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Amid the hustle of midtown Manhattan on a Wednesday in May 2022, James Cromwell entered a Starbucks, glued his hand to a surface, and complained about the extra fees on plant-based alternatives. “How long until you cease raking in huge profits while customers, animals, and the planet endure harm?” Cromwell boomed as fellow activists streamed the demonstration live.

But, the unconcerned customers of the establishment paid scant attention. Perhaps they didn’t know they were in the company of the tallest person ever recognized for an acting Oscar, deliverer of one of the best speeches in the hit series, and the only actor to say the words “space adventure” in a sci-fi franchise production. Police came to close the store.

“No one listened to me,” Cromwell muses three years later. “Customers entered, hear me at the full volume speaking about what they were doing with these vegan options, and then they would move past to the far corner, place their request and stand there looking at their cellphones. ‘We’re facing doom of the world, folks! Everything will cease! We have very little time!’”

Unfazed, Cromwell remains one of Hollywood’s greatest activists who act – or maybe activist-actors is more fitting. He marched against the Vietnam war, supported the Black Panthers, and took part in nonviolent resistance protests over animal rights and the climate crisis. He has forgotten the number of how many times he has been detained, and has even spent time in prison.

Currently, at eighty-five, 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 later life, Donald Trump turn back the clock on abortion and many other achievements.

Cromwell certainly appears and speaks the part of an old lefty who might have a Che Guevara poster in the attic and consider a political figure to be not radical enough on capitalism. When visited at his home – a wooden house in the rural community of Warwick, where he lives with his third wife, the actor Anna Stuart – he stands up from a seat at the fireplace with a friendly welcome and extended palm.

Cromwell measures at over two meters tall like a ancient tree. “Perhaps 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 door. All they have to do is the one thing to activate it and open Pandora’s box. Out will come every exception, every exception that the legislature has written so assiduously into their legislation.”

Cromwell has seen this movie before. His father a family member, a famous Hollywood filmmaker and actor, was banned during the 1950s purge of political persecution merely for making remarks at a party praising aspects of the Soviet arts system for nurturing young talent and contrasting it with the “exhausted” culture of Hollywood.

This seemingly innocuous observation, coupled with his presidency of the “Hollywood Democrats” which later “moved slightly to the left”, led to his father being called to testify to the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He had little of importance to say but a committee emissary 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 a fellow actor 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 at fault or not – similar to today.”

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

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

Creativity and ideology collided again when he joined a performance group founded by Black actors, and toured Samuel Beckett’s play a classic work for mainly Black audiences in a southern state, Alabama, Tennessee, and an area. Some shows took place under armed guard in case white supremacists tried to attack the theatre.

Godot struck a nerve. At one performance in a location, the civil rights activist 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 deep south. I went down and the lodging had a sign on the outside, ‘Coloreds only’. I thought: ‘That’s a historical marker, obviously, back from the 1860s conflict.’ 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 ejected of a restaurant before, so I immediately stood up with my clenched hand. I would have done something rash. John O’Neal informed the man that he was infringing upon our legal protections and that they would investigate fully of it.”

However, mid-story, Cromwell stops himself and breaks the fourth wall. “I’m listening to myself,” 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 being killed, people were being beaten, 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 lobbying Cromwell to write a memoir. 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 notching up film and TV roles for years when, at the age of 55, his career took off thanks to his role as a farmer in a beloved film, a 1995 film about a pig that yearns to be a sheepdog. It was a unexpected success, earning more than $250m worldwide.

Cromwell funded his own campaign for an Oscar for best supporting actor in Babe, spending $sixty thousand to hire a PR representative and buy trade press ads to promote his performance after the studio declined to fund it. The gamble 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 dance 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 a month 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 good enough, I’ll fail in the reading. I was just fucking sick of it.”

The recognition for the movie led to roles including presidents, religious figures and Prince Philip in a director’s The Queen, as the industry tried to pigeonhole him. In Star Trek: First Contact he played the interstellar pioneer Dr Zefram Cochrane, who observes of the spaceship crew: “And you people, you’re all astronauts on … some kind of cosmic journey.”

Cromwell views Hollywood as a “seamy” business driven by “avarice” and “the profit motive”. He criticises the focus on “attendance numbers”, the lack of genuine discussion on issues such as inclusion 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 deal”. He also admits that he can be a handful on set: “I do a lot of arguing. I do too much shouting.”

He offers the example of a film, which he describes as a “brilliant piece of work”. In one scene, Cromwell’s intimidating Captain Dudley Smith asks Kevin Spacey’s Jack Vincennes, “Have you a parting word, 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 subtly resistant Spacey won their disagreement.

This spurred Cromwell to try a alteration of his own. Hanson objected. “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, fuck you, you piece of shit! You don’t know what the {fuck|expletive