Gamble pays off with best roles of actor’s career
Betting looks would fade, Crudup often took character parts early on to secure longevity
Billy Crudup’s father, Thomas Henry Crudup III, was a gambler, a hustler, an occasional loan shark and a bookie of questionable gift. Sometimes on the way to his son’s soccer practice, he would stop the car on an interstate shoulder and deal king crab out of the trunk. He sold striped umbrella hats, coffee additives, Farrah Fawcett posters, an inflatable ice chest.
“Which is not a flotation device,” the younger Crudup clarified in a recent interview.
Despite 2 ½ decades in entertainment, this Crudup, 54, has lived a somewhat more conventional life governed by rigorous professional ethics. The risks he takes are mostly artistic. To watch his early films — “Stage Beauty,” “Without Limits,” “Almost Famous” among them — is to see a performer making audacious choices, executed with deep feeling and meticulous control.
He’s an indifferent gambler. Then again, his whole career has been a kind of gamble, a long game. Though he has movie star looks, he bet that they wouldn’t last, and so the parts he took, often character parts, were meant to secure longevity by demonstrating his aptitude and range.
In one way, he lost that bet. As I broke it to him, his looks have held up very well. “I appreciate that,” he said. “A lot of niacin and B-root.” (“Those are the first two things that came into my head,” he said.)
But in another way, it paid off: In his 50s, he is enjoying the best roles of his life. Since 2019, he has played Cory Ellison, a brighteyed, coldblooded news executive in the Apple TV+ series “The Morning Show.” Now he has added Jack Billings, a fast-talking slickster who heads a lunar timeshare group in “Hello Tomorrow!,”
a new Apple TV+ show.
An evangelist, a huckster, a consummate salesman, Jack reminds Crudup of his father, who died in 2005. Traveling salesmen are akin to gamblers, Crudup argued, always playing the odds, always counting on the big win. “I get to be in some proximity to my dad, by playing a version of him,” Crudup said.
But while acting is a kind of selling, Crudup has always resisted selling himself. For years, he wore his own clothes to award shows. He mostly skipped the talk show circuit. He has tried to keep his personal life private.
This avoidance was partly in service of that gamble. He wagered that a public persona would make receding into roles more difficult. “I figured the more people knew about me, the harder it would be for me to convince them that I was somebody else,” he said. Avoiding publicity was, he said, “a protective mechanism.”
The work has been consistent, but in the 2010s it became less visible. In films like “Jackie,” “20th Century Woman” and “Spotlight,” he inhabited characters so fully that he didn’t seem to be acting at all. It was easy to admire his performances without thinking much about them. That changed with “Harry Clarke,” a 2017 off-Broadway play about a pansexual con artist. The play has a dozen roles. Crudup played all of them.
Leigh Silverman, who directed the play, was surprised at how much Crudup struggled during rehearsals. In his films, he had made it look so easy. “I was so captivated, really, by his suffering, and his continuing to show up every day,” Silverman said in an interview.
But during previews, Crudup began to suffer less, abandoning himself to the various roles, switching fluently between them.
To anyone watching him alone onstage, his reach and capacity were irrefutable, as was his charisma.
One of those watchers was co-star Jennifer Aniston, who immediately turned to her producing partner, Kristin Hahn, and told her that Crudup had to be in “The Morning Show.” Cory had been originally envisioned as a 30-year-old villain. But when Crudup flew out to Los Angeles to meet with Kerry Ehrin, the original showrunner, she was quickly convinced.
“Billy has an intensity to him, an energy to him, that felt really right for the character,” Ehrin said.
Cory is staunch in his determination to win the ratings game. But there’s a volatility to the man, an unpredictability. “The Morning Show,” like “Harry Clarke” before it, allows Crudup to live in the contradictions that have made him a thrilling performer: his boldness and precision, his childlike enthusiasm married to a coolness that borders on opacity.
Crudup enjoys these tensions.
His co-stars do, too.
“It’s electric,” Aniston said of acting opposite him. “Every time, I’m going, ‘Oh, I wonder what’s going to happen next?’ ”
This electricity impressed Amit Bhalla and Lucas Jansen, creators and showrunners of “Hello Tomorrow!” Set in a retrofuturist world in which hovercrafts are a given and travel to the moon commonplace, the show centers on a group of salesmen hawking lunar properties in a development called Brightside. They’re led by Crudup’s Jack, who attacks the project with missionary zeal. Other actors had shown interest in the role. They’d seen Jack as a smoothie, a charmer. Jansen recalled Crudup’s take: “He said, ‘Oh, this guy isn’t a salesman; he’s a priest.’ ”
The truth about those lunar properties remains elusive though much of the season. What’s important is that Jack believes in them, and his belief is so unswerving and sincere that it has a way of inspiring those around him.
“Jack’s a genuine believer that providing somebody with a little bit of hope during the day is a true commodity worth valuing,” Crudup said.
Here are some of the things that make Jack a good salesman: his energy, his flexibility and his superlative people skills. These are qualities Crudup’s father shared. They are also among the abilities that make Crudup a great actor. Like an actor, Jack is selling people on a story. He believes in the dream so that others can believe it, too.
“Good salesmanship is truly believing what you’re saying,” Crudup said. And Crudup has that belief. It’s why he can deliver a line like “Chaos, it’s the new cocaine” in “The Morning Show” with absolute conviction. It’s why his Jack can conjure intimacy even when surrounded by computer-generated automatons.
“Sometimes giving folks a new dream to dream can make all the difference,” Jack says. And in Crudup’s mouth it sounds just about plausible.