Harry Potter television adaptation<\/a> adds a metatextual layer to his performance.) Lithgow believes discomfort is what makes the play compelling: \u201cMy Roald Dahl is a broken clock who is correct twice a day. He says things that you reflexively agree with, and then he undermines it by betraying his own cruel nature.\u201d<\/p>\n ![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/9ddaf0e150b391a9f78e7ed9a39c39e722-john-lithgow-1.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/4adafa57572e3857a31a47be0dfb80ed89-john-lithgow-2.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n In Giant (left) and HBO\u2019s Harry Potter and the Philosopher\u2019s Stone. Photos: Joan Marcus (Giant); Lara Cornell\/HBO (Harry Potter).\n <\/p>\n
\n In Giant (left) and HBO\u2019s Harry Potter and the Philosopher\u2019s Stone. Photos: Joan Marcus (Giant); Lara Cornell\/HBO (Harry Potter).\n <\/p>\n
In the review that landed Dahl in hot water, written for the monthly magazine Literary Review, whose publisher was a Palestinian named Naim Attallah, he admonished the U.S. for funding Israel\u2019s military efforts; condemned the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank; explained the horrors of the cluster bomb, the phosphorous bomb, and the penetration bomb; and compared Israel\u2019s then\u2013prime minister, Menachem Begin, to Hitler. Dahl also extended the Third Reich comparisons to Jews as \u201ca race of people,\u201d criticizing their majority support for Israel and asking, \u201cDo they have a conscience? And do they, I wonder, have the guts? Or must Israel, like Germany, be brought to her knees before she learns how to behave in this world?\u201d In a subsequent interview with the New Statesman, he went on the record with even more bigoted, explicitly antisemitic language. Giant centers on Dahl\u2019s publisher\u2019s efforts to prevent the book review from affecting sales of The Witches, but in reality Dahl\u2019s career wasn\u2019t affected by either review or interview. The Witches went on to win numerous awards for children\u2019s literature in 1983, and he was offered (and turned down) the OBE in 1986.<\/p>\n
Dahl\u2019s creations are ingrained in the U.K.\u2019s collective childhood imagination. A 2023 BBC poll of the \u201c100 Greatest Children\u2019s Books of All Time\u201d lists six by Dahl, more than by any other author on the list. Dahl populated his stories with comically cruel and grotesque adults, the kinds of villains who leave indelible impressions on young readers, in a way the character of Tom Maschler, who escaped Germany via Kindertransport as a child, expresses beautifully in a monologue in the show: \u201cIn his books, he picks a glorious, playful path through the chaos of childhood. It\u2019s the rarest of gifts. To show its cruelty but take you out the other side. And the more kids feel guided by his books, the more boldly they\u2019ll read as adults and rise above the narrow crap their parents told them to sit with braver minds in richer worlds.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rosenblatt had never written a play when he began working on what would become Giant in 2018. The now-48-year-old director grew up loving Dahl\u2019s work and later read Dahl\u2019s books to his young son when he started mulling the idea. \u201cI found myself going, I have a particular personal relationship with this man\u2019s creative work, and I also know that this man, whose work I love, may not have liked me as a person.\u201d Considering how he\u2019s depicted in Giant, Rosenblatt added, \u201che certainly wouldn\u2019t love me now.\u201d Dahl\u2019s review of God Cried, he thought, was a \u201cperfect mirror\u201d of how such prejudice can seep into and infect valid political discourse.<\/p>\n
He took the idea to Hytner, hoping the director could find a playwright to realize the piece. Hytner said Rosenblatt should be the one to write it.<\/p>\n
Lithgow first worked with Hytner on The Sweet Smell of Success in 2002. It was Lithgow\u2019s first Broadway musical, it won him a Tony (the show\u2019s only one, out of seven nominations), and it was a flop. \u201cIt opened six months after 9\/11, and New York City did not want to see a dark musical,\u201d Lithgow said. But the collaboration sparked a long friendship with Hytner, who emailed Lithgow an early version of the script for Giant in 2023. \u201cIt was overlong and very expository, a lot of lesson teaching about the history of Israel and Palestine. But it had amazing dialogue in it,\u201d Lithgow said. He admits he didn\u2019t know much about Dahl or his work until he joined this project besides taking part in a reading of one of his \u201cproper grown-up short stories\u201d at the Getty in 2006. He suspects his daughter, who was a bookworm as a child, probably read her fair share of Dahl. \u201cMy son, not so much,\u201d he said. \u201cHe was much more the athlete and the rascal.\u201d<\/p>\n
