Here’s What Happened to the ‘3rd Rock From the Sun’ Cast Before, During and After the Show

John Lithgow (Dick Solomon)

Effortlessly able to shift between drama and comedy, the actor was born John Arthur Lithgow on October 18, 1945 in Rochester, New York, coming from a showbiz family — his mother was an actress and his father a producer and director at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey. The family moved a lot and John spent part of his childhood in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where one of his babysitters was activist Coretta Scott King. He graduated from Princeton High School and Harvard College, with degrees in history and literature. He performed in a number of plays while attending Harvard, though acting wasn’t necessarily what he was going for.

“You see,” he explained to the New York Daily News in 1976, “I was brought up in Ohio surrounded by theater. My father, Arthur, is a pioneer in regional theater. He staged at least five Shakespearean festivals and worked in Yellow Springs, Akron, Cleveland. I grew up all over the state. I made my debut when I was 6, a good role. I killed Ellis Rabb I, my stage father in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part Three. And I played dozens of characters in father’s companies. And then, when I was 16 I directed my first short play in one of my father’s workshops. It seemed time when I went to college to try another avenue, but I found I loved acting in front of people. I love being on stage and I love directing. The trouble with commercial theater is that they want one marketable label. At Cambridge, you went along with the label they give you.”

That’s the thing. He may not have intended to spend his life as an actor, but his obvious skills took him in that direction, having received a Fulbright — or grant — to study acting in London. In an interview with NPR, he recalled telling his father the news: “His face fell. By that time I had worked for him for years in his summer Shakespeare festivals. He had directed me. I had acted with him. I even directed him once or twice. And I thought, ‘Well, it’s a fait accompli, I’m going to be an actor. I told him I was off to study it in earnest, and he looked like I had told him I’d contracted a terminal disease.”

He actually came to understand the reason for the response. “It’s one of those dark ironies of life,” he mused, “that the very moment when I, after some bit of struggle, had my career take off so abruptly, his was just beginning a sort of precipitous decline. He’d lost the last really good and prestigious job he had as a theater manager and he was a circumspect man. I mean, he was not emotionally extravagant, but the wonderful thing was he — to all appearances — was elated by the success I’d had and [was] very proud of me. He wouldn’t allow me to feel any guilt or bad feelings about his bad fortunes.”

He made his Broadway debut in a 1973 production of The Changing Room, winning a Tony Award in the category of Featured Actor in a Play as well as a Drama Desk Award. Over the next few years, he returned to Broadway in My Fat Friend (1974), A Memory of Two Mondays (1976), Requiem for a Heavyweight (1985), and M. Butterfly (1988). In between those shows, he starred in such films as Dealing: Or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues (1972), Brian De Palma’s thriller Obsession (1976), All That Jazz (1979, a pair of Academy Award nominations for The World According to Garp (1982), co-starring Robin Williams; and Terms of Endearment (1983), Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), as the anti-dancing pastor in Flashdance (1984) and 2010: The Year We Make Contact.

In just a few years, the actor felt that he had actually come a long way, not just from his stage appearances but in those critically acclaimed films. “I feel fearless as an actor now; I feel as if I could do anything,” John related to The Californian in 1984 after he had relocated to the West Coast. “I love playing parts that cut close to the bone emotionally. As actors we’re always looking for something nobody has seen before, so you can confront people with ideas and dramatic moments they never dreamed of. I think acting is a process of exposing your inner self, inviting people to connect with you and identify with feelings you have. It’s suggesting to people the commonality of feelings we all have.”

In an interview the following year with The Journal News of White Plains, he enthused about the diversity of roles he’d been able to tackle, “The fact is, when you play a murderer or someone who’s being manipulative or crooked or sadistic, you have to be game to play somebody different from yourself. That’s certainly the kick that I get out of it; taking a plunge in another direction, taking on somebody who is emphatically not me.”

