Unleashed Voices: James Cromwell … from Succession to Plastics
A character in search of a cause embraces the desperate need to erase the tsunami of plastics that is overwhelming our seas and our lives.
In the penultimate episode of the incomparable HBO show Succession, Ewan Roy—wealthy maverick brother of the incarnation of corporate rapacity and evil, media titan Logan Roy—delivers a eulogy at Logan’s funeral.
“He has wrought some of the most terrible things,” Ewan says of his dead brother, Logan. “He was a man who has here and there drawn in the edges of the world. Now and then darkened the skies a little. Closed men’s hearts. Fed that dark flame in men, the hard, mean, hard-relenting flame that keeps their heart warm while another grows cold. Their grain stashed while another goes hungry.”
This is something that neither Ewan, in character, nor James Cromwell who plays him so brilliantly, could ever conceive of embracing as their own totem, their beacon to guide them. So last week, as 169 nations gathered in Paris in what appears thus far to be a largely futile effort to hammer out a Global Plastics Treaty to bring under control the production, use and disposal of all plastics products, there were some on the sidelines who began doing their bit to even what was clearly somewhat of an imbalance in the lobbying efforts.
Cromwell joined with 27 other Hollywood luminaries to sign a letter to President Biden under the aegis of Greenpeace USA, which has played a major behind-the-scenes role in attempting to neutralize the powerful petrochemical and plastics lobby.
Jason Momoa, Jane Fonda, and Joaquin Phoenix also signed the letter
“The US must advocate for a legally binding treaty—not one that relies on countries to come up with their own plans for dealing with plastic waste,” the letter urged. “We’ve watched this method play out with the Paris Climate Agreement and to our extreme disappointment, it has not achieved a significant decrease in carbon dioxide emissions.”
Indeed the statistics paint a dire picture for the future of the planet. Plastics, which once created, really never disappear, are a frightening phenomenon. The UN Environment program estimates that “approximately 7 billion of the 9.2 billion tons of plastic produced from 1950-2017 became plastic waste ending up in landfills or dumped,” much of that in the oceans.
A treaty, which is the goal of many of the countries, including host country France and the European Union at this month’s Paris conference, would establish three mandates: reuse, recycling, and diversifying to non-plastic alternatives. According to the Hollywood letter, in 2021, the U.S. recycled just 5% of the plastics it produced and consumed.
“The US position is not yet strong enough,” the letter concluded.
The evening the conference adjourned, Andelman Unleashed sat down via zoom from Paris with James Cromwell to probe the depths of his interest in this subject and how it meshed with his own broader view of the world. Succesion creator Jesse Armstrong said in a New Yorker profile earlier this year, “Hopefully, the show is against bullshit.” Mr. Cromwell did not disappoint.
Andelman Unleashed: Mr. Cromwell, plastics and their erradication is something you've been deeply interested in for quite some time. What are the chances of a plastics agreement winding up any better than the COP-21 process for controlling greenhouse gases?
James Cromwell: I'm just perplexed as everybody else. I mean, I know what the solution is, how to accomplish the solution. Gandhi led the Indian Nation against the British because they believed in him and they were willing to die. And they, bought his philosophy that violence solves nothing. The system that we live in is so corrupt on every level, all our institutions have been captured by large corporations and the oligarchs and they basically run the world and they have a view of the world: It's nihilism.
James Cromwell zooms with Unleashed
And it's not as though you can address them. It's like the issue about AI now. Those people who look at AI without trepidation have some sort of neural blockage in the pathway that they cannot recognize that is a toxic technology that will ultimately destroy us. So I know that if we all stopped working. If we all went out into the street, if we all raised our voices, if we assembled in silence in front of the White House, millions and millions of people, quiet, something would happen because they wouldn't be able to dismiss it. But is it going to happen? Who will we follow? If we find somebody we like in our country, the Kennedys, we kill them.
Unleashed: So tell me how did you get onto the plastics bandwagon? I mean, there are many issues you, or even the fictitious but very real Ewan Roy, could easily have embraced. How did you come to plastic pollution?
