Wallace Shawn Isn’t Ready to Die

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INCONCEIVABLE

Wallace Shawn Isn’t Ready to Die

By Greta Rainbow

May 21, 2026

All photos courtesy of Greta Rainbow.

The 82-year-old actor and writer Wallace Shawn is spending a lot of time in Dimes Square. He loves it. On a recent Friday afternoon, he wanders through Metrograph in a state of seeming bewilderment and wonder. It’s the second week of the series Wallace Shawn: The Master Builder, curated by John Early and Lucas Kane who are both involved in Shawn’s acclaimed Broadway play What We Did Before Our Moth Days. The selected films range from feminist comedy classic Clueless to delightful mess Southland Tales, but at present the house is packed with 20-somethings for Vanya on 42nd Street, Louis Malle’s filmic rendition of the lengthy rehearsals for André Gregory’s production of Uncle Vanya in a dilapidated midtown theater. “It feels like a beautiful document of their famed, beloved process,” Early says.

As Vanya, Shawn is hopelessly in love with Julianne Moore’s Yelena, and so is Dr. Astrov, played by Larry Pine. Shawn, Pine, and Gregory are all here. “This is your opportunity not only to watch an extraordinary film, but to look at the oldest man you’ve ever seen,” Gregory quips. After Vanya, Shawn greets a gaggle of adoring fans. One guy has him autograph what appears to be a Toy Story trading card. Eventually, we escape to the Metrograph Commissary, where Shawn orders a large glass of orange juice and we talk about the past, present, and future of his artistic life.

This interview is not that enjoyable without Shawn’s distinctive voice. You’ll just have to imagine it in your head as you read, by which I mean, recall the anxious dinosaur of Toy Story, or Vizzini the Sicilian’s iconic “Inconceivable!” from The Princess Bride, or Blair Waldorf’s sympathetic stepdad in Gossip Girl. Or maybe it’s Wallace Shawn as Wallace Shawn, a younger version, in My Dinner with Andre. He can’t really remember playing any of those parts, he tells me. But at the same time, none of it feels that far away.

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FRIDAY, 6:00 PM, MAY 15, 2026, NEW YORK

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GRETA RAINBOW: I’m so happy to meet you. So it seems like you enjoy watching your old stuff?

WALLACE SHAWN: A lot of actors don’t like to watch themselves. For me, it’s my new hobby or something. I don’t expect you to understand, but time telescopes backwards. The last 49 years that I’ve been acting feel like a very short part of my life, and something I took up quite recently and never expected to do. I don’t feel some of the things that people who always dreamed of being actors feel. Obviously I have little moments of being upset, where I think, “I didn’t do that moment very well.”

RAINBOW: Watching Vanya on 42nd Street, I wondered if you felt like Vanya when you said the line, “I wish I could start anew and forget the past.”

SHAWN: That wouldn’t be true of me. If I had a wish, it would be that I wouldn’t be taken off the earth by death so soon.

RAINBOW: Because there’s more art you want to make?

SHAWN: No, it’s just that I’m not ready to go. I’ve had very, very, very good luck. I mean, my wish would be that I could live longer and continue having good luck. If you believe that people ultimately get what they deserve, a lot of bad things would happen to me very soon, because I really had uncannily good luck.

RAINBOW: Your trajectory was somewhat random, you’re saying?

SHAWN: People who have good luck have tools to grab more good luck. I came from a privileged background. I didn’t know that, and my parents were not, in a strange way, very conscious of it either. But I had every opportunity. For a brief period, I thought maybe I would lead a humbler sort of life, much humbler than my parents’ life. Then, I became an actor and I returned to having a pretty comfortable bourgeois life. In a way, I’m still downwardly mobile from my parents…But I don’t think my mother ever had a cappuccino. So am I downwardly mobile or upwardly mobile? Because I can have cappuccinos all the time.

RAINBOW: There’s a line that has become popular from My Dinner with Andre. You say something like, “I used to think about art and literature, and now all I think about, at 36, is money.” Is all you think about, at 82, money?

SHAWN: No.

RAINBOW: I didn’t think so.

SHAWN: No. Well, I think I said “art and music” rather than “art and literature.”

RAINBOW: You’re right, I’m putting words in your mouth. Literature is what I would say.

SHAWN: Between the age of birth and, say, five years old, I listened to records all day or people read to me. That was my life. I suppose it actually was literature and music more than art and music. I looked at the covers of the records. But that’s all I knew. When I was 36, that was in the middle of my more austere period. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I mean, I’d been writing plays for 10 years and a couple of them had been performed, but I was...