You may know him as the teacher in Clueless, the dinosaur in Toy Story, and the baddie in The Princess Bride. But Wallace Shawn wants to open your eyes to sweatshops, starvation and torture. He talks to Liese Spencer in Manhattan

It’s an icy day in Manhattan, and Wallace Shawn sits in a booth at the back of his local diner wearing snowboots. On the seat beside him is a floppy sun hat “for skin cancer”. I stick out my hand. He looks at it, raises an eyebrow and returns to the menu. I’ve forgotten about an email exchange that established there would be no shaking of hands (“I have the flu ... don’t think me stand-offish if I don’t touch you”). He’s also just had hand surgery “so let’s blame anything bizarre I do on that”. In fact, despite politely refusing to meet in his apartment (“Many of my close friends have never been invited into it”), Shawn couldn’t be more courteous. He’s already eaten lunch, but orders a dessert to keep me company while we talk about his play The Fever, currently showing in London.

It may shock you to learn that the elfin-faced high-school teacher in Clueless, and the lisping voice of Rex the timid dinosaur in Toy Story, writes plays that are deemed pornographic, even dangerously political. A Thought in Three Parts (“There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for pleasure ... I’d stick a hot poker up my ass if I thought I would like it”) featured an orgy at a youth hostel – and led to a visit from the vice squad and questions in parliament when it was produced at the ICA in London in 1977. His 1990 monologue, The Fever, meanwhile, is a ferocious meditation on the inequities of global capitalism. Set in a hotel room in an unnamed foreign country, it describes a nightmarish moral awakening as a sick traveller gets a glimpse into a parallel reality of political torture, sweatshops, slums, starvation. The Princess Bride it is not.

No one was more surprised than Shawn at how it turned out. “If I had read the final draft when I’d started writing it, I would have been absolutely shocked and horrified,” he says in his piping, nasal voice. “Because it represented a complete change in the way I thought about the world.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Wallace Shawn in Woody Allen’s Manhattan

The precocious son of New Yorker editor William Shawn and his wife Cecille, Wally grew up on the Upper East Side listening to Mozart and reading Freud. An early drama, written at school, dealt with the death of Sophocles. Critics on his father’s magazine jousted with him about Strindberg and Beckett. After graduating from Harvard in 1965, he was all set to become a diplomat. Was it the travelling that appealed? Shawn laughs drily – whether at the idiocy of my question or his idealistic younger self, I am not sure. “No, I felt that I could, err, be useful to people.” As a public servant? “Yes, yes, maybe I could have been. Useful. Who knows? But I changed my mind.”

What changed it was the year he spent in India teaching English after leaving college. “At that time, India was seen the way Africa is today, as the most miserable place on earth, where there is the most suffering, the most poverty. I was a believer in ‘economic development’. I thought certain steps could be taken that would lead poor people out of poverty, and that people like myself could help with that. I went there to be miserable, but I was flabbergasted to find how happy I was.”

The idea of trying to turn India into the US suddenly seemed perverse. “I’d always assumed I’d be a writer or some kind of artistic pretender at least, but I didn’t think it was morally appropriate, then in India I sort of gave myself permission.” His moral mission was reversed, and he returned to the US believing he had important things to tell his fellow Americans.

By the end of the 1970s, he had written six plays to almost universal indifference or downright disdain. “When I was about 35, I was receiving pretty harsh discouragement as a playwright.” The time was coming when Shawn, hugely in debt, would have to think about how to make a living: “Whether I was willing to live a completely bohemian life of real hardship. You know, break the bourgeois addiction.” Just as Shawn was contemplating becoming a taxi driver, he was offered an acting job in a production of Machiavelli’s play The Mandrake that he had translated for the stage. It wasn’t a hard decision: “As a New Yorker born and bred, I have a driver’s licence, but I am not a good driver.”

And so began an accidental acting career that has run the gamut from Ibsen to Cats and Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore. It’s something about which Shawn clearly has mixed feelings. More than once in our conversation he talks about being a “D-list actor who does animal voices for a living”. Although people love his performances as Diane Keaton’s ex-husband in Manhattan (“Well, you said that he was a great ladies’ man and that he opened you up sexually,” Allen says to Keaton, “and then this little homunculus ...”) and as Vizzini the “inconceivable!” Sicilian baddie in The Princess Bride, Shawn would much rather be regarded as a writer, intellectual, radical.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest In The Princess Bride. Photograph: Rex

A chocolate sundae arrives, topped with spray cream. Shawn takes a couple of mouthfuls, then pushes it aside. Talking to him is a bit like having a tutorial with a genial philosophy professor. He pauses frequently to compose thoughtful answers to even the most anodyne questions, and although he doesn’t laugh or even smile that much, his snub-nosed face is kindly and clever, and he exudes a kind of droll amusement at the world. At one point he catches himself talking about “having had a lucky life” and laughs. “I’m speaking of it in the past. Maybe because I have the flu.”