Cromwell: Since I surf the Internet a lot and YouTube in a sort of haphazard way, I collect a lot of information, and I see things. There have been many YouTube videos about the damage done by plastics, the big plastic islands floating in the sea; the fact that the fish ingest this plastic, the fact that we eat the fish, and it goes into women's breasts, the fact that it's ubiquitous all over the world, that they found it in the Himalayas, they found it everywhere. Mount Everest has been turned into a garbage dump.
Mt. Everest = garbage dump
So what man has done to the planet with this technology, because technology is basically false, it's built on a false premise, that is that we are separated from and omnipotent over the rest of the planet, which is there to provide us with all the accessories, whatever we want. We want money, we want power. We want whatever whatever we want. We just go out and take it through violence.
Unleashed: But there are so many causes that's relevant to. Why plastics in particular and not other petrochemicals or the whole environment, the water, the air we breathe?
Cromwell: I recently did a demonstration where I glued my hand to the counter of a Starbucks to protest. They're charging for non-dairy creamers for people who either were allergic to dairy who wanted to taste it, and they didn't do it all over the country, they just picked places where they could charge. Basically I believe, although it was never stated, because they made an arrangement with the dairy industry to give them a favorable rate on the cost of the milk that they use because they use a lot of milk. And the proviso was that if you have to have non-dairy, you will charge extra for it. And you won't publicize that you have it. So some people would say, well, wait a minute, what good does it do to glue your hands to the counter of an individual Starbucks store in New York? Is it ever going to cause anybody to rethink this? Well, first of all, you never can tell. And secondly, that issue is intricately linked to all the other issues. Plastic is connected to Big Oil, is connected, to fracking, is connected to sending fracked gas to Europe, is connected to Ukraine. Everything is connected. They think they control the world and they are out of control.
Unleashed: So you wrote this open letter to President Biden. There are some names equally prominent as yours on this letter. What would you like to see immediately out of this letter and especially out of the these negotiations?
Cromwell: I have very little faith in politicians. I would really like it if they would see it as a priority, if they would say okay, we'll put a price on plastic, for the buying of a plastic bottle. They'll still just produce them, people will still use them. But there are paper cartons, which work well. There are other alternatives. I know there are. We should have fresh drinking water throughout our country, which comes through our tap. But we don't because it's all polluted by the plastic in the chemicals that we flush into the rivers.
Unleashed: Or you have to buy it in a plastic bottle which then becomes part of the problem?
Cromwell: The vision is so false—that technology is going to get us out of this, and it is not. What's going to get out of this is first of all sacrifice. Second of all is self-knowledge, opening your heart beginning to see that other people have problems and that we can find solutions that are equitable to all people, not just to the rich. It's such a big subject to me.
The great French cartoonist Sanaga envisions a father saying: “One day, son, this will all be yours.”
Unleashed: Have you received any feedback since this letter went out? Hollywood Reporter did a big item, but little elsewhere.
Cromwell: I try to avoid going to Twitter because I look at it and I think my God, this is the humanity that we're trying to organize to see the threat that this represents, this plastic represents, that oil represents, pipelines, all of it. But they they have been so brainwashed. They are fed food that is killing them. We have no health care per se. We don't tell the truth about the pandemic. If Biden would take it seriously [saying], ‘I'm going to set up a task force. I'm going to include on it the organizations that are working against this plastic. We're going to come up with something.’ But of course, he works for the oil industry. That's who got him elected and that's who the Democratic party wants to help him to be elected again.
Unleashed: The administration sent the Under Secretary of State to the pre- conference last week. He left Paris before the actual conference began. Then the first two days of the conference, the U.S. delegation was led by an acting assistant Secretary of State. She left two days into the conference. Then there was a mid-level State Department person running the US delegation. Perhaps they simply want to make sure that nothing comes out of this could be an actual treaty that the United States can be forced to ratify because Biden knows he can't get it through the Senate. Do you believe that’s at least part of the reasoning behind the American position at this point?
Cromwell: That does make sense. That's been been going on for a long time, Whatever Biden could have gotten through while he had control of both houses, he did not do. He had a piece of legislation [on the debt ceiling] that if you read the legislation is a not a very good piece of legislation. And he can't do anything now because he has to go through [Senators] Manchion and Sinema. And Manchion just says, no.
