Cuomo’s office. “Second floor, to the War Room,” Cromwell instructed from the lobby. He recently finished shooting “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom,” in which he plays a scientist who warns of technology run amok. While filming his big speech, he sneaked in a jab at the fossil-fuel industry: “When they see it at the studio, they can say, ‘He can’t say that!’ It’ll be gone like that. And then my character will really serve no purpose at all.” ♦
