Between a ‘Rock’ and a Bard Place

No one has said, “Look out, here comes the High Commander!” as John Lithgow, briefcase in hand, finds his way to an outdoor table on a weekday morning at a cafe in Santa Monica. At least no one has said it out loud. At 6 feet 4, Lithgow has always been hard to miss, but since January he has been especially hard to miss as the star of a hit TV show, the interplanetary sitcom “3rd Rock From the Sun,” which NBC put on as a midseason replacement on Tuesday nights.

Once a cottage industry, John Lithgow has suddenly gone public. For a character actor, it’s the difference between meeting strangers who think they’ve seen you somewhere before and hearing a cab driver’s honk and knowing it’s probably for you. This is what all actors want, is it not? But Lithgow is and is not all actors.

“I was in the men’s room at a Broadway theater last week,” he says, “and this old guy comes up to me and says [chesty New York geezer accent], ‘I hate it when you do the silly comedies! It does a disservice to ya!’

“And I can only laugh,” which Lithgow is doing right now over his cappuccino, amazed at the idea of it all. “Just the fact that you are that much of a conversation piece.”

Being a TV star, he has discovered in a matter of months, has something in common with being a politician. “Everybody knows you and has an opinion on you. It reduces the world to a small town.”

This after more than a decade of working regularly in the movies, with two supporting actor Oscar nominations (for “The World According to Garp” and “Terms of Endearment”) on his resume, and a decade onstage in New York before that (including a Tony Award for “The Changing Room”). But it is on the great lawn of television that Lithgow is finding room to throw open the circus tent of characters he has spent a career amassing. Conveniently, they are all able to coexist within the person of “3rd Rock From the Sun’s” High Commander, the histrionically inclined military leader of a team of explorers from another planet who has assumed the form of a bombastic college physics professor named Dick Solomon but who is guessing all the way at how to behave as a human being.

As it happens, Lithgow will briefly return to live performance this week in one of L.A. Theatre Works’ radio-theater shows at the DoubleTree Guest Suites hotel in Santa Monica (Wednesday through Saturday, taped for later radio broadcast on KCRW-FM), reprising the role he played on Broadway in 1988 as the sexually duped French diplomat Rene Gallimard in the Tony Award-winning “M. Butterfly” by David Henry Hwang. And he says that during his sitcom hiatus next year, he wants to go back to do a play on Broadway, but at the moment all he can see on the horizon is the blue sky of his new life in television.

Before “3rd Rock From the Sun,” Lithgow had never even appeared on episodic television, unless you count an installment of “Amazing Stories,” for which he won an Emmy in 1986. But he never imagined he would be sitting here talking about his first season in a sitcom about aliens come to Earth that did so well in the ratings it blew Tony Danza to another night on ABC.

When the Carsey-Werner-based husband-and-wife writing-producing team of Bonnie and Terry Turner (Mike Myers’ collaborators on “Wayne’s World”) sprung on him the idea for “3rd Rock From the Sun” at a hotel breakfast two years ago, he only flinched momentarily. “The first words out of his mouth were, ‘It’s about four aliens,’ ” Lithgow recalls Terry Turner saying, “and I thought, ‘Uh-uh,’ the button turned off inside me. But as he kept talking, within two to three minutes I immediately saw the satirical possibilities of this.”

The Turners needed someone to be their High Commander, a tall order in as much as Terry Turner recalls he and his wife conceiving the role as “somewhere between Bugs Bunny and Errol Flynn.” The Turners, former staff writers at “Saturday Night Live,” had worked with Lithgow when he guest-hosted twice on the show and played such sketch characters as “the meanest Methodist minister in the world,” a riff on his part in the 1984 film “Footloose.” “A lot of people know him as a villain and dramatic actor,” Terry Turner says, “but we always knew how good he was with comedy. As we were developing this, from the get-go, the character who emerged in template was John.”

Good thing he went for it. The Turners say that they had no backup candidate.

The High Commander, by nature imperious but by circumstance clueless, is the sort of person who walks over to a stranger at a party and says, “I don’t like your shoes and I don’t think you do either,” and has no idea why the person’s mouth drops open. Like his three “family members” from outer space who have accompanied him on the mission, he has a huge brain but a child’s innocence about earthlings and their complicated emotional lives. And therein lies the basis of the show’s irony and its stranger-in-a-strange-land approach to sending up American popular culture.

