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Amid the bustle of midtown Manhattan on one spring day in May 2022, James Cromwell entered a Starbucks, glued his hand to a counter, and complained about the extra fees on plant-based alternatives. “How long until you cease raking in huge profits while customers, creatures, and the environment suffer?” Cromwell boomed as fellow activists streamed the protest online.

However, the unconcerned 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 Academy Award, deliverer of one of the most memorable monologues in Succession, and the only actor to utter the words “space adventure” in a Star Trek production. Police arrived to close the store.

“Nobody paid attention to me,” Cromwell muses three years later. “Customers entered, hear me at the top of my lungs talking about what they were doing with these vegan options, and then they would go around to the far corner, place their request and stand there looking at their devices. ‘We’re facing doom of the world, folks! It’s going to end! We have very little time!’”

Unfazed, Cromwell remains one of Hollywood’s greatest actor-activists – or maybe activist-actors is more accurate. He marched against the Southeast Asian conflict, supported the civil rights group, and took part in nonviolent resistance actions over animal rights and the environmental emergency. He has lost count of how many times he has been arrested, and has even served time in jail.

Currently, at 85, he could be seen as the avatar of a disillusioned generation that marched for peace abroad and social advances at home, only to see, in their later life, a former president turn back the clock on abortion and many other gains.

Cromwell certainly appears and speaks the part of an veteran progressive who might have a revolutionary poster in the loft and consider a political figure to be not radical enough on capitalism. 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 his partner – he rises from a chair at the fireplace with a friendly welcome and outstretched hand.

Cromwell stands at over two meters tall like a ancient tree. “Probably 10 years ago, I heard somebody intelligent say we’re already a fascist state,” 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 a source of trouble. Out will come every loophole, every loophole that the Congress has written so assiduously into their legislation.”

Cromwell has seen this movie before. His father John Cromwell, a renowned Hollywood director and actor, was banned during the McCarthy era of political persecution merely for making comments at a party complimenting aspects of the Russian theatre system for nurturing young talent and contrasting it with the “exhausted” culture of Hollywood.

This seemingly innocuous comment, coupled with his leadership of the “a political group” which later “moved slightly to the left”, led to John Cromwell being called to give evidence to the House Committee on alleged subversion. He had nothing substantive to say but a committee representative still demanded an apology.

He refused and, with a large payment from Howard Hughes for an unproduced work, moved to New York, where he acted in a play with Henry Fonda and won a theater honor. James reflects: “My father was not harmed except for the fact that his closest companions – 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 guilty or not – sort of like today.”

Cromwell’s mother, a relative, and his father’s wife, Ruth Nelson, were also successful actors. Despite this strong background, he was initially reluctant to follow in their path. “I avoided for as long as possible. I was going to be a technical professional.”

But, a visit to Sweden, where his father was making a picture with Ingmar Bergman’s crew, proved to be a turning point. “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.’”

Art and politics collided again when he joined a theatre company founded by African American performers, and toured Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot for mainly Black audiences in a southern state, Alabama, a state, and Georgia. Some shows took place under security protection in case white supremacists tried to attack the theatre.

Godot struck a chord. At one performance in Indianola, Mississippi, the civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer 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 southern US. I went down and the lodging had a sign on the outside, ‘Segregated accommodation’. I thought: ‘That’s a historical marker, obviously, back from the civil war.’ A wonderful 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 fist balled. I would have done something stupid. John O’Neal informed the man that he was violating our legal protections and that they would get to the bottom of it.”

But then, 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 record spotless, trying not to get hurt. People were being killed, 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: ‘Personal narrative’. People ask if I should write a book 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 minimal interest 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 notching up film and TV roles for years when, at the age of 55, his career skyrocketed thanks to his role as a farmer in a beloved film, a 1995 movie about a pig that yearns to be a herding dog. It was a surprise hit, grossing more than $250m worldwide.

Cromwell funded his own campaign for an Academy Award for best supporting actor in Babe, spending $60,000 to hire a PR representative and buy industry 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 go through auditions.

“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: ‘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 four weeks 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 not succeed in the reading. I was just extremely sick of it.”

The acclaim for the movie led to roles including leaders, popes and Prince Philip in Stephen Frears’ a film, as the industry tried to categorise 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 space travelers on … some kind of cosmic journey.”

Cromwell views Hollywood as a “seamy” business driven by “avarice” and “the bottom line”. He criticises the focus on “asses in the seats”, the lack of genuine discussion on issues such as racial diversity and the increasing influence of social media popularity on hiring choices. He has “no interest in the parties” and sees the “industry” 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 yelling.”

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

This prompted Cromwell to try a alteration of his own. Hanson disapproved. “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 background and his propensities, I said: ‘You motherfucker, curse you, you insult! You don’t know what the {fuck|expletive