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Amid the hustle of midtown Manhattan on one spring day in May 2022, James Cromwell walked into a coffee chain, affixed his hand to a surface, and complained about the extra fees on vegan milks. “When will you stop making excessive earnings while patrons, animals, and the planet suffer?” Cromwell boomed as fellow activists streamed the protest live.

But, the unconcerned patrons of the establishment paid little heed. Maybe they didn’t know they were in the company of the tallest person ever recognized for an Academy Award, performer of one of the most memorable monologues in Succession, and the only actor to say the words “star trek” in a sci-fi franchise film. Police came to close the store.

“Nobody paid attention to me,” Cromwell muses three years later. “Customers entered, listen to me at the full volume speaking about what they were doing with these vegan options, and then they would move past to the other side, get their order and wait looking at their devices. ‘It’s the end of the world, folks! Everything will cease! We have 15 minutes!’”

Undeterred, Cromwell remains one of the industry’s greatest actor-activists – or maybe activist-actors is more fitting. He marched against the Vietnam war, supported the Black Panthers, and took part in civil disobedience actions over creature welfare and the climate crisis. He has lost count of how many times he has been detained, and has even spent time in jail.

Currently, at 85, he could be seen as the avatar of a disappointed generation that demonstrated for global harmony and progressive goals at home, only to see, in their later life, a former president reverse the clock on reproductive rights and many other gains.

Cromwell certainly looks and sounds the part of an old lefty who might have a Che Guevara poster in the attic and consider a political figure to be too soft on the economic system. When interviewed at his home – a wooden house in the farming town of a New York town, where he lives with his spouse, the actor his partner – he stands up from a chair at the hearth with a friendly welcome and outstretched hand.

Cromwell measures at 6ft 7in tall like a ancient tree. “Perhaps 10 years ago, I heard somebody smart say we’re already a authoritarian regime,” he says. “We have ready-made oppression. 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 loophole, every exception that the legislature has written so diligently into their laws.”

Cromwell has seen this movie before. His father John Cromwell, a renowned Hollywood director and actor, was blacklisted during the 1950s purge of political persecution merely for making remarks at a party praising aspects of the Soviet arts system for fostering young talent and comparing it with the “used up” culture of Hollywood.

This seemingly innocuous comment, coupled with his presidency of the “a political group” which later “shifted somewhat to the left”, led to his father being called to give evidence to the government panel on Un-American Activities. He had nothing substantive to say but a committee representative still demanded an expression of regret.

John Cromwell refused and, with a generous cheque from Howard Hughes for an unproduced work, moved to New York, where he performed in a play with Henry Fonda 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 at fault or not – similar to today.”

Cromwell’s mother, Kay Johnson, and his father’s wife, Ruth Nelson, were also successful actors. Despite this deep lineage, he was initially hesitant to follow in their footsteps. “I avoided for as long as possible. I was going to be a mechanical engineer.”

However, a visit to Sweden, where his father was making a picture with a famed director’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 have to do this.’”

Art and politics collided again when he joined a performance group founded by Black actors, and toured Samuel Beckett’s play a classic work for mainly African American audiences in Mississippi, another region, a state, and Georgia. Some performances took place under armed guard in case extremists tried to firebomb the theatre.

The play struck a chord. At one performance in a location, the social advocate a historical figure urged the audience: “I want you to listen carefully to this, because we’re not like these two men. We’re not sitting idle for anything. Nobody’s offering us anything – we’re seizing what we need!”

Cromwell says: “I didn’t know anything about the deep south. 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 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 rash. a company founder informed the man that he was violating our legal protections and that they would get to the bottom of it.”

However, mid-story, 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 maturing, trying to get the girl, trying to keep his nose clean, trying not to get hurt. People were dying, people were being beaten, people were being shot, people had symbols of hate on their lawns.

“I feel uncomfortable recounting it always with the points that I think an interviewer would be interested in: ‘Personal narrative’. People ask if I should write a memoir 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 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.’”

We push on with his story all the same. Cromwell had been accumulating film and TV roles for decades when, at the age of 55, his career skyrocketed thanks to his role as a agriculturalist in Babe, a 1995 film about a animal that yearns to be a sheepdog. It was a surprise hit, grossing more than $250 million worldwide.

Cromwell paid for his own campaign for an Oscar for best supporting actor in the film, spending $60,000 to hire a publicist and buy industry ads to promote his performance after the production company declined to fund it. The risk paid off when he received the nomination, the kind of accolade that means an actor is offered scripts rather than having to go 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 filmmaker: ‘What was it about the audition that made you give me the part? I did it no otherwise 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 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 worthy, I’ll fail in the reading. I was just extremely sick of it.”

The recognition for Babe led to roles including presidents, popes and a royal in a director’s a film, as the industry tried to categorise him. In a sci-fi installment he played the interstellar 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 “unsavory” business driven by “greed” and “the profit motive”. He criticises the focus on “asses in the seats”, the lack of genuine debate on issues such as inclusion and the increasing influence of online followings on hiring choices. He has “no interest in the parties” and sees the “game” as secondary to “the deal”. He also admits that he can be a difficult on set: “I do a lot of disputing. I do too much shouting.”

He offers the example of a film, which he describes as a “genius piece of work”. In one scene, Cromwell’s menacing his character asks an actor’s Jack Vincennes, “Have you a valediction, boyo?” before shooting him dead. Spacey, by then an Oscar winner, disagreed with filmmaker and co-writer Curtis Hanson over what the character should reply. A subtly resistant Spacey won their disagreement.

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 experience and his propensities, I said: ‘You motherfucker, curse you, you insult! You don’t know what the {fuck|expletive