Over the next decade, the film work kept coming in, including The Manhattan Project (1986), Ricochet (1991), Raising Cain (1992) and Cliffhanger (1993). Then, in 1996, he joined the cast of the NBC sitcom 3^rd Rock from the Sun as Dick Solomon, a move which surprised a number of people — including John himself. “Comedy is beneath everyone’s dignity,” he mused with The Napa Register in 1996, “but that’s what I love about it. Comedy is by definition sort of anarchic. It’s supposed to startle people. I like the fact that most people who know me from the movies do not know me as a comic actor. That’s one surprise I can spring on them. The very fact that people were surprised that I was doing a sitcom I thought was a good thing.”

He added to AVClub, “I never intended to do a series. I thought a series was the kiss of death for a character actor, because it was all you would ever be known for. Like the great Carroll O’Connor. He’ll be Archie Bunker forever. So I had sort of avoided it. In fact, I turned down the role of Frasier on Cheers, when it was first offered to me.”

Bonnie and Terry Turner, who created 3^rd Rock from the Sun, were friends of his from the times he hosted Saturday Night Live in the 1980s and pitched him the idea of the series. “They were sneaky,” he laughed in the same interview. “They pretended they were just taking me to breakfast, but when I got to breakfast, they were there with the entire executive staff of Carsey-Werner Productions. And they pitched it to me and the first thing Terry said to me was, ‘Well, it’s about these four aliens.’ I thought, ‘Oh my God, how do I get out of here?’ But three minutes later, he persuaded me to do it. It was such a fantastic role and premise for a character, man: an alien who basically can’t figure out how to be a human being, so he tried everything.”

As to the character himself, John added to The San Francisco Examiner, “Dick Solomon is a chameleon. This is the essence of all great comedy: the misfit, the fish out of water. Doing a sitcom was something I was never going to do. I just never considered it. I had my doubts. I worried about being stuck in a role, becoming too well known for one thing. But I took this crazy leap of faith just because I liked these people who pitched it to me so much. It turned out to be the hippest decision I ever made.”

With 3^rd Rock from the Sun ending its run in 2001, John wasted no time getting back on the Broadway stage in Sweet Smell of Success (2002), Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (2005) and All My Sons (2008). Additionally, he played parts in the New York City Ballet and Houston Ballet in 2004 and 2007, respectively. On the big screen he was the voice of Lord Farquaad in the animated Shrek (2001) and starred in Kinsey (2004), Dreamgirls (2006) and Leap Year (2010); while on the small, after having appeared in a number of TV movies or miniseries in the 1980s, in 2009 he had a regular role that was about as far removed from Dick Solomon on 3^rd Rock as you could get: serial killer Arthur Mitchell — aka “Trinity Killer” — on the Showtime series Dexter. In that show’s fourth season, his seeming ability to have a “normal” family life despite his murder spree initially gives hope to Michael C. Hall’s Dexter Morgan, but it’s only a matter of time before both serial killers go up against each other.

While speaking to the Poughkeepsie Journal in November 2009, and revealing that his wife convinced him to take the part on Dexter, he explained his fascination with Arthur Mitchell: “This man is very two-faced, like Dexter. A serial killer by definition is a man who presents himself in a very different way to the world. So it’s an actor’s field day figuring out what you reveal and what you don’t. Every one of these [true serial killer] stories that suddenly spring up in the news, you read it and think, ‘My God, how could this possibly happen? How could a human being behave this way? — which in a way is really liberating. You can’t outdo the truth.”

In a separate interview with the Visalia Times-Delta, he enthused, “[Michael Hall] has created this amazing character — he’s pulled off that incredible trick: sympathy for the devil. You’re on Dexter’s side even though he’s a murderer. And the fact that he lies to everyone around him is such a fantastic device. There are so many secrets that the audience knows, but the other characters don’t. Everyone is withholding something or misunderstanding something. It’s this wonderful combination of gore and comedy and actual heart and emotion. You actually do care about these characters. I really can’t think of another show that pulls that off. Maybe The Sopranos.”