He was drawn to the layers the role allowed him: charm, pompousness, anger, hate. To ground the character, to find the relatable, likable elements in him, he asked his friend and Requiem for a Heavyweight co-star Maria Tucci about Dahl. She knew him because her late husband, Robert Gottlieb, was \u201cthe man who fired Roald Dahl from Knopf.\u201d She told Lithgow how \u201che played with children at a dinner at Gipsy House where there were kids underfoot. He would spend the entire time with the kids. He really believed passionately in writing well for children, entertaining children, educating them well.\u201d Seeing Dahl after hours of such playing, \u201cshe described his face as being completely spent and exhausted,\u201d Lithgow said. He wove that physicality into his performance in a scene where Dahl is reminded of his late daughter.<\/p>\n
That human side of Dahl, and all his contradictions, was Lithgow\u2019s \u201cway in\u201d to the role. \u201cMy whole philosophy of life is prejudice comes out of damage, and this feeling of injustice,\u201d he said. \u201cThe world has done me dirt, and I\u2019m going to get back at them. Hatred of the other.\u201d Born in Wales to Norwegian parents in 1916, Dahl wrote extensively about his youth at abusive public schools and the injuries he incurred in the Royal Air Force in World War II. Giant addresses the personal tragedies that left Dahl broken: the devastating death of his daughter when she was 7 and the accident that left his infant son with severe brain damage. \u201cYou take all those things together, and here\u2019s a man who\u2019s angry at the whole fucking barrel,\u201d Lithgow said. \u201cAnd what happens? Look for scapegoats. Who has it in for me?\u201d<\/p>\n
In September 2023, Lithgow signed on to collaborate on a workshop of the script in London, which led to the Royal Court Theatre\u2019s agreeing to stage it Off West End. The date was October 5, 2023. After October 7, Lithgow immediately wrote to Rosenblatt and Hytner, asking, \u201cJesus, can we still do this play? This is so volatile right now.\u201d But Hytner believed there was no better time to stage it. Rosenblatt called this \u201cthe biggest obstacle, which was this atmosphere into which this play will be performed for the first time. It\u2019s very sensitive, and very raw, and there is a lot of cultural and societal anger around these issues.\u201d Rosenblatt admired Lithgow\u2019s courage in committing himself so fully to this play at this moment, saying, \u201cHe\u2019s decided to step into a political conversation that is complicated, at a time in his life where he doesn\u2019t need to do that.\u201d The show opened in September 2024 to positive reviews and raves for Lithgow specifically, and it won Olivier Awards for Lithgow, Levey, and Rosenblatt. The following April, it transferred to the West End, where stars like Mick Jagger and Tom Stoppard would come backstage. \u201cEverybody would get plastered on cheap ros\u00e9 and then John would come and join us,\u201d Levey remembered.<\/p>\n
Lithgow\u2019s performance in Giant fills the theater. Levey is moved to mix metaphors when trying to describe what makes Lithgow a great actor. Having worked on this show with him since the workshop, Levey said Lithgow is still improving upon his performance like a master painter: \u201cEvery third performance, there will be another brushstroke.\u201d He finds Lithgow\u2019s acting sublime in a chemical sense, as in \u201csublimation, when you go from a solid to a gas while missing the liquid state. John can do it both ways.\u201d Cash calls him a \u201cmiracle actor\u201d whose technical precision at hitting beats is matched by \u201can incredibly deep emotional well that can fill anything. \u201cSome nights he scares me onstage, which is what he\u2019s supposed to be doing,\u201d she tells me.<\/p>\n
Whatever new brushstrokes or gaseous states Lithgow has added in the transfer to Broadway, they\u2019re working. Giant\u2019s New York run has been a success. Tickets at the Music Box are going for hundreds of dollars, even in the mezzanine. Lithgow said friends and theater folk flow through his dressing room every night: \u201cIt\u2019s become a regular salon.\u201d Levey tells me one of the biggest differences in the show since it transferred to New York is that it has taken on a \u201cthird act,\u201d which is what he calls his five-block walk home from the theater every night. \u201cThat can sometimes take an hour and a half, because people stop me, and talk to me about the show, then they invite me to Friday-night dinner,\u201d he said. \u201cThere are so many questions that they need answered on the spot, and it\u2019s heaven.\u201d The play\u2019s marketing has latched on to the conversation; the pull quote the show uses in TV ads reads, \u201cThere is no more urgent play right now.\u201d<\/p>\n
