Letting Them Talk with Will Harris - Ep. 24 - Jane Alexander (Testament / The Great White Hope / Severance)

This time, I’m letting Jane Alexander talk.

Jane is a four-time Academy Award nominee, a seven-time Tony nominee, and a two-time Emmy winner (with six additional nominations to her credit), so…there’s really no good reason why she should be talking to me for this podcast.

The only explanation I can offer: she and I got along swimmingly when I did a piece for Smithsonian about the play and film versions of The Great White Hope and chatted with both Jane and her co-star, the late, great James Earl Jones. Since then, we’ve stayed in touch, and when I found out that one of the films that scored her one of those aforementioned Oscar nods – Testament – was being added to the Criterion Collection, I pitched her on the idea of this conversation, and she was kind enough to agree.

I also took advantage of the opportunity to do something I’ve never done before during an interview: spring a special guest on someone. As you may or may not know, I did all of the interviews for the book Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane!, and one of those interviews was with Ross Harris, who – in addition to being the boy who visits Peter Graves in the cockpit – also played Jane’s son in Testament. This is another one of those moments that plays particularly well if you’re a paid subscriber and have access to the video, but even without it, you can hear the unbridled joy in Jane’s voice when Ross joins us for a portion of the conversation.

Of course, Testament isn’t the only thing we talk about during the episode. Jane has plenty of stories about other projects, including meeting Muhammad Ali while doing The Great White Hope, acting alongside Johnny Cash and being invited to introduce him at one of his concerts, working with Burt Reynolds and Clint Eastwood in City Heat, and – more recently – being part of the runaway Apple TV+ hit Severance.

Well, that’s probably enough of an introduction. It’s time to let Jane Alexander talk.