For fearlessly stepping up for animals at every turn and helping PETA achieve major victories for dogs and monkeys in laboratories, open people’s eyes to the myth of “humane meat,” and pressure Starbucks to end its vegan milk upcharge, Succession star James Cromwell is PETA’s 2022 Person of the Year. In honor of his incredible contributions to animal rights and because his empathy knows no bounds, PETA is naming its Los Angeles event space The James Cromwell Empathy Center.

Cromwell’s fire for animal rights was sparked decades ago by his role in Babe, which inspired him to go vegan. Now in his 80s, he’s bringing about change and racking up victories with the energy and enthusiasm of a teenager. Notches in his belt include persuading Air France to end its shipments of monkeys to laboratories by folding his 6-foot-7-inch frame into a shipping crate at Los Angeles International Airport and helping to shut down Texas A&M University’s deplorable canine muscular dystrophy laboratory. Cromwell was arrested and carted off to jail for protesting the lab’s tests, and this year, Texas A&M made the seismic announcement that it would be putting the remaining nine dogs, who had been transferred to another laboratory, up for adoption.

Most recently, Cromwell superglued his hand to the counter at a Starbucks café in New York to protest the company’s surcharge on vegan milks, and if his record is anything to go by, it’s only a matter of time until the chain buckles and agrees to price vegan and dairy milks equally.

“James Cromwell has compassion for all animals in every fiber of his being,” says PETA Senior Vice President Lisa Lange. “He’s PETA’s Person of the Year for being the secret weapon in our hard-fought campaigns on behalf of animals who are kept hidden away in cages, exploited, and killed.”

PETA is also releasing a rapid-fire Q&A video featuring Cromwell and Lange, in which the actor reveals a hidden cheeky side, sharing that his last meal would be magic mushrooms, that his cat makes him laugh harder than anyone, and that today’s generation of animal activists needs to be “implacable and confrontational”—qualities he’s demonstrated in spades when sticking up for animals.

The James Cromwell Empathy Center is located in Echo Park, just down the road from PETA’s Bob Barker Building, and hosts a variety of PETA events geared toward furthering respect, justice, and compassion for all sentient beings, regardless of species, race, religion, ability, or gender.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to abuse in any way”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.

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