“For an actor, it’s a fantastic performance piece,” says Lithgow (whose name is pronounced as if the last syllable were spelled “go”). “It’s about an alien but in a way it’s about an actor, it’s about somebody who can and will do anything. As Dr. Dick Solomon, I play at being human. I sing and I dance and I get drunk. I’ve done a ventriloquist act; I’ve worn a dress.” He modeled nude for an art class and squeezed into a pair of leather jeans so tight he walked with a limp. The show has often skated on his facility for physical comedy. “From the beginning, it’s been one of the great appeals of the show for me. It’s almost about acting. I get to strut my stuff.”

In a gesture of recognition of the many-sided characters Lithgow has played on the big screen, the writers for “3rd Rock From the Sun” have already introduced three or four parodies of them into the series--jokes that play at full volume only to the initiated.

“There’s a hilarious moment when I panic on an airplane (‘My God, there’s something on the wing of this plane!’),” recalling his “Twilight Zone--The Movie” (1983) part as a hallucinating passenger. “And the drag episode was a knockoff of Roberta Muldoon,” the transsexual pro footballer he played in “Garp” (1982). In the season’s last episode, just broadcast, an evil twin arrived to replace Dick, inspired by the surly British psycho villain Lithgow played in the low-low-lowbrow Stallone action picture “Cliffhanger” (1993).

Watching Lithgow wear these many faces, tangoing furiously with co-star Jane Curtin one moment and weeping hysterically the next, one tries to imagine who else might have played the part if he had not agreed to do it. There is, perhaps, the example of John Cleese in “Fawlty Towers” and “A Fish Called Wanda.”

“There is a John Cleese sense about John,” Terry Turner says. “His comedy is in a British mold, and I think sometimes the show has a British sensibility about it, though we tend to think of it as more ‘30s American screwball comedy. Hepburn meets Alf, maybe.”

Lithgow, who studied acting at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art after graduating from Harvard, came to Hollywood with some reluctance in the early ‘80s after growing up in the theater and figuring that would be his life.

Cast by Brian De Palma in one of his first films, “Blow Out,” as a sadistic killer, he nevertheless went on to play moon-faced husbands as well, not to mention perform children’s songs in his 30-minute video, “John Lithgow’s Kid-size Concert.” This somewhat unorthodox combination is not one that Hollywood’s star-making machinists are always eager to understand and like many an accomplished thespian, Lithgow found that his versatility eventually became something of a liability. Yet he says what might look to others as an odd talent was developed naturally.

“I think it comes from when I was very young. My dad ran the Antioch Shakespeare Festival and then the Akron Shakespeare Festival and then the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival. I was one of the fairies in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ I was a soldier in ‘Henry IV,’ a messenger in ‘Henry V.’ By the time I was 18 or 19 I was playing small parts in five or six Shakespeare plays all summer long--names like Nym and Froth and Pinch and Hortensio, curious little journeyman character parts. And in rep, night after night, the idea was to make yourself as different as you can. I would use a pound of makeup a week.

“As a character man, the three things they want you for are a scoundrel, a fool or a comic. Basically, you have to be willing to be very different from yourself. That’s just how I grew up thinking about acting. For me, if acting doesn’t have that quality, it’s no fun or it’s like I’m not doing my job--or they’re not letting me do my job. When I play a conventional leading man, I think I’m terribly boring.”

Steve Albrezzi, who is directing the L.A. Theatre Works production of “M. Butterfly,” recently encountered Lithgow’s full arsenal of mimicry when he listened to the audiotape version of Michael Crichton’s novel “Disclosure,” for which Lithgow provided the narration and voices.

“I was struck by what John can do--a seemingly effortless portrayal of an entire corporate landscape, and the fact that he could render both male and female characters with such nuance.”

Lithgow will be reunited in “M. Butterfly” with B.D. Wong, who originated the part of Song Liling, the beautiful Chinese diva who carried on an unlikely 20-year affair with the French diplomat before being unmasked as a man and a spy.

