John Lithgow (Footloose) Footloose
John Lithgow (born October 19, 1945, Rochester, New York) played Reverend Shaw Moore in Footloose (1984). See also Lithgow's role in Blow Out.
Shaw Moore is a man legislating his grief
Lithgow plays the reverend not as a hypocrite or a fanatic but as a man whose son's death has fused with his sense of pastoral duty. The dance ban is, for Shaw, what he can do — the form love takes when love can no longer keep a child alive. The hook for the performance, Lithgow has said many times, was the lost son.
"He'd lost his son in a car accident the night of the prom — drunken kids getting wild, driving a car off a viaduct. That was the hook for me." — John Lithgow, HuffPost (2014)
He prepared by misleading a real minister
Lithgow was not religious — he describes himself as a secular Jew — and felt he needed to learn the cadence of small-town American Protestant preaching from someone who could actually do it. He looked up an Assembly of God minister in the Yellow Pages and went to see him under false pretenses.
"I told him I'd been raised in the church and was thinking about becoming a minister. I just wanted to know what was involved. The truth was, I just wanted to know how a minister talks." — John Lithgow, HuffPost (2014)
The cadence — the rolling certainty, the slowing down at the moral, the way Shaw lets a sentence hang at the pulpit — came out of those conversations. (cheatsheet)
Footloose came in the middle of a remarkable run
Lithgow had been a stage actor most of his working life. The early 1980s turned him into a film star.
| Year | Film | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 1976 | Obsession | First De Palma collaboration |
| 1979 | All That Jazz | Bob Fosse |
| 1981 | Blow Out | Burke; see John Lithgow |
| 1982 | The World According to Garp | Oscar nomination, Supporting Actor |
| 1983 | Terms of Endearment | Oscar nomination, Supporting Actor |
| 1983 | Twilight Zone: The Movie | "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" |
| 1984 | Footloose | Reverend Shaw Moore |
| 1987 | Harry and the Hendersons | Family lead |
| 1996–2001 | 3rd Rock from the Sun | Three Emmys |
| 2009 | Dexter | Emmy and Golden Globe |
| 2016–17 | The Crown | Played Winston Churchill |
| 2024 | Conclave | Cardinal Tremblay |
The Reverend Shaw Moore stayed with him. Forty years on, he was still being asked about the Bomont preacher in talk-show interviews, and he answered every time.