"“They just thrill me to watch,” he leaned over to tell me between sections. “Actors do about 10 percent of what dancers do.” He paraphrased Noël Coward: “The essence of acting is to learn your lines and don't bump into the furniture.”"
"With his gray tweed flatcap under his arm, Lithgow settled into a chair and scanned the room, watching pairs of dancers fold themselves into impossible knots, rapt with their “onerous shapes.”"
"At six-three and 80 years old, Lithgow could never be mistaken for a dancer, but he had acted with the NYCB a year prior, when he and Wheeldon brought their take on Camille Saint-Saëns's Carnival of the Animals suite to the city."
"He has an incredible capacity to play both overgrown innocents (the guileless suitor in Terms of Endearment) and repressed, perverted psychopaths (Dexter's Trinity Killer). He can ramp up the approachable charm (30 Rock, the dad in Harry and the Hendersons) or completely void himself of it (the cruel, puritanical preacher in Footloose)."
John Lithgow visits the David H. Koch Theater during NYCB rehearsals for Christopher Wheeldon’s Continuum. He watches dancers fold into complex, difficult shapes and expresses excitement about the spectacle. He compares acting to dancing, saying actors do far less than dancers and joking that acting means learning lines and avoiding collisions. Lithgow, an 80-year-old actor with formal training, has worked with NYCB before, bringing a take on Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals. His roles range from overgrown innocents and approachable charm to repressed, perverted psychopaths and cruel, puritanical figures. His recent work includes varied characters across film and television.
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