The actor, 61, on standing up to Trump, losing friends to Aids and falling apart at his wedding

Angels in America is a timely play to be putting on. My character Roy Cohn was a lawyer and mentor to Donald Trump. When Trump was being sued in the 70s for not renting homes to African Americans he asked Cohn what he should do. Roy said: “Fuck ’em. Sue them.” He taught Trump that whatever they say about you, deflect. Always be on the attack.

In America, the inmates are running the asylum, but it’s forcing people to get involved

What’s going on in our country is in many ways healthy. It’s horrific, the inmates are running the asylum, but it’s forcing people to get involved. I think we may get more change from this – more so, maybe, than if Hillary Clinton had been elected. The American people are fighting back, taking part in the process, the protests.

I became an adult very quickly. My father died when I was 11 – he drank himself to death. Then about a year later my mother’s mother died and that led to her having a breakdown that was eventually diagnosed as manic depression. I saw these two major figures at their most vulnerable and home was very tense and emotional. It made for an attraction to Eugene O’Neill!

I lost many friends [to Aids]. I lived through the period in the play. I moved to New York in the late 70s, then in 1981 there was the article in the NYT saying something had been found in a group of gay men, a “gay cancer” and that was the start. Some said: “That’s it, the party is over”; others were defiant: “This is some sort of conspiracy, they’re targeting gay men, fuck them, I’m going to live my life and have sex.” I was somewhere in between.

Matthew Broderick is a very sweet person and also subversive. I treasure my friendship with him. He has, I won’t say a dark side, but he is wildly funny. We have a similar sense of humour and yet we’re very different which is apparently what people have enjoyed about our working together. There’s an interesting dynamic.

I have played a lot of morally questionable people. I’m not sure why.

There’s no big man in the sky looking down on us. No heaven. I was an altar boy and then I turned against it. I thought Catholicism was based on fear. They weren’t following what Christ had talked about, they were using it, profiting from it. Then there’s the paedophilia. As some comedian said: “If it was any other business they would have been closed down years ago.”

I loved Obama and miss him terribly. His intelligence, his eloquence. I think his difficulty was with schmoozing. He didn’t like having to go out and get his hands dirty, but that is how politics works.

This has been the happiest time of my life. Getting married was incredibly meaningful. Neither Devlin [Elliott, the playwright] nor I wanted to have a big wedding. We went to City Hall and I thought, well this will be nice and we’ll go for lunch afterwards and that’s that. Then you hear those words that you have heard a thousand times before in movies and plays, and I just fell apart. I could barely get the words out.

The cliché is actors like to talk about themselves and you reach my age and you don’t want to that much, unless you’re talking to a therapist.

Angels in America opens on 11 April. NT Live screenings will take place around the UK and internationally, Part One on 20 July and Part Two on 27 July. See nationaltheatre.org.uk