John Lithgow’s “tackiest” movie that nobody outside of England likes: “It is huge over there”
Not to wish any form of harm upon one of the modern era’s greatest character actors, but John Lithgow may have wanted to pay closer attention to history when he agreed to star in the Harry Potter reboot.
After all, Richard Harris was supposed to stick around for the entire franchise, but he passed away between the second and third instalments. Sure, Lithgow didn’t spend decades destroying himself with booze, but there’s nonetheless a precedent for the person cast as Albus Dumbledore not to stick around.
There’s also the small matter of his age, with the 80-year-old planning to see out six seasons of television before the wizard meets his demise, and in the streaming era where everything takes a fucking age to release new episodes, we could realistically be talking about eight-to-ten years before he reaches the finish line.
Obviously, we’d prefer that Lithgow hung about, because he seems like a genuinely nice fella, even if he underestimated the backlash that comes attached to anything connected to JK Rowling these days. Harry Potter isn’t his first British institution, of course, having previously played Winston Churchill in The Crown and won an Emmy for it, but one of his worst movies also fits the bill.
It sounds oxymoronic to describe a terrible film as something that would be embraced and ingrained into the heritage of an entire country, but that’s the way Lithgow sees it. In 1985, he played the role of BZ in Santa Claus: The Movie, where it promptly flopped at the box office amid scathing reviews from critics.
And yet, something strange happened. Despite being shit, the festive caper that sees David Huddleston’s title character embrace his destiny after meeting Dudley Moore’s toymaker and running afoul of Lithgow’s nefarious executive, became England’s single biggest Christmastime viewing staple.
In the last 50 years, no Yuletide flick has been aired and re-aired in the UK more often than Santa Claus: The Movie, and while nobody gives much of a fuck about it outside of the United States, Lithgow remains completely and utterly baffled that whenever he crossed the pond, it’s treated as his magnum opus.
“One of the tackiest movies I’ve ever been in,” he declared. “It seemed cheesy, and it certainly never stuck, except in England. It is huge over there. I wish I had a nickel for every Englishman who’s told me it’s their favourite film. In England, that’s half of what I’m known for.”
He knows it’s terrible, viewers from most of the world’s nations know it’s terrible, but in England, Santa Claus: The Movie has become the definitive Christmas rewatch, and Lithgow has absolutely no idea why.
