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Amid the hustle of New York's urban core on one spring day in 2022, James Cromwell entered a coffee chain, affixed his hand to a surface, and complained about the surcharges on vegan milks. “How long until you cease raking in huge profits while patrons, animals, and the environment endure harm?” Cromwell boomed as other protesters streamed the protest online.

However, the insouciant customers of the coffee shop paid scant attention. Perhaps they didn’t realise they were in the company of the most statuesque person ever nominated for an acting Oscar, deliverer of one of the most memorable monologues in Succession, and the only actor to say the words “star trek” in a Star Trek production. Law enforcement came to close the store.

“No one listened to me,” Cromwell reflects three years later. “They would come in, hear me at the full volume talking about what they were doing with these vegan options, and then they would move past to the far corner, place their request and wait looking at their cellphones. ‘It’s the end of the world, folks! It’s going to end! We have very little time!’”

Undeterred, Cromwell remains one of Hollywood’s greatest activists who act – or maybe performers with principles is more fitting. He protested against the Southeast Asian conflict, supported the Black Panthers, and took part in civil disobedience protests over creature welfare and the climate crisis. He has lost count of how many times he has been arrested, and has even spent time in prison.

But now, at 85, he could be seen as the avatar of a disappointed generation that marched for peace abroad and social advances at home, only to see, in their twilight years, Donald Trump reverse the clock on reproductive rights and many other gains.

Cromwell certainly appears and speaks the part of an old lefty who might have a revolutionary poster in the attic and consider Bernie Sanders to be too soft on capitalism. When interviewed 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 outstretched hand.

Cromwell stands 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 a single action to activate it and open Pandora’s box. Out will come every exception, every exception that the Congress has written so diligently into their laws.”

Cromwell has witnessed this scenario before. His father John Cromwell, 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 Russian theatre system for nurturing 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 “shifted somewhat 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 expression of regret.

He refused and, with a generous cheque from a wealthy businessman for an unrealised project, 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 touched 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 guilty or not – sort of like today.”

Cromwell’s mother, a relative, and his stepmother, another actor, were also accomplished actors. Despite this strong background, he was initially reluctant to follow in their path. “I resisted for as long as possible. I was going to be a mechanical engineer.”

However, a visit to Sweden, where his father was making a film with Ingmar Bergman’s crew, proved to be a pivotal moment. “They were creating something and my father was involved and was working things out. It was very exciting stuff for me. I said: ‘Oh, I gotta do this.’”

Art and politics intersected again when he joined a performance group founded by Black actors, and toured an playwright’s play Waiting for Godot for mainly Black audiences in a southern state, Alabama, a state, and Georgia. 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 social advocate 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 offering 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, ‘Coloreds only’. I thought: ‘That’s a relic, obviously, back from the 1860s conflict.’ A kind 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 thrown out of a restaurant before, so I immediately stood up with my clenched hand. I would have done something stupid. 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-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 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 memoir because I have all these stories and I’ve done a lot of different things as well as acting.”

Subsequently, his wife will confide 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 bad even his wife, who loved him, said: ‘That’s really stinky, 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 a beloved film, a 1995 film about a animal that aspires to be a sheepdog. It was a unexpected success, earning more than $250 million 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 industry ads to publicize his performance after the production company declined to fund it. The gamble paid off when he received the honor, the kind of accolade that means an actor is offered scripts 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 tired of the dance that had to be done when you did an audition. I finally asked a filmmaker: ‘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: ‘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 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 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 fail in the reading. I was just extremely sick of it.”

The recognition for Babe led to roles including leaders, religious figures and Prince Philip in Stephen Frears’ a film, as the industry tried to pigeonhole him. In Star Trek: First Contact he played the interstellar pioneer a character, who observes of the spaceship crew: “And you people, you’re all space travelers on … some kind of star trek.”

Cromwell views Hollywood as a “unsavory” business driven by “avarice” and “the bottom line”. He criticises the focus on “asses in the seats”, the lack of genuine debate on issues such as inclusion and the increasing influence of online followings on hiring choices. He has “disinterest in the parties” and sees the “game” 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 yelling.”

He offers the example of LA Confidential, which he describes as a “brilliant piece of work”. In one scene, Cromwell’s menacing his character asks an actor’s a role, “Have you a valediction, boyo?” before shooting him dead. Spacey, by then an award recipient, disagreed with filmmaker and co-writer a creative over what Vincennes should reply. A quietly defiant Spacey won their disagreement.

This spurred 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 expletive, curse you, you insult! You don’t know what the {fuck|expletive