The award-winning role John Lithgow tried his hardest to turn down: “No, I’m not doing that”
While he might have an array of excellent movies under his belt, you could argue that John Lithgow is at his best when he’s on the small screen.
He made his television debut in 1974 and has remained in love with the medium ever since; from his long-running role in 3rd Rock from the Sun to guest spots in How I Met Your Mother and The Crown, the elder statesman always brings his A-game, regardless of whether the show is funny or deadly serious.
One of Lithgow’s best TV roles was as Arthur Mitchell in Dexter. Introduced in the fourth season of the show, Mitchell is an unassuming older man with a dark secret. He leads a double life as a murderer, known to the FBI as the ‘Trinity Killer’. He becomes something of a mentor to the show’s title character (played by Michael C Hall), who is struggling to balance his own psychopathic tendencies with leading a ‘normal’ life.
Lithgow was showered with praise for his sensitive handling of such a twisted character, winning an Emmy for ‘Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series’ and a Golden Globe for ‘Best Supporting Actor – Television’. Mitchell is one of Lithgow’s most lucrative characters, so it might surprise you to learn that, at the beginning, he wanted nothing to do with him.
In an interview with GQ, the voice of Lord Farquaad recalled his initial meeting with Dexter showrunner Clyde Phillips. He was so secretive about his ideas for the Trinity Killer that he refused to speak to Lithgow with his agents present. Once they got him alone, they revealed their sinister plan.
“They told me the entire detailed unfolding story,” he said, “I kept saying, ‘Well, wait a minute, what happened to the baby?’ You know, things like that. They’d have to tell me, and I kept on saying, ‘More, more, more’, to the point where they had given me way, way much more information than they intended. But they were trying to persuade me to take the part. Having heard all of that, I said no. ‘I won’t tell anybody any of this, but no. I’m not doing that’.”
As we now know, Lithgow was eventually persuaded to come aboard. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, he revealed that he was eventually drawn to the complexity of the character, especially in relation to some of the more one-note villains he’d played in the past.
“He’s an evil man who does not want to be evil,” he said, explaining how he was essentially an older, more extreme version of Dexter.
The Trinity Killer only appears in 12 episodes of Dexter, but his influence on the show lasted much longer. He was a massive influence on the sequel series, New Blood, while Lithgow returned to play an imagined version of Mitchell in Dexter: Resurrection. It’s safe to say that this decision paid off. Let’s hope Lithgow can eventually say the same about playing Dumbledore.