No two people, whether backstage, onstage, or watching the stage, have the same answer to what makes it so urgent. Cash tells me the actors don\u2019t discuss politics with one another. \u201cWe don\u2019t talk about this stuff in our cast, and in the rehearsal process, politics were off the table and the ideas were explored within the characters, within the play, as opposed to our personal opinions. That is such an interesting way to work on this and to develop community around something like a play,\u201d she told me. (Lithgow and Levey do email about politics on occasion. \u201cI\u2019ve sent him articles on Omer Bartov, the Brown University scholar on genocide, things like that,\u201d Lithgow told me.) Rosenblatt said the play was not designed for \u201cany particular political persuasion,\u201d that it came from a personal place of loving Dahl\u2019s writing and knowing his feelings about Jews, of wanting \u201cto give some sort of dramatic form to my own confusions.\u201d Levey, who was raised Orthodox in Leeds and has family in Israel, sees the show as an urgent response to antisemitism in the U.K., which makes its Broadway transfer even more poignant for him. \u201cThat\u2019s my challenge as a Brit to American Jewry: You\u2019re going to have to fight a bit. You\u2019re going to have to fight when you wake up at four in the morning because everything is changing and nothing can be taken for granted,\u201d he said, drawing parallels to the current situation of Jews in the U.K. to Germany in the 1930s. \u201cIt\u2019s so easy for us to slip and slide into a hell.\u201d<\/p>\n
To Lithgow, the show\u2019s urgency comes from \u201cthe fact that history has precisely repeated itself in the Middle East,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a play about 1982 and Israel\u2019s incursion into Lebanon, and there have been two major incursions into Lebanon since then. One was two years ago, when we first started the play, and one was right now, when we opened it on Broadway. It\u2019s just astonishingly timely.\u201d Speaking about his performance as Dahl, he continued, \u201cWhen I turn on Jessie in defense of my review rebuking Israel, and I say they fired missiles into seven of the ten hospitals in Beirut, packed with children, into a mental hospital \u2014 that\u2019s about Israel attacking Lebanon in 1982, but they\u2019re attacking them now, and millions are being displaced. And also, a school with 180-plus children was destroyed in the bombing of Iran only in February. That\u2019s just breathtakingly current and urgent.\u201d<\/p>\n
I saw Giant at a Saturday matinee during previews with a Broadway audience that was decidedly old and Jewish, even by Saturday-matinee standards. Lithgow & Co. had the audience alternating between attentive, pin-drop silence and laughter for most of the heady, spiraling script until the climax of Act One. I heard more gasps and exclamations in the audience than during any play I\u2019ve been to recently when Dahl called Jessie Stone \u201cStein\u201d and his publishers \u201ca nasty little cabal of nasty fucking Jews.\u201d A friend told me that when he went to see it, a woman in the audience kept going \u201cWoo!\u201d whenever Jessie brought up Israel\u2019s right to defend itself. Cash confirmed that those lines occasionally get mid-scene applause and whoops and that Dahl\u2019s pro-Palestine lines sometimes receive applause as well. All the actors I spoke to have noticed these gasps and callouts and say New York audiences are having these visceral, audible reactions far more than their counterparts in London did.<\/p>\n
Giant is playing to a theater world divided. After October 7 and the Israeli incursion into Gaza that followed, Broadway media personality Seth Rudetsky organized the Jewish Broadway Alliance, a group of Broadway professionals (stars including Tovah Feldshuh and Debra Messing have participated in its events) united to counter the lack of support he saw for Israeli hostages in Gaza. As the Gazan civilian death toll rose into the thousands, Rudetsky went on actor Jonah Platt\u2019s podcast to affirm the notion that anti-Zionism equals anti-Jewish, a conflation that has been used in New York to silence and criminalize antiwar protests on campuses and one that the play\u2019s own Jessie conversely rails against and upholds. Musical-theater composer and lyricist Daniel Mat\u00e9, son of Holocaust survivor and trauma educator Gabor Mat\u00e9, is a founding member of an organization called Broadway Voices for Palestine and had a conflicted reaction to Giant. \u201cIt\u2019s a rare and fantastic thing to get to see a performance of that caliber by an actor of that caliber,\u201d he tells me, but he found the play felt the need to render a shocking and upsetting verdict about Dahl\u2019s bigotry, \u201cwhich has the effect of eliding the substance of his anti-Zionism and gives the audience an easy out. They can double down on their assumptions that anti-Zionists are really Jew haters underneath.\u201d<\/p>\n
Arielle Angel, an editor-at-large at the leftist magazine Jewish Currents, felt similarly when she saw Giant in April, saying many in the crowd were \u201cessentially Jews who have come to feel victimized.\u201d She felt the script was interesting \u201cdespite itself,\u201d but the strength of the performances was overshadowed by the play\u2019s \u201ctrying to have it both ways,\u201d with its Jewish characters condemning Dahl for assuming every Jew in the Diaspora supports the actions of Israel and taking personal offense and demanding apologies for his criticism of Israel. \u201cIn his own account, which is plenty antisemitic and fucked up and damning, he also asks, \u2018Why do they defend it?\u2019 And he\u2019s not wrong about that. The majority of the Jewish world\u201d supports Israel, Angel said, though those numbers are shifting. She pointed out that this production of Giant is co-produced by Shari Redstone, the former Paramount chairperson, who was attempting to tamp down coverage of Israel\u2019s genocide in Gaza on CBS News and 60 Minutes well before the Bari Weiss era. The billionaire media heiress told the New York Times she had left CBS and signed on with an Israeli production company \u201cto support Israel and address issues around antisemitism and racism.\u201d (She and her production partner, Alex Levy, are also behind this season\u2019s Death of a Salesman and Cats: The Jellicle Ball.)<\/p>\n
