Billy Crudup: ‘Jennifer Aniston juggles enormous challenges trying to have some kind of normal life’
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Billy Crudup is sharing a glimpse into the head-spinning world of Jennifer Aniston, his co-star (and executive producer) on The Morning Show, the hit Apple TV+ series that has introduced the talented 55-year-old American to a whole new audience.
“It’s so extraordinary what happens around her,” Crudup tells me, when we meet near the Ambassadors theatre in London, where he is making his West End debut in the one-man play, Harry Clarke. “She’s juggling enormous challenges trying to manage some kind of ordinary life. Of course, she’s incredibly capable, but you can’t be around her and not observe how difficult things are for her.”
In The Morning Show, Aniston plays the anchor of the titular news programme. But it’s arguably Crudup (pronounced “Crewd-up”) who has made the bigger splash in it – winning an Emmy for his inscrutable, urbane performance as the wily CEO of a fictional TV network.
“I’ve been more recognised in the past three years than I have in my entire career,” he says, when I ask how the show’s success has affected his life in New York City, his home since 1991. “I was never recognised before.”
That might seem surprising for an actor who has shared a screen with some of film’s biggest names since making his debut opposite Brad Pitt in Sleepers (1996), and who has strayed into blockbuster territory as the sinister Doctor Manhattan in the 2009 superhero film Watchmen, and Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant (2017). But if Crudup has always had an under-the-radar quality, his own chameleonic talent may be partly to blame. Referring to Cameron Crowe’s 2000 film, in which he played the guitarist of a fictional 1970s band, he says, “If someone says to me: ‘Oh, that was you in Almost Famous, I’m sorry, I didn’t realise…’, I go: ‘No, I’m happy you didn’t know that.’ I love convincing people that I’m someone else.”
Richard Eyre, who directed Crudup as a Restoration actor in the 2003 film Stage Beauty, has another theory: to him, he’s a “wonderful actor, very nice man… only his diffidence – and his good sense – stops him from being a big star”.
While Crudup says it’s true that he’s “not chasing billboard fame”, he admits “there are parts I deeply wanted that I didn’t get”. He auditioned for the role of the Vietnam War vet (that eventually went to Josh Brolin) in the Coen brothers’ 2007 Oscar-winner No Country for Old Men. “Then I saw the movie and was like ‘Oh, I’d have been a terrible choice for it!’ But sometimes, if I’m feeling insecure, I might turn to my wife [British actress, Naomi Watts] and say, ‘I turned that one down’ – ‘Big mistake, Billy’ – ‘I know!’
“The truth is,” he adds, “I felt early on I should be a character actor, and while I felt the industry’s push towards being a leading man, I didn’t understand those roles – they’re typically written without complexity. My agenda was to take the hardest job someone could offer, to build up real acting muscle, and take my time.”
In Harry Clarke, by the British-American playwright David Cale, Crudup plays all 19 characters as he relays the tale of an American conman who finds empowerment but becomes sexually exploitative, after ditching his real identity and assuming a British one, complete with accent and suave assurance.
In recent months, the West End seems to have developed a thing for one-person shows, a daunting challenge for the performer that can be dazzling – as Succession’s Sarah Snook proves in her current solo version of The Picture of Dorian Gray – or, none too rarely, toe-curling. Crudup says that “when I was first offered this, what was at the forefront of my mind more than the terror” of the challenge “was that it can be an audience’s worst nightmare”. In fact, Harry Clarke sounds like a dream; Aniston was so struck by the play’s 2017 New York premiere that it left her convinced Crudup was her man for The Morning Show.
Before playing Harry in front of a London audience, Crudup is honing his English accent with a dialect coach. But, in Watts, he’s got some home-help too. “Naomi gives me notes,” he says, “but also a bit of leeway because I’m going ‘Honey, it’s very hard to do this show, can I just get a pat on the back?’ ”.
Crudup, who has an adult son from a former relationship with actress Mary-Louise Parker (whom he left in 2003 for his Stage Beauty co-star, Claire Danes) met Watts in 2017 while they were playing cheating spouses in Netflix’s psychological thriller Gypsy. “Believe me,” he chuckles, “we have a much better relationship than we did on screen.”
Born on Long Island, New York, Crudup had an early crash course in adaptability, as the middle of three brothers who were shuttled around after their parents’ divorce. “I went to nine different schools, and from Long Island to South Florida, to Texas, back to South Florida, then to North Carolina, before coming to New York,” he recalls. “I was always learning how to fit in”. As a result, he says, while Harry Clarke “feels current – in terms of how we create identities for ourselves; what is invented and what is irrefutable – it also feels weirdly personal.”
His father, Thomas Henry Crudup III, who died in 2005, was a chaotic-sounding salesman, trading in unlikely paraphernalia and papering over his fragility with an assertive front. “My dad was constantly trying to be the tough guy, when he wasn’t – that was his cover for a deep, inherited insecurity.”
When Crudup tells me that, as an actor, he has an interest in the “facile”, and what lies beneath it, I ask whether he’s on an unstated quest to reveal the humanity in bluffers and hucksters like his father. “I wouldn’t disagree,” he replies, before suggesting I look at another of his roles, in Apple TV+ series Hello Tomorrow! “where I’m playing this guy who sells time-shares on the Moon. Well, I’m literally doing an impression of my dad. I always saw him as being like Willy Loman [from Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman] carrying that American idea that you live in hope rather than the truth.”
Crudup credits his mother, Georgann, who worked in advertising and then as a political strategist, with nurturing his interest in acting – “The reason I’m an actor is she took me to the theatre” – but he also doffs his cap to British theatre stalwarts. “When I was in high school, I was the class clown, but I could memorise things and for one assignment, we had to learn ‘To be, or not to be’. I did the whole thing. My teacher was impressed and said ‘You should watch the RSC tapes on acting’ – Trevor Nunn was interviewing people like Helen Mirren and Anthony Hopkins. They were lions in my imagination. They created my romantic idea of what an actor was.”
In 2013, when he appeared alongside Ian McKellen in US productions of Waiting for Godot and No Man’s Land – two of his many stage credits stretching back to Stoppard’s Arcadia on Broadway, in 1995 – he recalls seeing the Englishman diligently doing “text analysis” after rehearsals. Harry Clarke’s director Leigh Silverman affirms that Crudup, too, “works and works”.
Does all that make his imminent West End performance a spiritual homecoming, of a sort? He grins his assent at that. Mind you, it’s a commercial endeavour too. I tell him the eye-watering £195 cost of the top-price tickets. For the first time, he’s a little lost for words, before recovering the requisite self-deprecating charm. “That’s a lot to ask, but look, I promise I will try and give at least a $60 performance, and some nights it might even be a $200 performance,” he jokes. “I’m really going to do the best I can.”
Harry Clarke is at the Ambassadors theatre, London WC2 (harryclarketheplay.com), until May 11