“M. Butterfly,” which Lithgow describes as “a meditation on self-delusion and the West’s misperceptions of the East,” is a memory play in which he, as the main character, narrates the tale of his downfall from a prison cell. It is the last play he did in New York and earned him mostly high praise--Wong, Hwang and the director, the late John Dexter, all won Tonys--though the review in the New York Times slapped him with a double-sided compliment that still stings. “A winning yet emotionally bland performance from Mr. Lithgow” is the phrase he repeats verbatim in the recollection of it, as actors often can do with certain long-ago assessments of their work. The fact that he repeats it now for another journalist is perhaps an indication of his uncharacteristic lack of concern for his movietown image.

“It’s the kind of thing that does stick with you and makes you wonder, ‘Well, do I have the chops?’ But ‘M. Butterfly’ was such a tremendous experience on so many levels I was able to put that particular disappointment in perspective.”

How the play, which Albrezzi saw and remembers as a “sumptuous visual production,” will be translated to radio remains to be worked out, though Hwang is adapting it himself.

It will be Lithgow’s first appearance in an L.A. Theatre Works piece for producer Susan Loewenberg since performing in “Once in a Lifetime,” which launched the KCRW radio drama series back in 1987. “I’ve agreed to do a couple of them and have had to pull out for one reason or another.” He last appeared onstage in Los Angeles in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” with Glenda Jackson at the Doolittle in 1989.

A dozen years after moving west to make his home in Los Angeles, Lithgow still sorely misses New York and the theater world. A recent trip back only aggravated this condition. “I saw five plays in five days, I ran into so many people I knew--stagehands, actors, all kinds of people. That doesn’t happen here. And you go into the theaters and people are hungry for it. You need that for the theater: The audience has got to feel a need to watch and the actors have to feel a need to perform.”

He moved to Los Angeles to try his luck in Hollywood like so many stage actors before him but also because he had met a UCLA history professor, Mary Yeager, who became his second wife. They had two children right away--Phoebe, 13, and Nathan, 12. (His son Ian, by his first marriage, is an actor who has a small role on “3rd Rock From the Sun” as professor Solomon’s slowest student.)

“I don’t think she knew completely what she was getting into,” Lithgow says of Yeager. “I was the only actor she’d ever met before. And I said, ‘Believe me, honey, I’m one of the better ones.’ From the very beginning it’s been a combination of very difficult and very exhilarating. Because a professor’s life is so orderly and an actor’s life is so disorderly. We’ve brought an awful lot to each other’s life, I think.”

One pictures Lithgow reading tomes on economic history (Yeager’s field of specialty) to keep up his end of the dinner table conversation at their house in Westwood. “I certainly read what she writes. When she’s writing something, she runs it by me all the time. I’ve been to her lectures. And I would say our best friends are more from her world than mine--professor friends from UCLA. But I don’t really keep up with the literature.”

Some years ago, Lithgow was asked how a serious person like himself could have found happiness so quickly in Hollywood. And his answer was, in part, that he tried not to strap his life too tightly to professional ambition.

He hasn’t changed his mind about that, but says now, “It’s a poisonous business when you’re not successful. Nobody’s interested in you and they treat you like [expletive]. And when you are successful they treat you, in just as much extremis, far too well.

“But there are a lot of very good people out here who are trying to do good things. And when you meet ‘em, you know ‘em immediately. The Carsey-Werner gang is a bunch of really unusual people. They defy the conventional wisdom about the insincerity of Hollywood.

“It’s a Faustian place, Hollywood, full of Faustian bargains everywhere you turn. I’ve certainly ended up doing things in this business I never thought I would do. And yet, from movies like that I’ve made great friends. You always take something away.”

When he had been in Hollywood only a year, Lithgow said in an interview that he did not approve of actors doing commercials (“I don’t think actors were ever meant to sell things”), but today he looks back and has a laugh remembering he said that. “Yes, well, it’s my voice selling Kemper Funds on all those NCAA basketball games. It became such a vogue, it almost became a badge of honor--hearing Donald Sutherland and Jack Lemmon and Michael Douglas, and the idea is that they’re so famous that you can recognize their voice and maybe you’ll buy a Honda. Also, it comes with age and having a family and realizing your idealism isn’t what it used to be. Idealism begins to feel like fustiness.”