In the past 10 years since the end of his run on Dexter, John has continued to alternate between the stage (Mr. & Mrs. Fitch, The Columnist, King Lear, A Delicate Balance, the solo play John Lithgow: Stories by Heart, and Hilary and Clinton), film (Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Interstellar, The Homesman, Miss Sloane, Late Night and Bombshell), and television (the comedy Trial & Error and playing Winston Churchill on The Crown). As if this wasn’t enough, he’s written books and recorded albums for children, provided voice acting in a variety of projects (including Yoda in NPR’s adaptation of The Empire Strikes Back) and so much more.

Not that critical acclaim is anything new for him, but he was particularly lauded for his portrayal of Churchill. “It was very exciting and very intimidating all in the same degree,” he told Town and Country. “I never dreamed I would play Churchill. It was sort of unimaginable … but the most exciting things to do are the things that you are afraid of.”

There’s no question that today, over 50 years since he started acting, John can look back at his life and career with a sense of assurance, taking the doubts he can still feel and transforming them into a continuing series of mesmerizing performances.

“Doubt never goes away,” he told AARP. “When I think, ‘Boy, I just can’t do this role,’ that’s often when I do my best work. A rehearsal period is a process of flailing around. We’re in a business where you put your insecurities to work.” At the same time, he added, “It’s a good thing to grow old and know you’ve accumulated a lot of experience to get over your fears. I know who I am by now. I have many other things in my life that are jus as important to me as acting, if not more so. My family, my wife. I entertain children. I have a book of poetry. I danced for the NYC Ballet and sang with Met Opera stars at Carnegie Hall. I’ve had these extraordinary opportunities I tend to think that both grounds me and makes me levitate.”

Kristen Johnston (Sally Solomon)

Born September 20, 1967 in Washington, DC, Kristen was raised in Fox Point, Wisconsin and eventually achieved a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in drama at New York University. Her professional stage debut came as part of the Atlantic Theater Company in such shows as Stage Door and As You Like It. From there, she was part of the Naked Angels Theater company for The Stand-In and Hot Keys, then with New York Stage and Film for Kim’s Sister and, finally, The Lights at Lincoln Center Theater. Of living in New York at the time, she admitted to The Ithaca Journal, “I had a hard time here. It’s hard living in New York as an actor and doing off-off-Broadway plays for a maximum of $200 a week. Then you feel yourself turning a corner, and things will never be the same again.”

That turn came performing in The Lights, for which she was nominated for a Drama Desk Award and was the performance that caught the eye of a Carsey-Werner executive, which in turn, led to 3^rd Rock from the Sun. “I’m really thrilled to be on this show,” she said, “but it’s also a very intense experience, and there’s an adjustment period which I’m deep in the heart of. Onstage, I was never the ingénue. I was a character actress, a comedienne. I played the 60-year-old neighbor. I wore a fat-suit to play a smart-alecky high school girl. To actually be beautiful is a total first for me. I’d much rather people think I was funny than pretty. But this show reminds me that there are other aspects to me besides the fact that I’m a funny chick.”

The character of Sally, for which Kristen won two Emmy Awards playing, as much as she seems like a goofball on Earth, was apparently a war hero back home. Kristen told The San Bernadino County Sun in 1996, “We say Sally is a man in a woman’s body, but that’s not technically correct. Actually, she is a very masculine, asexual alien inside a woman’s body. And she’s not unhappy to be there. May I say, if you were suddenly put into a woman’s body, wouldn’t you be slightly interested in your breasts and why people look at certain parts of you, and why they move like they do?”

Following the end of 3^rd Rock in 2001, she made guest star appearances on some TV shows, was cast in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999), and Ice Age and Music and Lyrics (both 2007). She was a cast member of the sixth and final season of Sex and the City, playing Lexi Featherston; enjoyed a six-episode arc on ER and was a series regular on TV Land’s The Exes from 2011 to 2015. And let’s not forget she played Wilma Flintstone in the live action The Flintstones in Viva Las Vegas. Currently she’s a regular on the Anna Faris and Allison Janney series Mom as ex-con Tammy Diffendorf.

