'I hope viewers are appalled': James Cromwell on ABC's Maralinga drama

In a discount furniture warehouse-turned-soundstage just off the industrial sprawl of Parramatta Road in western Sydney, American screen veteran James Cromwell, his imposing two-metre frame bent into a wiry coil, pounds his fist on a lunch table.

Dishevelled and in pale long johns, between takes but still in costume as British military-lifer General the Lord Harrington Crankford in the ABC's new period drama, Operation Buffalo, he's explaining why, more than 25 years since he first ventured to Australia to play genteel Farmer Hoggett in Babe, he's now onto his "fifth or sixth" local production.

Were you expecting some twee "I love this country!" niceties? Welcome instead to a blunt rundown of Hollywood politics.

"We have a certain system in Hollywood – I'm not part of it, but projects are financed because the stars are bankable," he begins. "They do it through a single agency, and they package it so the second and third leads are usually also from that agency – ICM, CAA, whatever.

"Now when they get down to the smaller parts, the last thing they want is somebody who, when they have an interview like this, suddenly starts to talk critically about something – the President, our dysfunctional system, the end of the world – because somebody might publish it and that screws the whole thing up. Don't make a wave! That's the whole idea.

"But [in Australia], because they don't know my politics so much, I'm not such a liability," the 80-year-old chuckles.

Written and directed by Peter Duncan (Rake), Operation Buffalo is set amid the British nuclear tests at Maralinga in South Australia in 1956. Opening with the sly header, "This is a work of historical fiction ... But a lot of the really bad history actually happened", the series strikes an odd tone, playing coyly with the dreadful absurdity of British aristocrats stationed in the remote Australian desert, toying with radioactive bombs like toddlers in a sandpit.

Producer Vincent Sheehan, who recalled the damning McClelland royal commission into the tests in the mid-'80s, says he was sold on the concept after a fellow producer, a generation or so younger, voiced shock at the details: the colonial exploitation, Indigenous displacement, ecological disaster, and a government's betrayal of its people. "It made me aware that Maralinga had dropped off the consciousness in Australia," says Sheehan.

Cromwell, while unfamiliar with this chapter of Australian history, recognised its universality. A lifelong activist who has lobbied in Washington, DC, against nuclear proliferation and on behalf of Indigenous issues, he sees in the series a vital message.

"In my country, the Indians are the only ones who know how to live correctly, which is to leave no footprint and to see the responsibility that you bear towards the sustainability of the planet to the seventh generation. We white folk come from a culture that came to an absolute dead end and so spat out these explorers who then behaved as badly in the new world as they did back home, and began this cancerous expansion to our doom. And there will always be repercussions and consequences for the ignorance, stupidity and disconnection of a certain race of people who have behaved abominably towards everybody else."

The Cold War paranoia that fuelled the tests at Maralinga was also familiar to Cromwell. In 1951, his father, John – a theatre and film director, most notably of 1934's Oscar-nominated Of Human Bondage – was blacklisted after being brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee to testify. The experience was formative to Cromwell's own identity.

"I knew when I was young that my father had been through something called the 'blacklist', but I didn't know the full consequences and he didn't talk about it," he says. "However, I was working in a resident theatre and I'd travelled to Europe as part of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth, and when I came back, my father had cut out a little squib from the bottom of The New York Times that there was an integrated theatre touring the Deep South, sponsored by the Student Nonviolent Co-ordinating Committee, and so I went down and I got the job as director and actor. I was 23."

He recalls being "hassled by white cops" while working with the SNCC to help register black voters, and found out a friend of his, Mickey Schwerner, was killed alongside two other civil rights workers (the trio's story is told in the 1988 film, Mississippi Burning). He later joined the anti-Vietnam War movement, worked for the Black Panthers, and delved further into Indigenous causes.

In recent years, and among other charges of civil disobedience, Cromwell has been jailed and fined for protesting against the construction of a fracked gas power station near his home in New York State. Last October, he was arrested while protesting against the use of dogs in medical research.

"These issues, they impinge on me personally. I'm there, I see the consequences, I see the result of our failed democracy, and I have to respond," he says. When it comes to acting gigs, the same credence is front of mind.

"I try not to, unless of course the bank account is really low, do anything that has no meaning outside of itself as a piece of entertainment," he says. "I think we're being entertained to death."

So, if not entertainment, what does Cromwell hope ABC viewers take from Operation Buffalo?

"I hope they're appalled!" he says, another clenched fist descending. He sees a pop-cultural synonym in the HBO phenomenon, Chernobyl.

"Chernobyl isn't about the explosion or the clean-up; it's about what happens when a culture, to preserve its standing in the world, lies about its reality," he says. "That's exactly what the British in Australia did. They knew those clouds moved, that radiation was travelling across communities, and they didn't give a shit.

"It's exactly the same place we're at now," he continues. "Our leaders pay no attention to us as people, they don't serve us as people; all they want is to get elected, and they know they'll get elected because they have a lot of money and they think up bogus issues. They confuse the people, they disempower them, and they rile them up against some other people of some other colour or some other religion, and that's the way they get us ’til we're all f---ing confused and powerless. I hope viewers see something analogous in [this show] and say, 'No! We can't do this!'"

Operation Buffalo debuts on ABC and ABC iView on Sunday May 31 at 8.30pm.