Nathan Lane, Getting Serious, Plays Roy Cohn
Nathan Lane may be best known for supplying the voice of the fun-loving meerkat in “The Lion King,” but in recent years he’s turned his focus to more serious roles. Now he’s playing the villain, Roy Cohn, in a new production of Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America.” Lane sat down with Michael Schulman at The New Yorker Festival in October, 2017, to talk about the real-life Cohn. A conservative attorney who denied that he was gay to the end of his life, Cohn served as Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel during the crusade against Communism, as an adviser to Richard Nixon, and as a mentor to the young Donald Trump. Lane went to great lengths to understand the contradictions of Cohn’s life. “It’s easy to find people who hated him,” Lane tells Schulman. “But there were people who loved Roy Cohn.” “Angels in America” opens on Broadway in February.
January 26, 2018
25 min
156
Full
157 of 1,040
Episode 156 · January 26, 2018
Nathan Lane, Getting Serious, Plays Roy Cohn
0:00 / 25:03
Excerpt playback isn’t available for this episode — use the full-episode link.
Search the Record
Moment search isn’t open for this episode yet
When it opens, you’ll be able to type any phrase and jump straight to the second it was said.
The New Yorker Episodes Around January 26, 2018
Episode 157 of 1,040 — walk the feed in the order it was published.
25:03This episodeNathan Lane, Getting Serious, Plays Roy Cohn
Summary
Nathan Lane may be best known for supplying the voice of the fun-loving meerkat in “The Lion King,” but in recent years he’s turned his focus to more serious roles. Now he’s playing the villain, Roy Cohn, in a new production of Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America.” Lane sat down with Michael Schulman at The New Yorker Festival in October, 2017, to talk about the real-life Cohn. A conservative attorney who denied that he was gay to the end of his life, Cohn served as Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel during the crusade against Communism, as an adviser to Richard Nixon, and as a mentor to the young Donald Trump. Lane went to great lengths to understand the contradictions of Cohn’s life. “It’s easy to find people who hated him,” Lane tells Schulman. “But there were people who loved Roy Cohn.”
“Angels in America” opens on Broadway in February.
Episode details and artwork are published by the show’s own feed. Sentinel plays short cited excerpts and links every episode back to its publisher.