John Lithgow Bares His Soul — And That’s Not All! — in ‘Jimpa’ At Sundance

EXCLUSIVE: John Lithgow, who played Winston Churchill in The Crown and scores of major roles on stage and screen, is having the time of his life. He has a hit play on the London stage transferring into the West End in April — and to Broadway in 2026 — and now he’s starring alongside Olivia Colman in the Sundance opening-day premiere of Sophie Hyde’s terrific screen drama Jimpa, in which the multi-award-winning star plays a fictionalized version of his director’s own father.

Colman plays Hannah, his  filmmaker daughter who’s visiting him at his home in Amsterdam to talk about a film she’s developing about her parents marriage, and how it broke up when Jim, her father, comes out as gay.

Growing up with a queer dad has allowed Hannah to accept sexuality as a normal part of life. Her own kid, Frances, is a transgender, nonbinary teen, just like Hyde’s own 19-year-old child, Aud Mason-Hyde, who plays them in the movie.

“I was captivated by the script. I could just tell that this was intensely personal to Sophie,” Lithgow tells me during an interview over Zoom ahead of the Sundance Film Festival, where he is now.

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“All he knew about Hyde was Good Luck To You, Leo Grande “which I just thought that was an amazing film. Just the extraordinary forthrightness of her vision and even her technique. And I think it’s one of the best things Emma Thompson has ever done,” he enthuses.

“And so I said to my agent, ‘Oh, I am going to do this, but I am going to pretend that I need to be persuaded. Let me have a Zoom with this woman.’ And we had just the most lovely hour-and-a-quarter Zoom conversation.”

We both agree that we admire Antipodean  filmmakers. “Very bold,” he opines, adding that he had the “unique experience” of completing a New Zealand film before starting Jimpa.

The Kiwi movie is James Ashcroft’s The Rule of Jenny Pen, a psychological suspense thriller set in a senior care facility, in which he stars with Geoffrey Rush. 

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“Shot it in New Zealand with a New Zealand dialect coach and then went right to Amsterdam to work to become an Aussie, with an Australian dialect coach,” Lithgow tells me.

He laughs and says: “And by now, I’ve forgotten both dialects, so don’t ask me to talk that way.”

It’s fascinating to watch Lithgow as Jimpa bait Frances, who he terms his “grand-thing,” and he sort of baits them to explore the freedoms that he was at the forefront of fighting for — in Australia, at least. The real Jimpa saw friends die of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s, and now Frances’s generation no longer has endure the repression.

“There is always a generational gap between the third and second generation,” Lithgow begins, “but then you add the first generation, and it’s even more of a gulf, I think. But Jim absolutely adores of Frances, always has. And I think he is the person in their life who is the most accepting and the most almost exuberant about their self-liberation. And I think Jim sees himself as a sort of Jedi master of all things gender, after having been through the entire spectrum himself, going through very much a heterosexual marriage, whatever his inclinations might have been, and having two daughters and being devoted to all of them, staying in that marriage for a long time before finally saying, ‘OK, now I’m off. I’m going to have my own life.’”

While Jimpa’s kind of liberated sexually, he’s also “a fiercely committed activist and worked in establishment politics on behalf of gay people before and during this whole life-changing moment. But at the heart of it, he was always very devoted to his daughters and to his wife. But it just became his determination: ‘Now I’m going to be completely who I am.’ And because he’s quite a bold person, he just does it full-bore,” the actor explains.

Then Jimpa moves to Amsterdam, which, as the actor says, is “one of the most gender-fluid cities in the world, and has a wonderful time and he’s exuberant. I mean, there must be some layers of insecurity and self-doubt and even guilt about making such a life change. But I think they’re overwhelmed by this sense of relief and joy in the man. And I think all the rest of his family just appreciate that. Aud and Sophie certainly did. Sophie just adored him.”

I ask him about Hyde’s assertion in the film, via the screenplay by Matt Cormack and Hyde, that Hannah wants to tell the story of her parents’ relationship as a drama without conflict but with kindness and empathy.

“It almost defines Sophie as a filmmaker,” he says rapturously.

“She’s got a very good sense of herself,” Lithgow adds. “That said, I think it’s a wonderful tone that she introduces that Jim is very curious about how she’s going to portray him, almost a vanity. He wants to know, and she won’t tell him. And it’s this little emotional chess game they play. I think that’s great. He does have a vanity. He wants to be sure he comes off well.”

To the point about drama without conflict, he tells me that’s possible.

“Oh, I think so,” he says. “Look, there’s every version of drama and comedy, and there is a certain degree of conflict … there’s plenty of conflict in there. It’s sort of unspoken conflict in a way. It’s the drama of avoiding conflict and denying conflict. There’s a little conflict that’s sort of meta conflict there.”

He’s over the moon about having worked with Colman.

“I can’t say enough about what a responsive and generous actor she is, but also just as a person. She’s like the best person I know in the whole world. Just this wonderful, gentle, happy spirit full of her own interesting insecurities as we all are. But just an absolute joy to work with. And I think this, as you say, the drama without conflict but with kindness — it’s infused with love between father and daughter, between the two of them, and almost a companionship now,” he says.

“I mean, he’s there for her, in her, what she’s going through with her own former daughter, queer nonbinary child, whom Jim cheerfully calls his grand thing. He makes fun of himself, and he can’t quite figure out what in the world they’re going through, but it’s like he’s there. He’s got Hannah’s emotional back. He’s there for her. Just be patient. This young person is more together than we are. They’re going to find their way,” he reasons.

