John Lithgow

And it was sensational, but my mouth immediately filled up with apple cider.

Thank you, Dave.

I feel welcome.

Well, you look for ways you can empathize with every character.

And if you're playing a scoundrel of any stripe, you just try to make it interesting.

You try to figure out what made him that way.

And

Dahl is a man so famous for one thing and not known at all for this other thing, his kind of overbearing and sometimes cruel nature.

I just found it fascinating, the different perceptions of him.

And curiously, I have a good friend, the actress Maria Tucci, who is the widow of the editor Robert Gottlieb,

who is the man who fired Roald Dahl from Alfred Knopf because he was just so insufferable and cruel to everybody he worked with there.

And I knew this about him before this even came up.

This, to me, was fascinating.

Anyone who is that successful, that much of an asset for a publisher to be fired because he was impossible to work with.

I just thought, well, there's something there.

Yes, it's set in 1983, but it's about the events of 1982 when Israel was in deep conflict with Lebanon, mainly because they were trying to purge the PLO from Beirut.

And they invaded Beirut brutally and brutally.

Dahl wrote a book review a year later of a book about that invasion, which very much took the Palestinians side.

And in that review, he betrayed his own anti-Semitism.

between the lines and in a few of the lines quite explicitly.