What is it they say about talent? Five percent inspiration; 99 percent perspiration? Looking at the career of Billy Crudup, a career which—though still in its relative infancy—is turning out to be one of the most exceptional of any actor in his generation, you could be forgiven for thinking that luck and good looks have something to do with it. But spend half an hour in conversation with the thirty-something actor, and you quickly realize that his prodigious talent is anchored by the sort of sensitivity and intelligence that can only lead to his kind of success: a success characterized by thoughtful career choices and an impressive canon of outstanding performances. He has managed to work with both established directors such as Woody Allen, Stephen Frears, Robert Towne and Cameron Crowe and several newer, exciting independents like Keith Gordon and Alison Maclean. Neither luck nor good looks gets you a track record like Billy Crudup’s—this is an actor prepared.

Crudup caught the acting bug very early in life—in grammar school—and was wise enough to stay on the court and play. Though he continued to act and take performance classes as an undergrad at the University of North Carolina, he hadn’t yet grasped the possibility of acting for a living. As a senior in college, Billy was encouraged by several faculty members to audition for graduate school. It was at that point that he let fate decide: Billy agreed to audition but determined that he would only pursue an acting career if he was accepted into the master’s program at NYU. “So, it kind of chose me at that point. And I happily followed.”

The good feedback continued after Crudup completed his Masters of Fine Arts at the Tisch School of the Arts. The following year he won several awards for his Broadway debut in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, including the 1995 Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Debut. He starred in the indie pic Grind in 1994, though it didn’t see the light of day for three years. It was 1996 when filmgoers got their first look at Crudup, when he picked up a part in Barry Levinson’s Sleepers, opposite Brad Pitt, Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman. Next came a small role in Woody Allen’s musical Everyone Says I Love You (1996) and a higher profile gig in Pat O’Connor’s Inventing The Abbotts.

Inching forward nicely, his career then crossed a major watermark when Billy landed his first star outing: Without Limits (1998), Robert Towne’s bio-pic of American runner Steve Prefontaine. His performance was seamless, and a string of lead roles followed in quick succession including Stephen Frears’
The Hi-Lo Country (1998), Alison Maclean’s Jesus’ Son (1999) and Keith Gordon’s Waking The Dead (2000), all of which confirmed him as a versatile, hard-working professional.

Ironically, it was with the release of Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous (2000)—in which Billy stepped into the shoes of rising rock star Russell Hammond—that the bizarre world of celebrity began to make itself present in his own life. A reality for which his previous training had provided no guidelines for, Billy comments that “They don’t prepare you for success because it’s an extraordinary thing.” Press the issue further and you don’t get the sense of a guy whining about his good fortune: he’s simply aware that navigating the wacky waters of fame is an art in itself.

The new year finds Crudup with two new pictures in release: Charlotte Gray, helmed by veteran director Gillian Armstrong (Little Women, Oscar and Lucinda) and the Sundance-bound World Traveler, directed by friend Bart Freundlich (The Myth of Fingerprints). The later chronicles the missteps of Cal, a lost soul who, after leaving his wife and child, wanders the country trying rediscovering where he belongs in the scheme of things. Playing opposite Julianne Moore, Billy worked closely with his writer/director to discover the character: “We talked all the time,” Billy offers. Charlotte Gray involved yet another type of preparation for the actor, and a chance to work with yet another gifted actress, Cate Blanchett.

Blanchett stars as Charlotte Gray, a young British woman, who, during the second World War, volunteers to parachute into enemy-held France and take on the identity of a ordinary French woman as spy for the allies. Enter Julien Levande—played by Crudup—a French Resistance fighter who is fated to become intimately involved with Charlotte, as he introduces her to the harsh realities of living and fighting under the Occupation.

Over the course of two conversations from New York City, Billy spoke with MM about learning the acting trade and the peculiarities of his newfound stardom. Refreshing in his clear-headedness and obvious intelligence, he made the job a pleasant one.

Phillip Williams (MM): How did you get into acting?

Opposite Cate Blanchett in Gillian Armstrong’s Charlotte Gray.

Billy Crudup (BC): It was just something I got good feedback for. In grammar school I played sports, I was in various clubs, Boy Scouts and all of that stuff. During the summer I was at this day camp, and we used to do little skits and plays and I always got great feedback and was encouraged to pursue it. In high school we didn’t have a drama department, but I was in one play and thoroughly enjoyed the process of playing a part. Creating a character and getting a certain amount of praise and attention, it certainly was not lost on me. When I was an undergraduate I just continued performing; I took as many performance classes as I could. I didn’t major in it because I didn’t know anyone who majored in it and it didn’t seem like something you could pursue as a career, but I enjoyed it very much and had considered teaching any kind of performance art.

MM: Was it when you were accepted into NYU that you thought about acting as a career?

BC: Well, the reason I applied for a masters program as opposed to the conservatory program was that I wanted to be able to teach. I still wasn’t under the impression that one could make a living being an actor. It was through the course of three years of brainwashing at NYU that I came to the realization that people did work as actors and you could approach it as a profession. That was a sentiment that was completely lost on me; my sense was that people’s careers come and go. Our TV channels are filled with programs about ‘where are they now’—to me, that didn’t seem like a very responsible way of embarking on a career.