French Stewart (Harry Solomon)

French Stewart is Harry Solomon, brother to both Dick and Sally. The actor perfectly summed up the character in a 1998 interview with The Commercial Appeal, noting, “The way the character was originally described to me was he would be an idiot on any planet. So he’s got to be the biggest idiot in the universe.”

French was born Milton French-Stewart on February 20, 1964 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. A Student at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, he broke into television as DJ Razor Dee on The New WKRP in Cincinnati. On the big screen he was seen in such films as Stargate (1994), Leaving Las Vegas (1995), McHale’s Navy (1997) and Love Stinks. His biggest break, of course, came as result of 3^rd Rock from the Sun, where he provided physical comedy and Harry’s bizarre means of constantly squinting.

“I never thought of myself as an actor of amazing depth,” French told The San Bernardino County Sun. “I have a certain talent and now I’ve found a place for that, so I’m going to ride it into the ground.” As to his approach to playing Harry, he added, “Stumble into a room, say something stupid, hurt yourself, get the hell out. It’s amazing how much mileage you can get out of a character with only a brain stem.”

After 3^rd Rock, he made numerous guest appearances and is currently a recurring character on Mom as “Chef Rudy,” not only Anna Faris’ boss but Kristen Johnston’s love interest — which is kind of creepy if you spend too much time thinking about it.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Tommy Solomon)

The character of Tommy Solomon is the oldest of the Solomon clan chronologically, but he’s been placed in the youngest body when they arrive on Earth. He’s played by Joseph Leonard Gordon-Levitt, born February 17, 1981 in Los Angeles. At the age of four, Joseph joined a musical theater group and took to the stage as the Scarecrow in a production of The Wizard of Oz. His performance there led to his being signed by a casting agent and beginning to star in commercials on television.

In 1991, he starred as both David and Daniel Collins in the prime time version of the old daytime horror soap opera, Dark Shadows. From there he was cast in the film A River Runs Through It, then became a part of the Norman Lear-produced 1992 to 1993 sitcom The Powers That Be. In 1994 it was the film Angels in the Outfield and then, two years later, being cast in 3^rd Rock from the Sun.

Although he continued to act here and there following the end of the series, Joseph made a very conscious decision regarding his life, which he detailed to moviesonline: “The conscious decision was that I wanted to be in good movies. That’s what I always wanted to do, but the difference is that when I was young, I was kind of a selfish person. When I was a teenager, I mostly just cared about my own pleasure and, as I grew up, moved out of my parents’ house and moved to New York, went to college and quit acting for a while. I started to feel a connection to the world around me in a way that I hadn’t as a teenager. When I started acting again, I wanted the acting to engage with that connection whereas, when I was younger, I was really unnerved when anybody would recognize me for something I’d done. Now, I’m delighted if someone says to me, ‘Hey, Mysterious Skin, that movie meant a lot to me’ or Brick or even ‘3^rd Rock makes me laugh.’ I love that now whereas when I was younger I couldn’t handle it. So it’s changed. The reason I do it has changed, but I still also just do it because it’s fun and as far as different types of roles, I’m just trying to do stuff that I think is good.”

The credits kind of speak for themselves: Director Christoipher Nolan’s Inception and The Dark Knight Rises, co-starring with Bruce Willis in Looper, Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, Don Jon (which he also wrote and directed), playing Edward Snowden in Snowden and the forthcoming The Trial of the Chicago 7. He’s come. along way since playing that “creepy little kid” on Dark Shadows.

Jane Curtain (Mary Albright)

Playing Dick Solomon’s love interest — though utterly confused by the weirdness of he and the other Solomons throughout — is Jane, one of the original “Not Ready for Prime Time Players” on Saturday Night Live, which. she was a part of from 1975 to 1980. From 1984 to 1989 she co-starred with Susan Saint James on the sitcom Kate & Allie, about two single mothers who decide to share a house and raise their kids together. From there she starred in the series Working It Out (1990), Crumbs (2006), and Unforgettable (2012 to 2014), with a recurring role on The Librarians. In between, she made a large number of TV guest appearances and starred in numerous TV movies.