Scene Stealer: James Cromwell
He may be busy playing daddy in Spider-Man 3, but you've seen Cromwell as everything from an ur-dork (Revenge of the Nerds) to a pig whisperer (Babe).
By Jason Matloff
REVENGE OF THE NERDS FRANCHISE (1984-1994)
In these comedy cult "classics," Cromwell appears as ubernerd Lewis Skolnick's equally nerdy father.
JAMES CROMWELL: "I always had fun with that character and with Robert [Carradine, who played Lewis]. So I would do another one, but only if the script was as good as the first. That was sweet and wonderful. But I think the idea probably has wrung dry by now."
BABE (1995)
Cromwell could never have imagined that a talking pig would help earn him an Academy Award nomination and change both his career and life.
"When they sent me the script, I thought it was going to be like a Disney film where they put peanut butter in the mouths of the animals and they sort of move them up and down. I actually flipped through the script looking for my part and realized there were only about 17 lines or so. I thought, 'Oh, man.' But I didn't have a job, so I went on the audition. The first time I really started to believe in it was while we were shooting. We'd all sit around with a beer and watch the dailies and make bets on which was the real animal and which was the animatronic. I would be watching these animals and think, 'They look really great.'"
STAR TREK: FIRST CONTACT (1996)
Cromwell went all-out to perfect his performance as a scientific genius who enjoys his liquor.
"For my dancing sequence, I wanted to [do something similar] to Nicholson in Easy Rider when he takes the drink and flaps his arm up and down. So I bought myself a fifth of Jameson's, took a good belt, and went to rehearsal. Well, it seemed to go very well. So while they were setting up for the shot I took another belt. I must have done that four or five times, so by the time I was dancing, I was having a lot of fun. It was a method performance. [laughs]"
THE PEOPLE VS. LARRY FLYNT (1996)
For this biopic of Hustler publisher Larry Flynt, the liberal Cromwell portrayed the conservative anti-porn crusader Charles Keating.
"Everybody says, 'You have to like your character.' That's bullshit. You don't have to like him, you have to understand him. Keating was a bigot and a hypocrite. For research, I was going to go visit him in jail because I met somebody who used to play poker with him and said he was really a nice guy. Well of course he's a nice guy, they're all nice guys. Cheney is probably a nice guy if you're hunting with him — unless of course he shoots you. Wolfowitz, I mean somebody's got to like Wolfowitz. Anyway, I didn't visit Keating because the producers said if he finds out about this, he's liable to slap an injunction on us."
L.A. CONFIDENTIAL (1997)
Cromwell's ruthless police captain, Dudley Smith, is a far cry from Babe's Farmer Hoggett.
Curtis [Hanson, the director] had a gag that he neglected to let me in on: he needed the audience to believe that Dudley was benign, until he turned and shot Kevin Spacey's character. [Spacey went on to beat out Cromwell for the 1995 Academy Award, so Cromwell jokes that he didn't kill him soon enough]. So Hanson's advantage was that everyone had in their mind that I was the farmer from Babe. So when they saw me, they said, 'Oh, it's that nice actor, isn't he sweet?' And then suddenly, boom. Everybody just went, 'Holy Jesus.'"
THE LONGEST YARD (2005)
In Adam Sandler's remake of the 1974 football comedy, Cromwell costars as a morally challenged prison warden.
"Adam was doing another film and hadn't done anything in terms of looking at the Longest Yard script. So on the first day, I had the scene where I tell him he's going to coach the team. I had big chunks of dialogue. At one point, the producer comes in and says, 'Jamie, Adam hadn't been able to look at the script but he did this morning and he doesn't like this scene. Would you mind coming into the trailer to go over it?' There were 400 people called that day and he made them wait. I don't think we started shooting until about three. But Adam had realized it was a very pivotal scene and it was badly written for him. And he was right. So basically everything else from then on was sort of on the fly."
THE QUEEN (2006)
In this critically adored drama about the Royal reaction to Princess Diana's death, Cromwell portrays Prince Philip.
"I think Stephen [Frears, the director] cast me because he didn't want an English actor to make a caricature out of Philip. And I don't think he is a caricature in the film, so I was disappointed that so many people came up to me and said that he was a shit. I don't see him as a shit. I see him as a man defending his wife against an opportunist politician and a public that seems to have no understanding of protocol or appropriateness.
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