MM: So what were you learning? What was the ‘brainwashing’?

BC: Among other things, that there is technique behind acting, that it’s not just inspiration. Though intuition and inspiration play an enormous role in it, there are techniques that you can work with, there are ways that you can develop your skills—your voice, your body. You can learn the right questions to ask in developing a character; you can learn how to be less self-conscious. They sort of give you a path, artistically, to developing your tool. Then you meet, time and again, working actors, people who have graduated from school who are slowly putting together careers for themselves. And that has a profound effect—the fact that people do it, the fact that 95 percent of the working actors aren’t stars, which is how I used to perceive actors. That you could make a living at it was extremely heartening to me because that’s essentially all I wanted to do—make a living getting opportunities to act.

MM: Did your schooling prepare you for the success you’ve encountered?

BC: They don’t fully prepare you for success because it’s an extraordinary thing. So, for me, it was complicated when I started working a lot. There are things that you deal with as an actor, when you are successful, that you simply can’t be prepared for. That is to say, doing interviews…(laughs). There’s not an interview class at school. It’s a very strange thing to see quotes around something you’ve said. Or, more often than not, something you didn’t say. It can have an insidious effect. I think also the sort of attention you get as an actor—as a successful actor, or as an actor who has worked in film and is recognizable—is strange.

MM: Because you are still you?

BC: Exactly. People around you reorganize the way that they think about you based on some perceived elevation in status, which is a strange thing to encounter. Also, career management is a very difficult challenge simply because I was never someone who felt like they had something to say with acting—I just enjoyed it. As soon as I got a number of opportunities at once, I had to make a decision, not just about which one was right for me as an actor at the time and which one I could make a living off of, but which one was cultivating or embracing a voice that I wanted to embrace.

MM: How do you go about making those decisions?

BC: It’s always a juggling act. My aspirations are always changing on a daily, if not hourly, basis and you always modulate them based on what’s happening currently in your field. If you don’t feel like there are enough unique voices in independent film, you might pursue that for a while. If you feel like theater is not getting the attention it deserves, you might pursue that. Then there are more specific social and political agendas you can have. You begin to think well, socially, how does this material provoke or encourage the kind of thinking that I want to encourage?

MM: Do you still find, when you need assistance, that it’s easy to turn to your director, or do you feel like you are expected to know?

BC: This is the part that I wasn’t prepared for at all. As soon as I’d experienced the slightest modicum of success, directors started referring to me, and I deeply didn’t want that. I think intuitively I took that challenge on and said, `Okay, that’s what I need to do. You have to have an opinion about this so, what’s your opinion?’ Initially there’s a sort of brazen attitude about it. Which is to say, well, if people are looking to me then I’m going to tell them what I think. Then slowly you get that just because people are encouraging you to give your point of view doesn’t mean you have to. Slowly I’ve been able to both refine what I think I’m capable of helping with and what I want to collaborate on. I’ve always felt that I am a secondary artist; in film the writer and the director are the primary artists, and to no small extent the cinematographer. I can only help the film insofar as I’m collaborating on the vision of the director.

It’s difficult when you’ve gained experience in some regard and there is a conflict between accepting that the director is the primary artist in film and recognizing your own point of view based on experience. It’s something you always have to negotiate.

MM: Do you find that when you don’t agree with a director, you will tend to defer to him or her as the main author?

BC: I wish I could say that was the case more often than not, but I think sometimes I’m a little self-righteous.

MM: Isn’t that good, to some degree?

BC: To some degree, but it can also be a protective instinct and that’s not always the best thing in a creative atmosphere because it becomes about ego and not about the material. There’s certain point in which you have to say, ‘You know, we truly disagree on the way we are approaching this. We’re not being helpful to each other.’ You make your decision based upon a continuum, and if it’s at the far end of the continuum, where it’s really important to you, then you part company with the director on that issue, but what you have to learn is not to part company with the director period.

MM: What attracted you to Gillian Armstrong’s latest project, Charlotte Gray?

L to R: Billy Crudup as Russel Hammond in Almost Famous; in Robert Towne’s Without Limits

BC: Well, I’d seen Oscar and Lucinda, with Cate Blanchett and Ralph Fiennes, and I thought it was very interesting—and I had wanted to work with Cate for some time. When I first read the script I just assumed that they were interested in me for the pilot, and it was a role I felt like I had played before. It didn’t seem like something that I wanted to pursue again. I took for granted that they could be interested in me for Julien—so that piqued my interest.

MM: What sort of questions do you ask when developing a role?

BC: You ask yourself where they’re from, what they want, what their relationships are like, what their decision-making process is in life and the tools they use to get what they want. Rather than using adjectives—he’s angry here, he’s sad here—you give the character motivation to pursue something, and as you build the character you give them tools for going about getting what they want.

