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

However, the unconcerned customers of the coffee shop paid little heed. Maybe they didn’t know they were in the company of the tallest person ever recognized for an Academy Award, performer of one of the most memorable monologues in the hit series, and the only actor to say the words “space adventure” in a Star Trek production. Police came to close the store.

“Nobody paid attention to me,” Cromwell reflects three years later. “Customers entered, listen to me at the full volume talking 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. ‘We’re facing doom of the world, folks! Everything will cease! We have 15 minutes!’”

Undeterred, Cromwell remains one of Hollywood’s greatest actor-activists – or maybe performers with principles is more fitting. He protested against the Vietnam war, supported the civil rights group, and took part in nonviolent resistance actions 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.

Currently, at 85, he could be seen as the symbol of a disappointed generation that demonstrated for peace abroad and social advances at home, only to see, in their later life, a former president reverse 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 Bernie Sanders to be not radical enough on capitalism. When visited at his home – a log cabin in the farming town of a New York town, where he lives with his spouse, the actor Anna Stuart – he stands up from a chair at the fireplace with a warm greeting and outstretched hand.

Cromwell stands at over two meters tall like a great weathered oak. “Perhaps 10 years ago, I heard somebody intelligent 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 a single action to activate it and open a source of trouble. Out will come every loophole, every loophole that the Congress has written so diligently into their legislation.”

Cromwell has seen this movie before. His father a family member, a renowned Hollywood director and actor, was banned during the 1950s purge of anti-communist witch-hunts merely for making comments at a party praising aspects of the Russian theatre system for nurturing young talent and contrasting it with the “used up” 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 give evidence to the House Committee on Un-American Activities. He had little of importance to say but a committee representative still demanded an apology.

He refused and, with a generous payment from Howard Hughes for an unrealised project, moved to New York, where he performed in a play with Henry Fonda and won a theater honor. 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 accomplished actors. Despite this deep lineage, he was initially reluctant to follow in their path. “I resisted 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 Ingmar Bergman’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 gotta do this.’”

Creativity and ideology intersected again when he joined a theatre company founded by Black actors, and toured an playwright’s play Waiting for Godot for predominantly 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 firebomb the theatre.

Godot struck a chord. At one performance in a location, the civil rights activist 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 sitting idle for anything. Nobody’s giving 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, ‘Segregated accommodation’. I thought: ‘That’s a historical marker, obviously, back from the civil war.’ 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 fist balled. I would have done something stupid. John O’Neal informed the man that he was violating our legal protections and that they would get to the bottom 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 growing up, trying to get the girl, trying to keep his nose clean, trying not to get hurt. People were being killed, people were being assaulted, people were being fired upon, 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: ‘Personal narrative’. 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.”

Later, his wife will reveal that she is among those urging Cromwell to write a memoir. But he has minimal interest for such a project, he insists, since he fears it would be predictable and “because my father tried it and it was so poor even his wife, who loved him, said: ‘That’s really stinky, John.’”

We push on with his story all the same. Cromwell had been accumulating film and TV roles for decades when, at the age of 55, his career skyrocketed thanks to his role as a agriculturalist in a beloved film, a 1995 movie about a pig that yearns to be a sheepdog. It was a unexpected success, grossing more than $250m worldwide.

Cromwell paid for 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 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 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: ‘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 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 worthy, I’ll not succeed in the reading. I was just extremely sick of it.”

The acclaim for the movie led to roles including leaders, religious figures and Prince Philip in a director’s The Queen, as the industry tried to categorise him. In Star Trek: First Contact he played the interstellar pioneer a character, who observes of the Starship Enterprise crew: “And you people, you’re all space travelers on … some kind of cosmic journey.”

Cromwell views Hollywood as a “seamy” 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 casting decisions. He has “no interest 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 “brilliant piece of work”. In one scene, Cromwell’s menacing his character asks Kevin Spacey’s Jack Vincennes, “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 subtly resistant Spacey won their disagreement.

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