James Cromwell Joan Marcus
There are plenty of arresting performances on Broadway — but only one performer whose arrests outnumber his stage credits.

That’s James Cromwell, the “Babe” and “L.A. Confidential” star seen more recently on “American Horror Story: Asylum” and “Succession.” He’s currently playing the curmudgeonly half of a long-married couple in Bess Wohl’s “Grand Horizons,” his first Broadway show since a short-lived “Hamlet” in 1992.

A lot has happened since: onstage, on-screen and in the streets.

As Cromwell recently told Page Six, he spent three days in jail after protesting against a power plant near his log-cabin home in Orange County, NY. And he’s under indictment in Texas following a PETA protest of animal testing at a university lab, a misdemeanor punishable by a year in jail and a $20,000 fine.


How many arrests does that make?

“I’ve sort of lost count,” he tells The Post with a chuckle. He turned 80 last month, but, sipping a green tea, looks hale and hearty in a sweater the color and texture of oatmeal. “They told me to leave my Bernie T-shirt at home,” he says.

Cromwell’s activism began more than a half-century ago, when his theater troupe performed “Waiting for Godot” to black audiences in Mississippi, where three civil-rights workers went missing. One of them, Mickey Schwerner, had played football with Cromwell in high school in Pelham, NY. The bodies of all three were found buried in a dam.

“But for the grace of God, the White Citizens’ Councils and the local constabulary didn’t take us very seriously,” Cromwell says.

Someone who did was activist Fannie Lou Hamer, who saw their “Godot” and stood up after the first act. “She turned to the audience and said, ‘I want you to pay attention to these two men, because we’re not waiting for anybody. We’re taking what we need now!’ ”

After that, Cromwell hitchhiked around the world before heading to Hollywood, looking for work. A friend, the son of CBS News correspondent Eric Sevareid, steered him to a network casting agent, who had Cromwell read for Stretch Cunningham, Archie Bunker’s friend in “All in the Family.”


He got the gig — “I channeled Art Carney in ‘The Honeymooners,’ ” — and started work immediately. He soon found out why: The sitcom’s star, Carroll O’Connor, had just quit. “He wanted his name above the title and $200,000 a show, and this was 1975,” Cromwell says. Stretch introduced a story arc ending with Archie’s death, but O’Connor and CBS settled before that happened.

“So O’Connor had me killed off,” Cromwell says. “And that actually saved my career.”

Since he hadn’t played Stretch long enough to be typecast, he went on to do a string of plays and movies. But when he got the script for 1995’s “Babe,” he balked.

“I had, I dunno, 17 lines, and I didn’t know about CGI,” Cromwell says of the live-action film about a farmer and his sheepherding pig. A friend talked him into it: “He said, ‘It’s a chance to go to Australia, and if the film fails, it’s the pig’s fault!’ ”


“Babe” didn’t fail, and Cromwell’s kindly, taciturn Farmer Hoggett became a meme: “That’ll do, pig, that’ll do.” It earned him an Oscar nomination, too.

Because of “Babe,” Cromwell says, Curtis Hanson cast him in 1997’s “L.A. Confidential” as the antithesis of the farmer: a corrupt, violent police lieutenant. Since then, his roles have toggled between the benign and the vicious, with a lot of presidents and priests in between. He has several new movies and TV series on the way, as well as another season of “Succession,” a show he calls “extraordinary.” It features him in a good-guy role, that of Logan Roy’s more principled brother. The writers “don’t know what to do with me,” Cromwell says, “but they’ll include me in the next season.”

For now, there’s “Grand Horizons” at the Helen Hayes Theater, where, as a 14-year-old, he saw his first play. Although it’s been decades since Cromwell’s played Broadway, he’s glad to be onstage again.

“I’m much more comfortable now in front of people, especially when I can address them directly,” he says. “I like to break the fourth wall and let them know we’re in this together.”

Ref;nypost.com