Rosenblatt said that while the play \u201ccertainly raises uncomfortable questions for people, I hope, of either position,\u201d he has seen audiences \u201csit with the spectrum of arguments, rather than feel like they were being lectured or told what to think.\u201d Regarding the reading of Giant as abetting the dangerous conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism, he said, \u201cMaybe at the more extreme edges of coverage, there have been one or two pieces that have accused the play of being on one \u2018team\u2019 or another, but we\u2019ve had those accusations from both extreme ends, so I think it has allowed people from different sides of the aisle to have a balanced experience.\u201d (Indeed, the lawyer and prominent Israel defender Alan Dershowitz, criticized Giant for portraying Dahl as a \u201cprincipled supporter of Palestinians.\u201d) Rosenblatt added, \u201cJohn plays Dahl\u2019s humanitarian compassion as real, and some of his arguments come from the right place. One of the amazing things John does is he plays both as true. They sit parallel to each other. How can you say one thing and then another? How can you be so unaware of your own blind spots? Is it possible to argue meaningfully about these things, to express humanitarian anguish and heartbreak, without saying the things Dahl ends up saying? I\u2019m just trying to have both come from the same person because that\u2019s an interesting paradox.\u201d<\/p>\n
In real life, Dahl\u2019s New Statesman interview with a young writer named Michael Coren \u2014 who went on to write books with titles like Hatred: Islam\u2019s War on Christianity and op-eds such as \u201cWe Should Nuke Iran\u201d \u2014 was supposed to be an opportunity for Dahl to explain the trope-filled language of \u201cJewish financial institutions\u201d and \u201cAmerican Jewish bankers\u201d he had used in his book review. Instead, Dahl doubled down, saying of Jewish Holocaust victims, \u201cI mean if you and I were in a line moving towards what we knew were gas chambers, I\u2019d rather have a go at taking one of the guards with me; but they were always submissive.\u201d He continued, \u201cThere is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it\u2019s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews.\u201d Lithgow plays the scene as if he\u2019s enacting a compulsive death drive, digging his own legacy\u2019s grave and pissing on it with Hitler apologias while staying true to Coren\u2019s note that Dahl was \u201cpolite and not unfriendly\u201d as he said these things. Lithgow found that \u201cself-destructive anger\u201d the stuff of gripping drama: \u201cI had a friend who said she wanted to climb up onstage and tell him to stop doing this to himself.\u201d As for whether that apology ever came, Dahl\u2019s family issued a formal one for the author\u2019s racism and antisemitism in 2020, 30 years after his death.<\/p>\n
Over the course of our lunch, Lithgow would break out into song or act out moments from the play, using tortilla chips to mime Dahl shuffling his papers and slipping in and out of Dahl\u2019s accent. It is quite possibly a switch he can\u2019t turn off. Lithgow has been onstage since he was a toddler; he showed me a photo of himself, age 2, in a production of The Emperor\u2019s New Clothes in an album he brought to our interview, sent to him by Antioch College, where his father worked in the theater department. I asked if the play, especially in its depiction of Dahl\u2019s vulnerability and sweetness toward his children, had made him reflect on fatherhood at all. He briefly reminisced about his own father and his nightly tradition of bedtime stories but noted that he \u201cdidn\u2019t duplicate that with my kids. I think I was too peripatetic. I wasn\u2019t there enough for their bedtimes. When they were kids, those were my years of more feverish movie activity.\u201d He\u2019s not troubled by this: \u201cI had a wonderfully close relationship with my kids, but I remember it as very raucous, roughhousing, chasing them around the house, hide-and-seek, playing wild games.\u201d He doesn\u2019t know which wild games he has left in him. \u201cAll of these things have been surprises to me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Giant is playing a strictly limited 16-week engagement. In August, Lithgow will return to London, where he has recently found a flat not far from Levey, to film the second season of HBO\u2019s long-gestating Harry Potter TV series. It was announced in 2025 that Lithgow would portray Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore in a big-budget episodic adaptation of J.