Jon Voight on what he tells his grandchildren, why he's optimistic about the future, and the finale of 'Ray Donovan'

Los Angeles — Award-winning actor Jon Voight remains charming, spirited, and bubbly.

Talking to us from New York via Zoom, Angelina Jolie's dad excitedly told us, “This is important for me because it’s been a long time since I’ve been on the interview set with you. It’s almost like coming back to family in a sense.”

Asked how he is, Jon replied, “I am good. I am here in New York filming the finale of ‘Ray Donovan,’ which is a television series that I have been on for several years.  And I’m in a screening room. I asked for this room because you see behind me, it’s ‘Forbidden Planet,’ this horror picture with Walter Pidgeon from years past.  But I thought it was an appropriate background.”

How did you do with the lockdown and pandemic?

I look at everything in a spiritual way. It’s our responsibility to help each other out, it’s what we are here for. We are here to learn lessons. This is what I feel, and then we are here to help our fellow humans at every opportunity. 

So I’ve been very concerned about the people who have lost so much livelihood unnecessarily during this time and the fear that has been spread across the world about this COVID thing.

It’s very, very, certainly this germ has been very damaging, and it’s killed many people. But most of the people who have been killed have had different kinds of weaknesses within their system and they’ve been older people. Those are the ones that we really needed to care for. 

Other people, especially young people, have almost no, they certainly weren’t in danger of passing, of dying from this. And yet, everybody is running around like a two-year-old child thrown off an airplane with their family because the child didn’t want to put on the mask, I mean, we’ve seen some insane things. 

But anyway, I’ve tried to help people the best I can within my own circle of things and I tried to fight against things that I thought were wrong too. That can be a help, sometimes you have to speak up. So, we’ve done the best we can. But we’ve hurt a lot of people, and this has been a manipulated attack really, I see across the world. It’s been amazing.

So what are you telling your grandchildren about how the world is changing and not necessarily for the better?

There’s lots to worry about with our grandchildren and I try to reach them with messages. I make little messages and little drawings. I didn’t give up art all together when I was six. I kept on a little bit with it, but I never really approached it from the same way from that moment that I said, 'Well, I am not going to pursue this.' 

But I do little drawings and little poems and they are poems that are trying to speak to them about, always full of love and a little bit of guidance in them.  And I am very concerned.

I try to talk to everyone in my family about that stuff. But it’s been a difficult time because people can’t find their footing, once this propaganda gets a hold of you and it’s been delivered on all the mainstream stuff. So it’s very hard to escape from it and it’s now, we see that it’s been in our schools and we have lost a generation to it, even in the lowest grades these kids are being poisoned. It’s a tough time.

So yes, we have to, all of us who care about our families, have to be very alert to what’s going on in our schools. We have to find out what’s being taught. We have to read the books. We have to do everything.  And if we find out somebody is out of line teaching or we find a set of things that are being taught that are out of line, we have to pick ourselves up and go to these school boards and go to wherever we have to go to, go to the schools and say this is out of line, we can’t do this to our children.”

Courtesy of Janet Susan R. Nepales/HFPA

In the crime drama TV series, “Ray Donovan,” which is on its last episode, you play Mickey Donovan, the father of Ray Donovan who is portrayed by Live Schreiber. How do you cope with that?

I’ve had a very good run with this show. It's been an unusual character for me to play. 

I think most of my successes have been unusual characters for me to play in some way.  And this has been — to have this kind of attention towards the end of my career, to be so popular in this show, has been a nice little kiss for me from the fans and stuff.  It’s a lot of fun. I love playing this character.

It’s been very, very hard work. We’ve all worked very hard over the seasons, and we’ve produced very good shows, and that means everybody works hard. 

But anyway, it’s coming to an end, and there is a little bit of sadness. We would have liked to have kept going. But they are giving us this two-episode finale which is like a movie. It’s two hours.  And I have to say I think the script is a very strong script. I hope we do it justice. I hope we as actors and the team do it justice, because the script is very daring, very ambitious and very poetic and beautiful. It’s going to be good.  So we will see.”

In the drama, “Roe v. Wade,” you portray Justice Warren Burger. So how good of a Supreme Court Justice would you be with his viewpoints of the constitution and stuff?

I have a very strong feeling about the Constitution. It’s a remarkable document, and the drama leading up to that, all the decisions, from the Declaration of Independence, when these very bold men, very brave men, stepped up with and said we want to pull away from Britain and go on our own because of offenses that we enumerate, and they did in the Declaration. 

And the reason why they had the boldness to do that is because they saw the tyranny of the governments across the world and they saw something else possible, at this one moment they said this is possible now. We can build a country around all these principles that we are reading about for the enlightenment. They had all these wonderful ideas about Government. They were searched and all sorts of things. These were smart fellows.  And they were all genius level guys, and they had this moment and they took it.

Now the Constitution is something remarkable.  And I have to say that God must have had a hand in all this. I think there’s a reason why in this country we say, ‘In God We Trust.’ I think that’s because we at key moments have turned to God and always recognized His hand in things and tried to live by that.  But anyway, ‘Roe v. Wade” is interesting for me to be playing Warren Burger, the Supreme Court Justice, and I think that what they are supposed to be doing is paying attention to the Constitution.  And there are movements today that would like to attack the Constitution, but so far, it’s kept us whole and we would be very wise to keep our eye on anyone who is trying to change it.

Courtesy of Janet Susan R. Nepales/HFPA

Are you hopeful for the future?

I’m an optimist. I do feel that there’s hope for the future because I see so many wonderful people who know what’s happening and are taking a responsibility to combat the distortions and the lies.  And I see people stepping up who haven’t been involved, and that’s been wonderful. 

There are so many good things going on in every local area of our country and across the world. There are many wonderful people, so I’m just hoping that they will prevail and I know that God is the big element here, that our prayers are going to be heard, are being heard, and that things are happening. I always say God has a plan, just watch.  We have to do everything that we are supposed to do, and God will take care of things, I believe that. — LA, GMA News