During their discussions about the film, Lithgow sent Hyde a 1973 photograph of himself nude.

It was from his Broadway debut when he was 27 years old — he’s now 79 — in British playwright David Storey’s The Changing Room, for which he won his first Tony.

The sending of the photograph “was purely all business,” he stresses.

“I said, ‘Look, this is what I look like. It’s what I used to look like anyway, and blithely sent it to her online. It’s probably gone around the world five times by now,” he dryly supposes.

“But here’s what I think,” he says, sitting up smartly. “I think that being naked onstage or in a film is about the most potent thing you can do dramatically. And even comedically. It is the one thing we all have in common. We all have naked bodies, and yet it’s the one thing that we completely hide from the rest of the world. So whenever you actually have the nerve to go out there naked, you’re going to have a tremendous impact no matter what. And so I just embraced that.”

Pausing to count, he notes with a hint of merriment in his voice that “there have been four or five times when I’ve appeared naked and this and that, and every time I’ve won a major award.

“So it’s a very complex, positive reinforcement,” he adds with delightful comic timing.

Even so, it’s admirable that all is bared with such alacrity, and it’s for a purpose.

“And I think also it works in the theater and onscreen if it’s important to the moment, to the screenplay,” Lithgow agrees.

Indeed, one such moment fully exposes — sorry, I mean fully advances the plot.

“I knew it was very important to Sophie, and I felt it was quite important to the film, just this feeling of Jim as a completely liberated person, and there is this level of irony, pathos and even comedy about a plot twist that happens because of sexual activity in a sex club. And I savored the complication of that plot twist,” the two-time Oscar nominee and six-time Emmy winner says.

He concedes, however, that “although I was game, I was nervous about it. Of course, I was very self-conscious about it, and Sophie helped me through that. I just believe in her and trust her so explicitly as a filmmaker.”

The set was closed, he reveals, “up to a point, but there’s lots of crew people around. And of course there were all those naked extras — that helped out.”

I mention that Ian McKellen is, or used to be, just as eager. When he played King Lear in Trevor Nunn’s 2007 Royal Shakespeare Company production, which I saw, the most memorable moment, according to Germaine Greer, “is when Ian Mckellen drops his trousers and displays his impressive genitalia to the audience.”

He was a strapping 68 years of age at the time.

“But he also, he has a reputation in England of just any chance he gets,” Lithgow quips.

Jimpa, he believes, “is disarming in all sorts of ways,” and he says that “the most beautiful way is that it’s the portrait of a nuclear family in which one of the parties has transitioned, and yet it is still a very loving, very happy, playful family. They have absorbed this and made it into their own version of normality. And I think that is the capital important aspect of this film. But it doesn’t come off as preachy.”

Not at all preachy, but it is touchingly  poignant, I tell him.

Particularly when Jim goes to Helsinki seeking this job, and that’s so heartbreaking. He sits there hopeful, and then he goes to that meeting and he kind of picks up pretty quickly. And something in your eyes, I tell Lithgow, that tells us so much.

Which is quite heartbreaking, actually.

He nods knowingly. “Well, especially when you’ve seen him as such a super confident and almost arrogant swaggering soul. He’s so goddamn confident in himself and his achievements, and he’s gotten old. I mean, that’s the aspect of it that I identified most closely with. You get into your late 70s and early 80s and you begin to realize, ‘Oh, I don’t have much bottle left.’ And trying to deny that as long as you possibly can. I found that extremely moving. And Sophie, in her writing with that wonderful writer, Matthew Cormack, they just treat that with such tenderness and kindness.”

To take this role, Lithgow proves that he’s still got some bottle.

He takes my comment as a moment to reflect on playing playing Roberta Muldoon in the 1982 screen adaptation of John Irving’s groundbreaking novel The World According to Garp, where he played a trans woman. “People asking me: ‘Why did you take this part? Weren’t you scared?’ I thought that was such a crazy question. I said, ‘Why do you think I became an actor? It’s to enter into other emotional worlds and explore other people with empathy and understanding even horrible people. But this is not a horrible person. This is a beautiful person.’”

He continues: ”And I have to say, these days, you cannot escape what’s happened in the zeitgeist and in politics. Our last election cycle, it ended with two weeks of the most disgusting, transphobic, smear campaign about Kamala Harris and Tim Waltz’s empathy for trans people and LGBTQ people. It’s like, what has happened to us? How have we become so cruel? At the very moment when I thought people were finally opening up and an age of empathy had dawned, it was disgusting. Therefore, how marvelous that this film should be chosen to open the Sundance Film Festival because it’s really an important moment for them. Once again, I hesitate to use the word ‘important.’ I want people to just accept this film purely on its own terms. It’s a beautiful portrait of a family.”

Giant, the new play by Mark Rosenblatt that Nicholas Hytner directed at the Royal Court last year to enormous success, transfers to the Harold Pinter Theatre from April 26. Lithgow gives an unbelievably astonishing performance as Roald Dahl.

“And with all if all goes well, we’ll do it on Broadway too. It’s that good a play,” he boasts, with good reason.

It’s expected to have a substantial run at the Harold Pinter and likely will head to New York in 2026.

There’s been talk of a screen adaptation as well.

“Inevitably there are those conversations,” he says, “but I think there are sort of stations of the cross that a great property goes through — Royal Court, West End, Broadway — and then the logical next thing is some other medium. But it’s such a piece of theater. It is kind of hard to imagine it any other way at the moment. Who knows?”