The strange thing--or maybe not so strange--is how the movies and movie roles began to get worse and worse. He found himself headed for the Alan Rickman-Christopher Walken school of classical actors turned B-movie fiends. It sort of reminds Lithgow of a character actress friend in New York who told him she wanted it written on her tombstone: “The Best Thing in It.” “That’s me,” he says, laughing. “I’ve gotten well reviewed in a lot of movies that didn’t fare too well.

“And I began to see myself as one of the most reliable supporting actors in the business, and I use the term ‘reliable’ in a pejorative way. Sure, I was in these big popular movies, but they were getting further and further from my original intentions. I felt like it was very familiar stuff being the bad guy in an action movie. There’s only one way to do it: psycho-neurotic.”

And so it is that “3rd Rock From the Sun” has been a windfall for him at the age of 50. The story of how it took two years to get on the air, switching networks in the process (from ABC to NBC), has been much reported. Lithgow admits that part of it was nerve-racking. But in television time the waiting period is ancient history now.

“I mean, it’s a huge step for an actor to take to get into sitcoms. Television is this naughty stepchild. But now, I feel more creative than I’ve felt since I was doing college theatricals.”

He is very much involved in the scripts, as he was in the casting of Kristin Johnson, French Stewart and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, as his alien family members, and Jane Curtin as his earthly colleague and combative love interest.

“This is like doing a one-act play every week,” Lithgow says. “And it has something which movies don’t offer you, which is rehearsal, getting scenes to play exactly the way you want them to. And you have a studio audience, which you need in comedy. It’s modern-day vaudeville, and I’m a great admirer of vaudeville.”

In some ways, Lithgow does strike you as both an actor and a man from another time. He is uncommonly gracious without it looking phony; writers and actors repeatedly cite his professional generosity. He will tell you, without naming names, of occasional fits of rage he has staged with arrogant stars or producers, but after meeting him a few times, it is still something that requires imagination to fully picture.

Sounding like a contradiction of something Lithgow has said earlier about himself, Terry Turner says, “What you see out there is him. John is one of the most honest people I’ve ever worked with. He’s upfront with everything, there’s no hidden agenda.” He does occasionally play practical jokes on the set, and once quietly started the rumor that Prince Andrew would be visiting the show. “He was very clever about it,” Turner recalls. “He did it by asking me, ‘Should I be wearing something special with Prince Andrew coming?’ ”

What B.D. Wong remembers about him from “M. Butterfly” is “that he was a well-seasoned star who had so much patience with me as an inexperienced unknown. And looking back, I realize I tested his patience in some pretty stressful situations. He was teaching me how to act without me knowing he was teaching me.”

Watching Lithgow in “3rd Rock From the Sun,” Wong says, “He’s like a dad performing for his kids. You can feel the joy of it.”

Like other actors, Lithgow has missed out on a role or two, an opportunity here or there. Years ago, he read a book and thought it would make a good movie, “and I thought I would be great in the role.” He wanted to acquire the rights but didn’t get around to it. The book was Winston Groom’s “Forrest Gump.”

“I was on the set of that ‘Amazing Stories’ and Steven Spielberg came up to me and said, ‘My sister has written a terrific script that you would be perfect for and it’s going to be done at Fox, get your agent on it right away. It’s called “Big.” ’

“Apparently I was next in line for Hannibal Lecter. I went in to meet with Jonathan Demme and he said, ‘I’m terribly sorry, but I have to tell you we offered Hannibal Lecter to Anthony Hopkins this morning. But if he turns it down, it’s yours.’ ”

Lithgow, sitting tall, as always, looks bemused, philosophical. “But, I mean, everybody has stories of near-misses. I’m sure there’re lots of parts I’ve played that other actors feel they almost got. I remember just nosing out Brian Dennehy for ‘M. Butterfly.’ ‘The World According to Garp,’ they were going to hire Kevin Kline until they saw him in drag and his beard was too heavy. There’s always somebody to envy, but then there’s somebody to envy you.”

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“M. Butterfly” plays Wednesday-Saturday at 8 p.m. at DoubleTree Guest Suites, 1707 4th St., Santa Monica, (310) 827-0889. $22-$25.