Then there are intuitive parts of the process, the way that the person speaks, what they wear, what sort of personal belongings they have, things that may or may not be seen by the character. One of the troubling things about learning stuff as an actor is that you discover that you can spend your entire life [creating characters], and you know, I don’t even know who I am—and I’m with me all the time.

Needless to say, there are endless amounts of research you can do on any one character, and I suppose one of the ways that I start to pursue characters is also behavior—their manner, how they carry themselves physically, how they regard themselves in the world.

MM: Laurence Oliver said that, when he was creating his Othello, he found the character in the walk, and from there everything else fell into place.

BC: In Jesus’ Son, the walk was an integral part of building that character for me; part of it was intuitive and part of it was intellectual. It was important to me that he was a character who was stumbling through life—literally and figuratively—but that, more than anything, he was hopeful and optimistic. So, in some ways that governed a physical clumsiness; however, it was important to me that he always look forward, hopefully. So he was somewhat stooped, but his face was always open to the world.

MM: Michael Caine has said that if he’s not getting what he needs from another actor, he pretends he is. What can you do as an actor when you’re not getting what you need from someone else?

BC: It’s a question of degrees. If you are not getting what you want from another actor, I don’t think your first course should be to pretend that you are. The course should be to discuss: I feel like the scene should go this way; I don’t feel like this moment is happening. Then you can actually make what’s happening in front of you what you need. So that when they cut it together there won’t be a discrepancy between what one actor is doing and what another is doing.

MM: So you have to be in dialogue with one another?

BC: Exactly. If you are using your imagination all the time to create the performance of another actor so that you can go down the road that you think is best, then it’s going to leave one of you out in the dark—and it’s going to leave all of the audience in the dark.

If, on the other hand, it’s just not happening for another actor and you feel like it’s a major priority for your character, there are tools that you have at your disposal as an actor called endowment. You just endow a character with the things that you need to, the same way that you would endow an object with history. I’ll receive a prop from the prop department and I endow that with a history so that it has personal significance for me. You can do the same thing with a person. We project a lot onto people.

MM: You obviously did a lot of research for your role in Charlotte Gray. What did you take away with you from that experience?

BC: From the beginning, the greatest challenge was to imagine what it possibly could have been like—and I have to say that it’s a challenge I did not overcome. I really have no idea what that must have been like for people to go through—the occupation of their country by a hostile force and to be in the midst of the kind of horror and atrocities that these people were in the midst of.
I learned a lot about it, I spoke with people, but it was incredibly difficult for me to collect those ideas in any real fashion; I simply did the best I could to approximate it.

MM: At the same time, you have to go ahead and pretend.

BC: Yes, and make the best choices you can. In Almost Famous, for example, when we did our mock rock shows, despite the fact that I knew that the audience were extras who were being paid to be there and they knew that Stillwater was playing to playback at a certain tempo so that it all could be edited together, if I went to the front of that stage and made some guitar face at a person while I was playing a solo, they went apeshit. At that moment I got a sense of what it was like to be that powerful. In that way there is a true exchange of feelings between the actor and the person they are representing.

MM:In addition to Charlotte Gray, you’ve got another film coming out, World Traveler. Can you talk a bit about this film?

BC: Yes, it’s a film directed by Bart Freundlich. He wrote it and he’s a good friend of mine. It’s essentially the story of a young guy who finds himself completely lost in his life. He’s an architect, has a wife and child and one day, without any discussion, leaves. He finds himself driving west for no particular reason he can understand and it’s just the story of his growth and enlightenment by way of some pretty hard experiences. I like the movie a lot. I thought it was inventive in terms of the way it struggled to deal with my character Cal’s conscious and subconscious mind coming together—and I thought it was unique in the storytelling.

MM: How so?

BC: The trauma comes from his imagination more than anything that’s happening externally. There are very simple encounters with people that have this enormous drama behind them, based upon where he is in his life. I thought that was kind of unique. There was something very original about it for me.

MM:How would you distinguish your character in World Traveler from other roles that you’ve played?

BC: Cal is not capable at all of describing his circumstances. He’s never been introspective, he’s not a child of psychotherapy, he doesn’t even know that something is wrong with him. He just knows that his life is not right and he tries to escape from it, but he doesn’t talk about it to anybody. So, because of his lack of vocabulary it was a challenge to let people know what was going on with him.

MM: How did you get into this character?

BC: Bart is a very intelligent writer. He’s extremely capable of detailed analysis of the character’s psychology and he writes with that in mind, so our preparation really came down to the two of us studying the script in a detailed fashion. Everything he says and everything he doesn’t say was under deep scrutiny, more so than maybe anything I’ve ever worked on maybe besides Stoppard. It was fascinating to me in that way. There wasn’t the sort of physical preparation or change of some kind; it was more of an analysis of the work he had done with the script already.

MM: How did you and Bart first meet?

BC: We met through a mutual friend after I was out of school, but he went to NYU for his undergraduate work, too. Then he did a film called The Myth of Fingerprints; we spoke about working on that, but I already had a commitment and we just kept hanging out and became golf partners.

MM: I didn’t imagine you as a golfer.

BC: I’ve got lots of secrets. MM