Let the record show that James Cromwell has been in town for several weeks now, and he has yet to set foot in a Wendy's.
The lanky actor of Babe fame was arrested last July in Virginia, in a protest by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Terms of his suspended sentence include a ban from the late Dave Thomas's eatery.
"The court order was actually only for the one Wendy's," says a jovial Cromwell in presidential suit and tie at the Kleinburg set of Little Brother. He's Lyndon Johnson in the Robert Kennedy biopic, which is being filmed for the U.S. FX network.
"They called me in from California for sentencing, and the judge was pissed because he felt the prosecutor was grandstanding. When the prosecutor said, 'Part of the condition is he not be able to enter the Wendy's here,' the judge looked at him and said, 'Why would he do that?' " Cromwell recalls, laughing.
Cromwell has marched in the civil rights, anti-war and animal rights movements -- and denounced Survivor: Australian Outback for the killing of a pig and chickens.
It's ironic that he's portraying LBJ, considering that the first of Cromwell's several lifetime arrests occurred as he protested the Vietnam War in Washington -- Johnson's War, as some would have it. In fact, Cromwell spent Wednesday shooting a scene in which Johnson blasts RFK -- played by English actor Linus Roache -- for conducting peace talks behind his back.
Yet his feelings toward Johnson are fairly positive. "For the first part of his term, I was in Mississippi and was a supporter of his. All we knew at the time was what was going on in Mississippi and he was a Civil Rights president. Then the war came.
"But he was a victim like all the rest of us. He was a victim of his own hubris and of an intelligence community that has always had agendas of its own. So he never got an accurate view of what was happening there. He certainly didn't understand -- ever -- what (Viet Cong leader) Ho Chi Minh's position was. If he had, maybe he would have acted differently."
He's fascinated too with Robert F. Kennedy. "To us, he was just part of the establishment. But after Jack was killed, he began to listen to people like Cesar Chavez and Martin (Luther King), and it humanized him. I believe he could've been another FDR."
One of Cromwell's contemporary causes is Global Rule One, the move by the U.S. Screen Actors Guild to have U.S. actors covered by their union wages and benefits when filming out of country.
Before working in Toronto, Cromwell shot The Sum Of All Fears in Montreal with Ben Affleck and Morgan Freeman (once again, Cromwell plays the U.S. president).
"I did Babe for basically nothing, and I didn't get one cent, no residuals from any showing of Babe. Foreign distribution, cassettes, not a friggin' nickel," he says.
"In Australia, it was either take it or leave it. My position is there should be one worldwide English-speaking actors union, under the best contract that can possibly be negotiated. That cuts both ways. Canadian actors are not second rate, and they shouldn't have to take less money than an American would have been paid."
His pricetag since has made him comfortable, "but these concerns are real to me. I made my living as an actor for 40 years, a middle class actor putting his kids through school. (He's married to actress Julie Cobb). It's just that nobody pays any attention to you when you're a TV actor."
Well, nobody except New York cabbies, who he says still tend to remember him for a handful of appearances as Stretch Cunningham, Archie Bunker's pal on All In The Family.
"Carroll O'Connor saved my life," he says wryly. "He thought Stretch was getting too many laughs and he refused to let me be a regular character. If he had, the character might have become like Fonzie and it would have been the end of my career."
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