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In the middle of the bustle 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 protested about the surcharges on plant-based alternatives. “When will you stop making excessive earnings while customers, creatures, and the planet suffer?” Cromwell declared as fellow activists streamed the protest online.

But, the unconcerned customers of the establishment paid little heed. Perhaps they didn’t realise they were in the presence 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 “star trek” in a Star Trek film. Law enforcement came to shut down the store.

“Nobody paid attention to me,” Cromwell muses three years later. “Customers entered, hear me at the top of my lungs talking about what they were doing with these non-dairy creamers, and then they would move past to the far corner, get their order and wait looking at their cellphones. ‘We’re facing doom 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 activist-actors is more accurate. He protested against the Southeast Asian conflict, supported the Black Panthers, and took part in civil disobedience protests over animal rights and the climate crisis. He has lost count 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 symbol of a disillusioned generation that marched for peace abroad and progressive goals at home, only to see, in their later life, a former president turn back the clock on abortion and many other achievements.

Cromwell certainly appears and speaks the part of an veteran progressive who might have a revolutionary poster in the attic and consider Bernie Sanders to be not radical enough on capitalism. When visited at his home – a wooden house in the farming town of a New York town, where he lives with his third wife, the actor his partner – he rises from a seat at the fireplace with a friendly welcome and outstretched hand.

Cromwell measures at 6ft 7in tall like a ancient tree. “Perhaps 10 years ago, I heard somebody smart say we’re already a fascist state,” he says. “We have turnkey fascism. The mechanism is in the door. All they have to do is the one thing to turn it and open a source of trouble. Out will come every loophole, every exception that the legislature has written so diligently into their legislation.”

Cromwell has seen this movie before. His father John Cromwell, a renowned Hollywood director and actor, was banned during the McCarthy era of anti-communist witch-hunts merely for making comments at a party praising aspects of the Russian theatre system for fostering young talent and comparing it with the “used up” culture of Hollywood.

This apparently harmless observation, coupled with his leadership of the “a political group” which later “moved slightly to the left”, led to John Cromwell being called to give evidence to the government panel on alleged subversion. He had little of importance to say but a committee representative still demanded an apology.

John Cromwell refused and, with a large payment from a wealthy businessman for an unrealised project, moved to New York, where he acted in a play with Henry Fonda and won a Tony award. James muses: “My father was not touched except for the fact that his best friends – 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, Kay Johnson, and his father’s wife, Ruth Nelson, were also accomplished actors. Despite this deep lineage, he was initially hesitant to follow in their footsteps. “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 picture 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 heady stuff for me. I said: ‘Oh, I gotta do this.’”

Creativity and ideology collided again when he joined a performance group founded by African American performers, and toured an playwright’s play Waiting for Godot for predominantly African American audiences in Mississippi, another region, a state, and Georgia. Some shows took place under armed guard in case extremists tried to attack the theatre.

The play 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 waiting for anything. Nobody’s giving us anything – we’re seizing what we need!”

Cromwell says: “I didn’t know anything about the southern US. I went down and the rooming house had a sign on the outside, ‘Coloreds only’. I thought: ‘That’s a relic, 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 thrown out of a restaurant before, so I immediately stood up with my fist balled. 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 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 shot, people had symbols of hate on their lawns.

“I feel uncomfortable 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 various activities as well as acting.”

Later, his wife will confide that she is among those urging 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 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 decades when, at the age of 55, his career skyrocketed thanks to his role as a agriculturalist in Babe, a 1995 movie about a pig that yearns to be a herding dog. It was a unexpected success, grossing more than $250m worldwide.

Cromwell paid for his own campaign for an Oscar for best supporting actor in Babe, spending $60,000 to hire a PR representative and buy trade press ads to promote his performance after the studio declined to fund it. The risk paid off when he received the nomination, the kind of recognition that means an actor is given roles rather than having to trudge 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 worthy, I’ll fail in the reading. I was just fucking sick of it.”

The recognition for Babe led to roles including leaders, religious figures and Prince Philip in a director’s a film, as the industry tried to categorise 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 space travelers 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 “asses in the seats”, the lack of genuine discussion on issues such as racial diversity and the increasing influence of online followings on casting decisions. He has “disinterest in the parties” and sees the “industry” as secondary to “the business transaction”. He also admits that he can be a difficult on set: “I do a lot of disputing. I do too much yelling.”

He offers the example of LA Confidential, which he describes as a “genius piece of work”. In one scene, Cromwell’s menacing Captain Dudley Smith asks an actor’s a role, “Have you a parting word, boyo?” before killing him. Spacey, by then an Oscar winner, 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 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