If India was Shawn’s first political epiphany, his second came 20 or so years later when he and his girlfriend, the writer Deborah Eisenberg, visited Nicaragua and El Salvador and he began to consider the US’s relationship with Latin America. “If The Fever has any value, it is that it carries that naivete along with it,” he says. “That’s one of its very American characteristics. I’m not sure an English person would have written it because they would have thought: I’ve heard these ideas a million times before, I’m not going to put them in a play because everybody already knows this. Whereas I was really discovering these things one by one, as if for the first time, and thinking, ‘My God, can that be true?’, ‘Oh no, is that really possible? Oh my goodness, I can’t believe this is how it is.’”

But, I say, after returning from India, you spent two years in Oxford studying PPE at Magdalen College (and avoiding being drafted to Vietnam). Surely you were surrounded by such revolutionary ideas? “Most of the people I hung out with lived in a Brideshead Revisited fantasy world,” he says, “and I myself was very afraid of really every aspect of the 60s. At the time I was reading Henry James and trying to forget about what was happening. The wildest thing I did was to sip sherry. ”

Shawn first performed The Fever in apartments around New York because he wanted it to be received as an urgent political statement, not entertainment. “In a way, the play was a kind of declaration to my own friends, first of all, and then to my class,” he told the Paris Review. “I was telling my own group that I no longer believed in the various justifications for our existence that I’d formerly found convincing. It was like a secret meeting of the bourgeois class, in which I would speak frankly about what we were.”

This intimate, exclusive presentation of Shawn’s wide-eyed political awakening (the current revival is being staged in a luxury suite at the May Fair hotel to audiences of 25 people a night) was just one of the things that had reviewers spitting feathers when it opened. For every Michael Billington who cheered the play as “a naked assault on privilege”, there was another critic who found it “insufferably pompous”. Nicholas de Jongh, he reminds me, wrote: “I abominate this play.” Given his gilded life as a Manhattan intellectual, many found his armchair lecture smug and hypocritical.

“I made a very conscious decision in writing The Fever – and anybody is welcome to laugh but it was actually quite a painful thing to do – that I was going to try to put down what I believed,” he says. “And if I was going to be mocked or denounced, I would have to accept that. If my play has a thesis, it’s making the claim that the oppression of the poor is carried out in order to enable the rich to be rich and have a pleasant life. That’s a factual matter. I’m either right or I’m wrong. It doesn’t really have anything to do with what my behaviour is. The only person who might be able to denounce me with dignity is, I don’t know, the pope?”

He’s constantly surprised by the kind of life people think he leads. “They are always saying, ‘Don’t you have someone to carry those bags of groceries?’ I didn’t inherit any money. I live off of doing voices in cartoons.” While they pay the bills, the productions he has enjoyed the most, unsurprisingly, are those where he has been a “key player”. “The Master Builder. Vanya on 42nd Street. My Dinner with André, Clueless, of course. The Moderns by Alan Rudolph. Scenes from the Class Struggle.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest In Clueless. Photograph: Allstar

He and Deborah have been together since 1972, and live in an apartment in Chelsea. Famously with no TV. “I’ve never had one. Some residual belief in self-discipline and the need to earn a living has restrained me from lying in bed 24 hours a day watching TV or sitting at a computer trying to get into people’s chatrooms. I don’t do that. But I know I’d enjoy that. I have a pretty big curiosity about people.”

He says that if anybody offers him a senior rate at the movies “I want to strangle them”. But surely, I suggest, at your age – wait, how old is he now? “Well, it’s not a secret. I am actually 71. I don’t like to talk about it. But it is a fact.” Well at your age, I say, there must be things you want to get done, to prioritise? At which the tutor becomes less genial, ticking me off like a dim student. “Well, I don’t really ... I don’t know. I mean, death is quite different from a finish line. There’s nothing after the finish line. You can’t enjoy that you won the race, so it isn’t really ... life is not a game in that sense, ‘Oh now I have done the seven things that I would like.’ I mean, yes, you know, I am well aware my time is limited, but I am not sure what conclusion to draw from it.”

What’s been his biggest disappointment? “Being an actor is a strange thing that came up in my life, and I’ve had great good luck with it, and should just be gratified by that. But since you’re asking such a brutally frank question, let’s put it this way: I take myself much more seriously as a writer, but I understand why people might not like my writing. I mean I really understand why it’s not as popular as the writing of some other people. I understand that completely. I actually don’t understand why I haven’t been taken more seriously as an actor, in the sense of being given better parts. Although I sometimes have the feeling that everybody else understands it very well, they’re just too polite to tell me. It’s probably quite obvious. I mean it could be connected to the fact that I am often cast as someone who it would be very, very repulsive for the heroine to be obliged to touch. It’s always men who want me to play those roles,” he mutters. “I don’t do those parts any more. Once the pattern became clear to me, I started turning them down. So yes, I suppose I am disappointed to be on the D-list rather than the B-list.”

Perhaps he needs to move to France to find casting directors who are not obsessed with making a joke of his looks? “Maybe so!” he says merrily. “My accent is no worse than any other American’s. If there are any French directors reading this, I’m available.”

• The Fever is at the May Fair hotel, London W1, until 7 February. Details: almeida.co.uk

• This article was amended on 20 January 2015. An earlier version referred to Magdalene - rather than Magdalen - College, Oxford.

