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Amid the hustle of midtown Manhattan on a Wednesday in 2022, James Cromwell entered a Starbucks, glued his hand to a counter, and complained about the surcharges on plant-based alternatives. “How long until you cease making excessive earnings while patrons, animals, and the environment endure harm?” Cromwell boomed as other protesters broadcast the demonstration online.

But, the insouciant customers of the establishment paid little heed. Maybe they didn’t realise they were in the presence of the tallest person ever nominated for an Academy Award, 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 close the store.

“Nobody paid attention to me,” Cromwell muses 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 move past to the far corner, 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!’”

Undeterred, Cromwell remains one of Hollywood’s greatest actor-activists – or maybe activist-actors is more accurate. He marched against the Vietnam war, supported the civil rights group, and took part in nonviolent resistance protests over creature welfare and the climate crisis. He has lost count of how many times he has been detained, and has even served time in prison.

But now, at 85, he could be seen as the avatar of a disappointed generation that marched for global harmony and progressive goals at home, only to see, in their twilight years, Donald Trump turn back the clock on reproductive rights and many other gains.

Cromwell certainly looks and sounds the part of an veteran progressive who might have a Che Guevara poster in the loft and consider a political figure to be too soft on capitalism. When visited at his home – a wooden house in the rural community of Warwick, where he lives with his spouse, the actor Anna Stuart – he rises from a seat at the hearth with a friendly welcome and extended palm.

Cromwell measures at over two meters tall like a ancient tree. “Probably 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 loophole, every exception that the legislature has written so assiduously into their laws.”

Cromwell has seen this movie before. His father John Cromwell, a famous Hollywood director and actor, was blacklisted during the McCarthy era of anti-communist witch-hunts merely for making remarks at a party complimenting aspects of the Soviet arts system for fostering young talent and comparing it with the “exhausted” culture of Hollywood.

This seemingly innocuous comment, coupled with his presidency of the “Hollywood Democrats” which later “moved slightly to the left”, led to John Cromwell being called to give evidence to the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He had nothing substantive to say but a committee emissary still demanded an apology.

John Cromwell refused and, with a generous cheque from a wealthy businessman for an unproduced work, moved to New York, where he acted in a play with Henry Fonda and won a Tony award. James reflects: “My father was not touched 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 stepmother, another actor, were also successful actors. Despite this strong background, he was initially reluctant to follow in their footsteps. “I resisted for as long as possible. I was going to be a technical professional.”

However, a visit to Sweden, where his father was making a film 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 exciting stuff for me. I said: ‘Oh, I have to do this.’”

Creativity and ideology intersected again when he joined a theatre company founded by Black actors, and toured Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot for mainly Black audiences in a southern state, another region, a state, and Georgia. Some performances took place under armed guard in case extremists tried to attack the theatre.

The play struck a chord. At one performance in Indianola, Mississippi, the social advocate 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 sitting idle 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 lodging had a sign on the outside, ‘Segregated accommodation’. 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 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-story, Cromwell stops himself and breaks the fourth wall. “I’m hearing my words,” he says. “These are not just tales 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 fired upon, 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 memoir because I have all these stories and I’ve done a lot of different things as well as acting.”

Later, his wife will confide 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 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 notching up film and TV roles for decades when, at the age of 55, his career took off thanks to his role as a agriculturalist in Babe, a 1995 movie about a pig that yearns to be a herding dog. It was a surprise hit, grossing more than $250m worldwide.

Cromwell paid for his own campaign for an Academy Award for best supporting actor in the film, spending $sixty thousand to hire a PR representative and buy industry ads to publicize his performance after the studio declined to fund it. The risk 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 sick 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 four weeks 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 extremely sick of it.”

The acclaim 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 Starship Enterprise crew: “And you people, you’re all astronauts on … some kind of star trek.”

Cromwell views Hollywood as a “seamy” business driven by “greed” and “the profit motive”. He criticises the focus on “asses in the seats”, the lack of genuine discussion on issues such as inclusion and the increasing influence of online followings on casting decisions. He has “disinterest in the parties” and sees the “game” as secondary to “the business transaction”. 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 LA Confidential, which he describes as a “brilliant piece of work”. In one scene, Cromwell’s intimidating his character asks an actor’s a role, “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 quietly defiant Spacey won their battle of wills.

This spurred Cromwell to try a line change of his own. Hanson disapproved. “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 tendencies, I said: ‘You expletive, curse you, you piece of shit! You don’t know what the {fuck|expletive