The Old Man

John Lithgow stars as former FBI Assistant Director Harold Harper, who travels far from home to try to protect his family and salvage his career.

Career Highlights

John Lithgow’s roots are in the theater. In 1973, he won a Tony Award® two weeks after his Broadway debut in David Storey’s The Changing Room. Since then, he has appeared on Broadway 25 times, earning five more Tony nominations, a second Tony win, four Drama Desk Awards and induction into the Theatre Hall of Fame. His Broadway performances have included major roles in My Fat Friend, Trelawny of the ‘Wells,’ Comedians, Anna Christie, Bedroom Farce, Beyond Therapy, M. Butterfly, The Front Page, The Retreat from Moscow, All My Sons, The Columnist, Hillary and Clinton and the musicals Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and Sweet Smell of Success, for which he won his second Tony Award. In England, he has played “Malvolio” with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the title role in Arthur Wing Pinero’s The Magistrate with the National Theatre. In 2014, he played another title role, “King Lear,” for The New York Public Theater at the Delacorte Theater in New York’s Central Park.In 2008, Lithgow devised a one-man show John Lithgow: Stories by Heart for the Lincoln Center Theater Company. Over the next 10 years, he performed it in 35 cities around the country, finally arriving on Broadway in 2018 for a triumphant run at the Roundabout Theater. Most recently, Lithgow directed the off-Broadway play Everything’s Fine, written and performed by the late Douglas McGrath.In the early 1980s, Lithgow began to make a major mark in film. Mid-decade, he was nominated for Oscar® Awards in back-to-back years for The World According to Garp and Terms of Endearment. In the years before and after, he has appeared in over 50 films. Notable among them have been All That Jazz, Blow Out, Twilight Zone: The Movie, Footloose, Buckaroo Banzai, Harry and the Hendersons, Raising Cain, Ricochet, Cliffhanger, Shrek, Kinsey, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, This is 40, Interstellar, Love is Strange, Beatriz at Dinner, Bombshell and Killers of the Flower Moon. He will soon be seen in Conclave with Ralph Fiennes and The Rule of Jenny Pen with Geoffrey Rush, and his voice will be heard in the animated film Spellbound, with that of Rachel Zegler, Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem.Lithgow has been nominated for 13 Emmy® Awards for his work on television, most recently for HBO’s Perry Mason. He has won six times: once for an episode of Amazing Stories, once for Showtime’s Dexter, once for the role of Winston Churchill in Netflix’s The Crown and three times for playing High Commander “Dick Solomon” on the hit NBC comedy series 3rd Rock from the Sun. During that show’s six-year run, Lithgow also won a Golden Globe®, two SAG Awards, The American Comedy Award and, when it went off the air, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.Currently, Lithgow is starring alongside Jeff Bridges in the FX drama series The Old Man. His documentary Arts Happens Here with John Lithgow aired on PBS in April, highlighting the importance of the arts in education for young people.Since the early days of his career, Lithgow has also entertained young children. He has written several New York Times best-selling children’s picture books, most recently Never Play Music Right Next to the Zoo. He has performed concerts for children with a dozen major American symphony orchestras and has released three kids’ albums, including the GRAMMY®-nominated The Sunny Side of the Street, just one of his four GRAMMY nominations. He has been honored with New York’s New Victory Theater Arts Award for his work “bringing kids to the arts and the arts to kids.”In 2011, Harper Collins published Lithgow’s warmly received memoir, Drama: An Actor’s Education, an evocation of his life and career up to the age of 35. Since 2019, he has written and illustrated three books of satirical verse comprising The Dumpty Trilogy, achieving the remarkable feat of landing Lithgow on the New York Times non-fiction Bestseller List three times in three consecutive years.In the last three years, Lithgow has joined Kennedy Center President Deborah Rutter and Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey as co-chairs of the Commission on the Arts of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Under their leadership, the Commission produced authoritative reports on arts in education and America’s creative workforce.John Lithgow was born in Rochester, New York. He grew up in a theater family, following the fortunes of his father Arthur Lithgow, a producer of American Repertory Theater. He attended eight public schools, in Ohio and Massachusetts, finally finishing high school in Princeton, New Jersey. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College and studied at the London Academy of Music &amp; Dramatic Art on a Fulbright Grant. He has been honored with the Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Medal, induction into The American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Harvard. On this last occasion, he became the first and only actor to ever deliver Harvard’s Commencement Address.Lithgow has three children, three grandchildren and lives in Los Angeles and New York. Since 1981, he has been married to Mary Yeager, an Emerita Professor of business and economic history at UCLA.

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He has a complicated past with rogue fugitive Dan Chase, which makes him uniquely suited for hunting him down.

John Lithgow headshot wearing a brown jacket

John Lithgow as Harold Harper | The Old Man on FX

The Old Man

Career Highlights

Amy Brenneman
as Zoe McDonald

Alia Shawkat
as Emily Chase / Angela Adams

Navid Negahban
as Faraz Hamzad

John Lithgow as Harold Harper | The Old Man on FX

The Old Man

Amy Brennemanas Zoe McDonald

Alia Shawkatas Emily Chase / Angela Adams

Navid Negahbanas Faraz Hamzad

Amy Brenneman
as Zoe McDonald

Alia Shawkat
as Emily Chase / Angela Adams

Navid Negahban
as Faraz Hamzad