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Amid the bustle of New York's urban core on a Wednesday in May 2022, James Cromwell entered a Starbucks, glued his hand to a counter, and protested about the surcharges on plant-based alternatives. “When will you stop making excessive earnings while patrons, animals, and the environment suffer?” Cromwell declared as other protesters broadcast the demonstration online.

However, the unconcerned customers of the coffee shop paid scant attention. Perhaps they didn’t realise they were in the company of the tallest person ever nominated for an acting Oscar, performer of one of the most memorable monologues in the hit series, and the only actor to say the words “star trek” in a Star Trek film. Police came to shut down 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 vegan options, 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 very little time!’”

Unfazed, Cromwell remains one of Hollywood’s greatest actor-activists – or maybe performers with principles is more accurate. He protested against the Vietnam war, supported the Black Panthers, and took part in civil disobedience actions over creature welfare and the environmental emergency. He has forgotten the number of how many times he has been arrested, and has even spent time in prison.

But now, at eighty-five, he could be seen as the avatar of a disillusioned generation that demonstrated 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 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 the economic system. When visited at his home – a wooden house in the rural community of Warwick, where he lives with his spouse, the actor his partner – he rises from a seat at the fireplace with a warm greeting and outstretched hand.

Cromwell measures at over two meters tall like a great weathered oak. “Perhaps 10 years ago, I heard somebody smart say we’re already a fascist state,” he says. “We have ready-made oppression. The key is in the door. All they have to do is the one thing to activate it and open a source of trouble. Out will come every exception, every loophole that the Congress has written so diligently into their legislation.”

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

This seemingly innocuous observation, coupled with his leadership of the “Hollywood Democrats” which later “moved slightly to the left”, led to his father being called to testify to the House Committee on alleged subversion. He had little of importance to say but a committee emissary still demanded an apology.

John Cromwell refused and, with a large cheque from a wealthy businessman 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 – 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 – sort of like today.”

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

But, a visit to a Scandinavian country, 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 involved and was working things out. It was very exciting stuff for me. I said: ‘Oh, I have to 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 African American audiences in Mississippi, another region, a state, and an area. Some performances took place under armed guard in case white supremacists tried to attack the theatre.

Godot struck a chord. At one performance in Indianola, Mississippi, the civil rights activist 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 taking 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, ‘Segregated accommodation’. 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 proprietor 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 civil rights and that they would get to the bottom of it.”

However, mid-anecdote, Cromwell stops himself and addresses the interviewer directly. “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 dying, people were being assaulted, people were being shot, people had crosses burned on their lawns.

“I feel strange recounting it always with the points that I think an interviewer would be interested in: ‘My story’. People ask if I should write a book because I have all these stories and I’ve done a lot of different things as well as acting.”

Subsequently, his wife will reveal that she is among those lobbying Cromwell to write a memoir. 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 adored 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 years 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 aspires to be a sheepdog. It was a unexpected success, grossing more than $250 million 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 promote his performance after the production company declined to fund it. The risk paid off when he received the honor, the kind of recognition that means an actor is given roles 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 sick 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 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 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 Prince Philip in a director’s The Queen, 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 “attendance numbers”, the lack of genuine debate on issues such as inclusion and the increasing influence of social media popularity on hiring choices. He has “disinterest in the parties” and sees the “game” as secondary to “the business transaction”. He also admits that he can be a handful on set: “I do a lot of disputing. I do too much yelling.”

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

This spurred Cromwell to try a alteration 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 background and his tendencies, I said: ‘You motherfucker, fuck you, you insult! You don’t know what the {fuck|expletive