‘The Rule Of Jenny Pen’ Terrified New Dumbledore Actor John Lithgow

“I was scared to death of this. It scared me so much,” admits iconic character actor John Lithgow as we discuss psychological horror The Rule of Jenny Pen over Zoom.

“It was so extreme on the page. I thought it was an amazing piece of work, but it was a scary thing to contemplate until I spoke with James Ashcroft. I give my manager, Tony Lipp, great credit because he said, ‘Stay with this. I think this guy has got something.’”

Set in a retirement home, New Zealand indie The Rule of Jenny Pen stars Lithgow as Dave Crealy, a seemingly gentle man who secretly terrorizes the residents with a sadistic game involving the titular dementia doll. One of the targets of his reign of terror is arrogant Judge Stefan Mortensen, played by Oscar-winning actor Geoffrey Rush admitted to the facility after being left partially paralyzed after a stroke. Written and directed by James Ashcroft, The Rule of Jenny Pen lands in theaters on Friday, March 7, 2025, before heading to the horror streaming platform Shudder.

“I saw James’ very first feature film called Coming Home in the Dark, and it was very clear he knows exactly what he’s doing,” Lithgow continues, “I got on Zoom with him for about an hour and a half after having gotten a wonderful letter from him, in which he said in the first line, ‘I tell you in all honesty, you were not the first person I thought of for this role but George Sanders and Alec Guinness were not available.'”

“On the call, he talked so eloquently and with such intelligence and compassion about what he really felt the film was about. It is about cruelty, bullying, and growing old, and these are issues that he takes very seriously. James’ wife runs a chain of excellent senior care facilities in New Zealand. She’s second generation because her mother and father created it. James knows this world well and was determined to treat it with dignity, compassion, and accuracy.”

Something that appealed to the two-time Oscar nominee Raising Cain actor was Ashcroft’s depiction of the world within the walls of a retirement home, albeit with a dark twist.

“It still creates that world more accurately than you’ve ever seen it before,” Lithgow muses. “Most of us who have passed the age of 50 or 60 know this world from what our parents went through, those of us who were lucky enough to have parents to live to be extremely old. He gave me great confidence, and I felt that this was a project that I wanted to be a part of. I said, ‘There is one condition, and that is that there has got to be somebody fantastic playing the judge because this is a two-hander of major proportions,’ and they got Geoffrey.”

It has been over 20 years since Lithgow and Rush have appeared on screen together. The last time was in The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, the 2004 Stephen Hopkins-helmed biopic about the life of the legendary English comedian. Lithgow played director Blake Edwards and considers The Rule of Jenny Pen promotional cycle to be their “reunion tour,” adding that Rush’s performance “was very memorable. Mine, not so much.”

“On most projects, you lose track of people,” Rush laments. “It’s a very meandering existence, but with Peter Sellers, I’m still very good friends with Miriam Margolyes, who played my mother, and John and I have run into each other many times around the traps, so it’s great to be working together again.

Bemoaning the fact that The Life and Death of Peter Sellers appears not to be available to stream, Rush adds that he is “working on developing a project with Stephen Hopkins” but couldn’t reveal any more.

Reality And Terrifying Fantasy Blend In ‘The Rule Of Jenny Pen’

Because of the film’s setting and being filmed in New Zealand, the pair of legendary characters got the opportunity to work with their equivalents there, including the great George Henare.

“He is a great Māori actor,” Rush enthuses. “I knew of him because he did a famous Othello at the Melbourne Theatre Company back in the day.”

Lithgow interjects, “He’s a beautiful actor and a beautiful man. The whole cast is made up of New Zealand’s great actors, who are over 80 years old, and they all know each other. They’re effectively the biggest repertory company of artists in the world, and they loved doing the film. They didn’t feel the indignity of this at all. They believed in the project and its intentions and embraced the whole experience. It was great.”

However, where they both relished playing with their characters was in the many intense scenes of dark torment that Lithgow’s Crealy exerts on the residents through the haunting Jenny Pen.

“It is quite terrifying to mix horror with manic comedy. You think of a ventriloquist act as something that’s hilariously funny, and yet to use it for diabolical purposes is like cognitive dissonance,” he says. “It’s very distressing, especially when he’s doing mean things. He’s using Jenny Penn to manipulate a man’s catheter tube. What could be more diabolical than that? It’s a terrifying clown act. Stephen King knows all about that, which is my cue to say, Stephen King tweeted that this was the best film he’s seen this year. We quote him whenever we can.”

Lithgow’s character humiliates Rush’s character by forcing him to perform a humiliating act on the dementia doll, reveling in the deeply sinister debauchery.

“It was all in the script. The great fascination for me with the character, and in a way, I had to discover this before I could say yes to it, was ‘Why?’ What has made him into such a sadistic and vengeful person?” Lithgow says. “Between James, me, and Owen Marshall, who wrote the original short story, we discovered this little moment from Dave’s young years and found a way to fold it into the script. It was a moment when he caught sight of the judge making a self-important speech at a fancy dress banquet while working as a drudge in the hotel kitchen.”

“That moment has made him obsess about that man for his entire life. Just thinking of the moment when working as a janitor in a senior care facility, the judge arrives as a resident and is suddenly at his disposal. As soon as I found that a little thing, a little moment, that damaged him and became the subject of his obsession for his entire life, the whole horror film made sense. Unless a horror film makes emotional sense, it’s just nothing but a scary movie.”

Grateful for their illustrious careers, both Rush and Lithgow are philosophical and optimistic about what lies ahead for them.

“For many people, the pandemic was a period of great reflection,” Rush says. “We were locked down in Melbourne for long periods, so I read a lot. I read all of the Tom Stoppard plays that I’d never been able to see and his pretty fantastic autobiography. I’ve turned a lot of things down because I thought, ‘Well, I’ve fulfilled that part of the bucket list.’ The bucket list started later in life. I took on House on Haunted Hill because I had worn tights for a long time in movies like Shakespeare in Love. I needed to take a self-intriguing sideways move, which was great. Like James, William Malone, who directed that film, was completely immersed. I think the most incredible thrill that he had on that whole shoot was when he had the actor from Creature from the Black Lagoon doing a cameo role, and that day, he was just so buzzed up on the set.”

John Lithgow’s Perfect Dumbledore Casting

Aside from his stellar performance in the Oscar-winning papal political thriller Conclave, Lithgow has also been making headlines again after confirming he will be taking on the polar opposite role of Albus Dumbledore in the upcoming Harry Potter TV show. He can’t wait to get started.

“Actors make choices much less than you think. Job offers come if you’re very lucky; many of them come if you’re extremely lucky. I’ve been a lucky actor,” he concludes. “Things come my way, but I would say all the most interesting and exciting and fun jobs I’ve had, and the biggest successes I’ve had, are things that had never occurred to me until I was offered the role. Who would have picked me as Winston Churchill in The Crown or the Trinity Killer in Dexter? Third Rock from the Sun was the bright idea of two old friends of mine, two comedy writers who were on the staff of Saturday Night Live back in the 80s when I was the guest host.”

“I have been somebody else’s brainstorm for everything good I’ve ever done. Two or three things that I’ve actually initiated have been not so great. I think actors don’t know ourselves as well as we think we do. Other people know what we’re capable of more than we do. Directors surprise me when they come to me with job offers. Dumbledore was a total surprise, and yet everybody said, ‘Oh yes, you’re perfect for it.’ Well, who knew? That was the last thing I ever dreamed I’d play in my later years, yet it’s perfect. It’s the ideal nice, long role to ease me into my old dotage.”