\u2009K. Rowling\u2019s boy-wizard books. What motivates an actor in his ninth decade on earth to sign on to a multiyear project that, if filming stays on schedule, will wrap when he\u2019s 87? \u201cThose books are an amazing phenomenon, and I really do believe in this project fervently because of the people who are creating it, showrunner Francesca Gardiner and director Mark Mylod,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Over the past decade, Rowling has become a figure of controversy for obsessively spouting bigoted views against trans people. In recent years, she has shifted from simply bullying trans people to materially supporting legislation in the U.K. that changes the legal definition of woman to exclude trans women, eroding their rights. Lithgow said he had no idea about any of this when he accepted the role but has wearily resigned himself to a lifetime of distancing himself from her opinions in interviews. \u201cI\u2019ve never met her,\u201d he said. \u201cShe\u2019s not directly involved with the production. In fact, long after it airs, I could get together with you and tell you some of the things I\u2019ve contributed, bright ideas on the set that were radical ideas, and Rowling never even knew about it. She was never even told about the bold liberties we\u2019ve taken with the material because she trusts Francesca Gardiner and Mark Mylod, and they trust me. It\u2019s going to be marvelous. And so far, I\u2019m very glad I signed on, and I\u2019m saddened that it\u2019s upset a lot of people, including some very good friends of mine. I take the issue very seriously. I\u2019m on the side of transgender people. I know their complaints; I know some of the issues. How can you be prejudiced against a person who has dealt with that?\u201d (Through a representative, Rowling declined to comment. An HBO spokesperson said the author \u201cis working very closely with Francesca and Mark in the creation and production of the Harry Potter series, including reading scripts and casting \u2026 and the show is better for it.\u201d)<\/p>\n
He pointed to his \u201cwhole history with gender-fluid characters,\u201d including his performance as Roberta Muldoon, a trans woman, in 1982\u2019s The World According to Garp, which got him the first of his two Oscar nominations. I asked if those \u201cbold liberties\u201d he\u2019s taking with the material refer to whether he will play Dumbledore as gay, a revision Rowling made to the canon after the books had been released. \u201cExactly. This is something I have dealt with in many roles I\u2019ve played. I find it fascinating because, to me, great art comes out of people\u2019s pain. And these are people who struggled with tough issues,\u201d he said. While not confirming this will be an overt element of his performance, he said, \u201cI consider it a very good thing that I\u2019m playing Dumbledore. It gives me a chance to talk about these issues in a compassionate way.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhatever you think about J.\u2009K. Rowling and her eccentric views that I don\u2019t agree with,\u201d he added, \u201cshe has created something amazing for children.\u201d In many ways, Rowling is the most apt contemporary parallel to the version of Dahl on display in Giant \u2014 a massively influential British children\u2019s novelist who has disappointed legions of her adult fans who grew up attached to the series. Many now boycott any new works to come from the Potterverse so as not to contribute further to Rowling\u2019s wealth and influence. Maybe, many decades from now if Broadway still exists, a virtuosic actor raised on Lithgow\u2019s Dumbledore and the HBO series will be nominated for a Tony for her portrayal of Rowling\u2019s transphobia in a play much like Giant.<\/p>\n
Production Credits<\/p>\n
Photograph by
\n Mark Seliger<\/p>\n
Styling by
\n Daniel Edley<\/p>\n
Grooming by
\n Michelle deMilt<\/p>\n
Turtleneck by
\n Prada<\/p>\n
Jacket by
\n The Row<\/p>\n
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\n New York Magazine.<\/p>\n Related<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Photo: Mark Seliger for New York Magazine On a sunny April Thursday on the Upper West Side, John…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":433444,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[61756,21846,430,156,13313,153040,9273,111,139,69,34111,60119,20936,12844,6001],"class_list":["post-433443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-audio-article","tag-broadway","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-giant","tag-john-lithgow","tag-new-york-magazine","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-profile","tag-roald-dahl","tag-theater","tag-vulture-homepage-lede","tag-vulture-section-lede"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/433443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=433443"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/433443\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/433444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=433443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=433443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=433443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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