John Lithgow's Tony-nominated performance in Giant brings the antisemitism-vs.-anti-Zionism debate center stage.

Wait, What Did He Say?

- REBECCA ALTER

On a sunny April Thursday on the Upper West Side, John Lithgow took me through the stage door of the David H. Koch Theater, where the New York City Ballet is rehearsing his friend Christopher Wheeldon’s Continuum. With his gray tweed flatcap under his arm, Lithgow settled into a chair and scanned the room, watching pairs of dancers fold themselves into impossible knots, rapt with their “onerous shapes.” “They just thrill me to watch,” he leaned over to tell me between sections. “Actors do about 10 percent of what dancers do.” He paraphrased Noël Coward: “The essence of acting is to learn your lines and don’t bump into the furniture.”

At six-three and 80 years old, Lithgow could never be mistaken for a dancer, but he had acted with the NYCB a year prior, when he and Wheeldon brought their take on Camille Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals suite to the city. Few actors veer so wildly between highbrow and low entertainment. Lithgow graduated from Harvard magna cum laude and studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art on a Fulbright, yet he used this training to play a diminutive bad guy in Shrek whose name sounds like “fuckwad” in Lithgow’s transatlantic inflection. He has an incredible capacity to play both overgrown innocents (the guileless suitor in Terms of Endearment) and repressed, perverted psychopaths (Dexter’s Trinity Killer). He can ramp up the approachable charm (30 Rock, the dad in Harry and the Hendersons) or completely void himself of it (the cruel, puritanical preacher in Footloose). He has the range, though he’s not a chameleon; it’s more that he has the room in his big, unmistakable frame to house such vast extremes. In recent years, his career has stayed as much of a grab bag as ever. He played the chilly, espresso-sipping Cardinal Tremblay in 2024’s Conclave, a creep tormenting Geoffrey Rush with a hand puppet in