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American actor and activist James Cromwell has said that he decided to go vegan on the second day of filming 1995’s Babe, a film about an orphaned pig learning to herd sheep.
An adaptation of Dick King-Smith’s novel The Sheep-Pig, the critically acclaimed movie turns 30 later this year. Babe cast Cromwell alongside over 970 real animals – as well as animatronic ones to keep animal actors safe – and many fans feel that it has a bold pro-animal rights message.
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Speaking to the Guardian this week, Cromwell said, “On the second day of filming, I broke for lunch before everybody else. All the animals I’d worked with that morning were on the table, cut up, fricasseed, roasted, and seared. That was when I decided to become a vegan.”
He explained that the film achieved its depiction of realistic animals by blending footage of real animals with prosthetics, puppets, and animatronics. Along with Cromwell, the film inspired many viewers to reexamine their own relationships with “food” animals like pigs.
“The only negative thing I ever heard about Babe was from a woman who said it ruined her relationship with her daughter,” Cromwell told the Guardian. “They used to enjoy Big Macs together, and now her daughter wouldn’t eat animals. I thought: ‘If that’s what you based your relationship on, it sucks anyway!’”
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James Cromwell, animal rights, and activism
In the years since Babe came out, he has become particularly well-known for his advocacy for pigs, working with animal rights organizations such as Mercy For Animals and PETA. In 2023, Cromwell helped PETA rehome a pig named Babe with Indraloka Animal Sanctuary in Pennsylvania. He previously told PETA that making the film changed his life, along with his diet.
While Babe prompted Cromwell to go vegan, the actor had been vegetarian since visiting a stockyard in the 1970s, where he has said he experienced the animals’ fear and anxiety firsthand. Cromwell has been involved in various grassroots social justice movements since the 1960s, including The Committee to Defend the Panthers and the anti-Vietnam War movement.
Speaking to the Big Issue in 2021, Cromwell said, “The only thing that gives me hope at all is Greta Thunberg, Black Lives Matter, movements all over the world of Indigenous people, people of colour, women, trans people fighting for justice. People give me hope. Politicians give me no hope at all.”
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