At 78 years old, John Lithgow’s acting career isn’t slowing down. He appeared in the best picture nominee “Killers of the Flower Moon” and starred with Jeff Bridges in the FX series “The Old Man.” Most recently, the two-time Oscar-nominated and multiple Emmy, Tony and Golden Globe winner played the new kid at school. He learned dance, pottery, screen printing and vocal jazz ensemble with Los Angeles-area high school students. It was filmed for “Art Happens Here with John Lithgow,” which airs Friday on PBS with the aim of. promote artistic education.
Lithgow, who graduated from Harvard and was a Fulbright scholar at the London School of the Arts, spoke to the Associated Press about returning to school.
Responses have been edited for clarity and brevity.
LITHGOW: You need to get kids excited about learning and excited to go to school. If there is something at school that is entirely theirs, something that is a creative project where they are really and truly expressing themselves…they will want to go to school. I think arts education is a big part of that. I also think sport is a big part of it.
LITHGOW: Creating a program like this is trying to persuade people to just wake up. I mean, you have to think about the kids, especially after they’ve endured two years of the pandemic. Two years of the pandemic were difficult for all of this, for all of us, but they were catastrophic for children. Children are not used to going to school. They lost two years, and two years in a child’s life is an eternity.
LITHGOW: I wanted it to be things that I’m not good at or have very little experience with, if any. I didn’t want to do theater. I wanted to do things that were technically difficult. I wanted to put myself in a situation where I still had a lot to learn or a lot to remember. I wanted to be with a group of bright kids who were having so much fun with the new kid in class and trying to catch him up.
LITHGOW: They weren’t particularly dazzled by my presence. To my dismay, few of them actually knew who I was, until someone mentioned “Shrek,” you know? And that was just my voice. But they were very playful and were excellent children. Look, they were kids who decided to go to pottery class. They decided to go to dance class. They decided to go to Los Angeles County High School for the Arts to study singing. They took what they did seriously and knew it was well-intentioned.
LITHGOW: It was incredibly fun. It was very difficult work because it was rigorous stuff. It’s not easy showing up to do a documentary every morning for two months, but it’s fun. It’s a really good thing that we captured my own insecurity. I knew it was important for me to look like a fool and for the kids to look like experts and… watch me fail and fail until I had a small measure of success – and try to capture that joy. Because joy is what matters.
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