Billy Crudup Is the Best Part of The Morning Show
Try to count on your fingers the number of times you’ve actually seen a sparkle in someone’s eyes before. There’s measurable joy, sure, but unbridled enthusiasm—the kind that reads from the top of someone’s face to the very bottom—is a much more rare occurrence.
It's only rare, though, if you've never met Billy Crudup before. The 51-year-old actor—longtime vet of stage and screen, known in part for his “chiseled good looks,” according to a tidy bio on IMDb—regularly flashes a harlequin-like smile and locks eyes, almost as if he’s trying to make you contract his giddiness, when discussing Cory Ellison, the eccentric network exec he plays on The Morning Show, Apple TV+’s prestige-y flagship series. “Once I saw Cory, I kind of blocked everybody else out,” Crudup says over coffee in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, recalling what drew him to the character. “I was like, ‘Who the fuck is that weirdo?’”
If you’ve ponied up the $4.99 for Apple TV+ already, you know Crudup’s Cory is the recently appointed head of news at UBA, the fictional network at the center of The Morning Show. In the first episode, he sees an opportunity to reinvent the titular a.m.-news program after a sexual misconduct scandal forces anchor Mitch Kessler (Steve Carrell) off the air. Workplace gamesmanship ensues, as Jennifer Aniston’s seasoned Alex Levy tries to hold onto her anchor chair in the wake of Mitch’s dismissal and Reese Witherspoon’s outspoken, relative-upstart Bradley Jackson adjusts to being plucked from obscurity to replace Mitch.
Inspired by Brian Stelter’s 2013 book Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV, Apple’s The Morning Show has been greeted with mixed reviews so far. But despite the show’s sprawl and curious handling of dynamics around #MeToo, Crudup’s gleeful performance remains eminently watchable. (When asked about the critical response, Crudup says from underneath his worn Yankees cap, “I would be wildly surprised if this didn’t find a substantial audience.”)
To say nothing of the rest of the ensemble, it’s worth tuning in for Crudup alone, an actor who practically licks his chops onscreen as he tears into monologues and pontificates about the state of network television and media at large. He seems to crack himself up with some of his more unhinged line readings. (“And Woke Twitter will ne-vah forgive us!”) And, in the show’s fifth episode (which just hit the streaming service), he coaxes Aniston’s character into an impromptu duet of Sweeney Todd’s “Not While I’m Around.” GQ talked with Crudup about recording that musical number, making a show that honestly wrestles with questions about #MeToo, and why he’s so fascinated with a character who’s so clearly fascinated with himself.
GQ: The main reason I wanted to talk to you about The Morning Show is: You seem to be having the time of your life on screen. Are you having as much fun as it looks like you are?
Billy Crudup: Oh, definitely not. Not in the same way. What is fun for me is the intricacy of the mind that Kerry [Ehrin, The Morning Show’s show runner] has written about in Cory. So, the exploratory work, and the mining that goes into trying to understand what makes a person think that that’s a reasonable way to be in the world—and even a delightful way to be in the world—is fascinating to me, because it feels quite foreign. But Cory thinks faster than I do, he speaks faster than I do, he has wildly ornate interpretations of other people’s behavior and what it means to him.
In order to chart all of that, it’s a ton of text work for me. I have to really dig through every word, every sentence, every stage direction, so that when I’m actually on set, it’s the expression of a shit-ton of work that I’m trying to make it seem as though there’s no work at all. So, I’m mostly filled with flop sweat and covered with powder so that nobody sees it.
I was surprised at just how much the #MeToo movement factors into the show. It feels like that’s what the series is actually about—more so than the news media. When you’re all working on something that grapples with such a major upheaval in culture and Hollywood, does that affect the atmosphere on set?
Oh, it definitely affects the set, but not specifically because of the content, but because of the ambition of it. [Kerry’s] going after something sophisticated, and you have a number of different stories that you’re trying to follow at the same time, which makes the shooting schedule really chaotic and complicated.
And Jen and Reese, at a time in their careers when they could just be taking easy role after easy role and raking it in, have decided not only to take on these really difficult characters in this piece, but to produce it as well, which is an expression of the extent of the ambition. It’s really, really, really hard what they’re trying to do, and I have incredible admiration for them, because at lunchtime when they’re looking at past episodes and upcoming episodes, I’m napping. And I'm like, ready to nap. By lunchtime, I am dead tired.
With respect to #MeToo, what we’re all trying to understand—in addition to giving voice and agency to people who have been oppressed—is, what do we do with a new power structure? Okay, good, that guy is gone. Stoked. Who’s gonna fill in, what experience do they have? What is it like for them to get experienced under these circumstances? What does it mean to adopt power at a time when people are restructuring power? What does it mean for the people who still want power but can’t have power at this time?