Unleashed: What do you see, as your next step? Especially since Succession and Babe before that, you have a big voice now.
Babe plus dad
Cromwell: I have a voice. And I use my voice on behalf of people who are in the trenches organizing these movements, organizing these conferences, getting the information out. I'm a storyteller, I'm an actor, but I'm a storyteller. I want to tell stories that really affect people. There was a series of films when I got involved in fracking because I got a gas-fired power plant ten miles from me, and there was a movie with Matt Damon about how fracking was sold to the community. Of course, if you've ever been to a fracking field and you see what happens in Pennsylvania, you see what happens to people when they can light their water on fire. So to get people to understand what's at stake, I'm afraid is going to have to take some sort of catastrophe.
Unleashed: So how can you with your megaphone, persuade Biden in a second term because then he won't have anything to lose, take this on and really move towards some kind of a legal compulsion on plastics control?
Cromwell: Well if I don't get my candidate of choice which is Bobby Kennedy, I'm left with the lesser of two evils. I've known Biden, a long, long time and he never keeps his word. He is a flip-flopper, he is a coward, he doesn't do squat, he's in the system.
Unleashed: But he is the president and you're trying to get him to do something. It is not exactly the language that will warm him to you, right?
Crowell: Okay, I don't know what I would say to him. I don't know what the progressive caucus is doing. Bernie [Sanders] is the only guy. Flawed. I disagree with some of his positions, but I love him. He tells the truth, but he has no clout. The trick is, he's there and he can't get it done. The only thing that, you know, is setting myself on fire, the way that guy did in Vietnam. That's that's all I can see.
Unleashed: I have one final question. Could you ever have seen Logan taking on a cause like this?
Ewan and Logan Roy get into it on Succession
Cromwell: No. Because he thought, as a lot of people do, that this represents weakness—that our position is basically a capitulation to the wave of progress, and the laws and intricacies of the market that are unopposable. If you think there actually was a conspiracy that killed John Kennedy? You are a nut. You believe that we're going to drown in plastics? You're a nut. You believe that AI is not going to help us all to a better future? You're a nut.
Unleashed: That's the beauty of the character that you played in that film, which I don't think was so much out of character, frankly, having talked with you now.
Cromwell: There is a lot of there's a lot of him in me.
Unleashed: Did you play any role in the scripting of your lines?
Cromwell: I had a meeting with Jesse Armstrong the first day that I was on the set. And I said, 'Jessie, the take on this character is wrong.' I said, 'You don't fight two tours in Vietnam and come away untouched by the savagery of this country, vis-à-vis the Vietnamese, the Cambodians, the Laotians, everything.' And he listened. I argued. And he looked at me at the end and said, 'okay, okay.’
Jesse Armstrong, Succession’s godfather … reflective
What he knew was that it doesn't matter that Ewan wasn't running an Empire. What matters is that he is a man with $100 million and 100,000 acres of Montana. He is self-righteous, he is bitter, he feels excluded, he feels unrecognized. So what happened was I got Jesse to make me sort of the righteous angered guy. But over the course of the show, Jesse kept writing scenes between me and my grandson, which showed his inability to have compassion and understanding and forgiveness, and open it up and help this kid to find another way. He didn't. He let him go. Fuck you. You want to see how bad they are? Go ahead, do it, but don't come back to me because I'll give you nothing.
When Jesse finally gave me the last speech in that last [penultimate] episode, I said, “Jesse you are the most brilliant writer. Not only did you hoodwink me to do four years of a character that I now understand is as culpable is any of them. But now you've given me an opportunity to say these things. I hope I'm not so compromised as a character that no one will believe a word coming out of my mouth.” I think they did.
Unleashed: Mr. Cromwell, thank you for joining us.
I do drink with my lips indeed !!!!
(but my niece did give me a reusable straw for my last birthday!)
;-)
James Cromwell, though an actor, did offer our Andelman Unleashed audience some most stimulating ideas !
Thanks ever so much, Ron ... as a worldclass journo yourself, you know whereof you speak ... esp (as I often attempt) afflicting the comfortable !
We must at some point discuss a Volume Four of your extraordinary trilogy! (And then there's the movie !)
;-))