I think we’re just trying to understand what the story is trying to grapple with, which is happening in real time socially. So, there are constantly questions of, like, something may be right on the page, and then when we get in there, the writers will come in and say, “It doesn’t quite feel like it has the same impact that we’re looking for, let us try to find another…” It’s not as though we’re improvising, or things are changing all the time, but that is a feature of trying to shoot a moving target.
We haven’t seen any sexual misconduct from Cory, but he is a somewhat oily, manipulative guy. What’s it like playing someone like that on a show that’s, in part, about Bad Men?
Cory has to have no skeletons in his closet. I think it’s always been in the forefront of his mind to understand the sexual power dynamics and the workplace power dynamics, and how to separate them. And that the people who are the douches in that particular way, are the ones who try to exploit that. Not only do they have an understanding of it, but they try to exploit it. And I think he’s been ahead of that game by two decades.
Is Cory someone who just likes to win? Is he genuinely invested in making a good show? Or is he purely an agent of chaos?
I don’t think he’s an agent of chaos, because I don’t feel like he’s an anarchist at all. He loves the system, are you kidding me? The system is the thing that gets him nice suits. The crucial thing is: he understands the system as it is, and he’s not afraid of the system as it’s changing because there’s no evidence yet to support that he doesn’t know how to figure it out.
He has a line to Reese in the beginning, I think, where he says sort of glibly, “Smart kid, dad left, I vowed to take over the world someday and kick everybody’s ass into submission.” He says it in a glib way, but I think he genuinely believes most dudes are dicks. And I’m gonna get in there and shiv every one of ‘em, and show them that the little guy with pretty hair is not to be fucked with.
Fred [Cory’s boss on The Morning Show, played by Tom Irwin] sort of takes for granted that he’s part of the white patriarchy and he can do whatever he wants, people should listen to him. I don’t think Cory thinks that at all. And I think you see him change [toward] Jen because the central belief before is that she’s given up. She’s a person in a position of power, and she’s given up. And then, she enters the game by bringing Reese on and he’s like, “Thank fucking God! Now we want to play!” Because I won’t know if I’m the best at this unless I’m competing with the best.
Therefore, I don’t want the old boys’ club in here—they’re not the best of anything, most of them inherited this bullshit. I want the people who’ve had to work at it, who have had to be shrewd and manipulative and cunning and tough. And who’ve had to pivot, keep their wits about them in dire circumstances.
Your line readings are part of the reason Cory’s so fun to watch. I have to ask about the “Ne-vah!” in episode four. Where did that come from? Was that a direction?
No, that was just me. That was me enjoying Cory at that moment. [Laughs.] I’m laughing because I’m remembering when I did it, I was just like, “Oh God.”
Did you know instantly, “They’re using that one?”
No, I thought, “Oh, they’ll never use that one.” And the truth is, sometimes I do shit and people are like, “What?” And then, “No, no, no.” So that stuff you won’t see. Or, some of it you do see and they leave it in because it is so strange. But if you can get to a point as an interpretive artist—which is really what I am—one of the ways to be creative in a singular way is to not filter yourself. To let your unconscious be a part of your creative flow. So that “ne-vah,” that could’ve come from my dad, that could’ve come from John Sterling, who calls the games for the Yankees. Whatever it is, it’s somebody who is in love with that moment of themselves working through an idea in the company of people. I think that’s intoxicating to watch.
So, the Sweeney Todd singing scene. What was your reaction when you first heard about it?
“I don’t sing!” I was like, “You don’t want to hear me try to sing. That’ll just become the entire part of the thing is that, ‘Cory is terrible at singing.’”
Did it take a lot of convincing to get you to do it?
Oh, it didn’t take any convincing at all. No, the part that was hard was like, I wanna be able to do this the way that you have written it, which is super-weird and so much fun, but I don’t want my own abilities to be an impediment to that. It turns out if you really drill it and get some help, and you go in to record it, and they give it a little Auto-Tune stuff, that it… well, I actually haven’t seen it, so I don’t know how it turns out, but as long as it’s not off-pitch, it should be in concert with the story. I don’t know, what did you think about it?
I had seen a reference to it on Twitter, so I had a sense it was coming. And then when it actually started, I was really impressed. I was like, “This really sounds like the two of them singing.”
It was definitely the two of us, and we recorded it.
You both sounded good.
I appreciate that. It’s unbelievable—we were at Capitol Records, where there’s, like, pictures of Marvin Gaye and stuff, and then I get to wander in there with Jen and we recorded together.
Do you have a sense of where season two is headed and where Cory fits into that?
I don’t yet, no. Season one is disaster recovery, a hurricane has hit. So it’s just about getting the medical supplies, seeing how to get the grid working again, seeing who’s gonna be in control. It’s a disaster movie. So, the next season has got to be about, well, how did it work out? You guys have all now solidified your place in this new world order. How’s it going? And that can’t be without drama.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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Originally Appeared on GQ
