Billy on the boil

Billy Crudup has juggled film and stage careers, and is now moving into television.

Billy Crudup in After the Wedding.

Billy Crudup might be playing a rock star (Almost Famous), a runner (Without Limits), a journalist (Jackie) or the commander of a spacecraft (Alien: Covenant). Whatever the task, whatever the role, whatever the world he’s inhabiting, every time, it’s abundantly clear, preparation matters.

His new film, After the Wedding, demonstrates this unequivocally. It’s set for the most part in a world of extreme material comfort, but it’s a story about certainties and uncertainties, secrets and deceptions. Appearances are deceptive: good intentions are not quite what they seem to be.

It is adapted from the Danish film released under the same name in 2005. Writer-director Bart Freundlich sticks closely to Susanne Bier’s original in many ways, but he has made one significant change: he has swapped the genders of the three main characters.

Julianne Moore and Michelle Williams play the leads; Crudup cast in support as a character with a crucial part in the lives of both women, has a significant role that’s also in some ways at an angle to the action.

Michelle Williams in a scene from After the Wedding

The swap does make a difference, Crudup says; “there’s no question about it”. But there’s another alteration he also sees. In Bier’s film, he says, “the internal drama was the most significant feature and I felt like Bart took a slightly different tack. I think he was exploring class in a way that it wasn’t featured as much in Susanne’s movie”.

Williams plays Isabel, an American woman who has spent years living overseas. She works for a non-profit organisation in India that takes care of children. Money is always tight, of course, and when a US donor expresses interest in supporting the enterprise, she’s ready to go to New York to plead their case.

She meets the potential donor, Theresa (Moore), a self-made entrepreneur who runs her own company. And Isabel is introduced to Theresa’s husband, Oscar (Crudup), who is, it turns out, someone she once knew very well.

As the discussions over the conditions of the donation take place, other complications start to emerge. There are twists and turns to the story that it’s best not to reveal.

Theresa has money and power, and she’s offering support and security for the orphanage. She engulfs Isabel in an atmosphere of lavish control from the very beginning; putting her up in the penthouse suite at a luxury hotel, inviting her to a family event and providing her with a dress to wear. And that’s just the start.

Where does Oscar fit into this scenario? Crudup has carefully worked out ideas on who the character is and where he came from. The past plays a role in the narrative, but some of its details are not spelled out, and competing versions of events can remain unclear and unresolved to the end.

For Crudup, establishing how to play Oscar had a particular starting point. “I was interested in creating a man who had incredible confidence and comfort in his own skin when we meet him.”

It’s a confidence that can seem like reticence. “Julie and Michelle’s characters are such ambitious, persistent, gregarious people: I wanted Oscar to coexist as a kind of rock that Julie’s character could always count on.”

Oscar is an artist. The first time we see him, he’s supervising the hanging of a new show, and the work seems to consist of large metallic spirals, suspended from the ceiling, dramatically lit.

He had to establish the kind of work Oscar did in order to play the character, Crudup says.

“I had discussions with Bart about abstraction”, and that led him to the idea of using metal and stone, and to sculpture inspired by natural world. As an actor he thought about what underpinned his character’s practice: but Oscar, he says, has no such ability to articulate these insights. “Were you to ask him, ‘why wrought iron in interconnected circles?’, he might say, ‘it just seemed like a beautiful thing’, or he might say, ‘I wanted the power of the rock to speak for itself’ rather than it being some kind of meditation about how it’s reflective of his own sense of self.”

Yet there’s a scene when Oscar and Isabel are in his studio, and she presses him about his artistic choices, linking them with life choices, and leading him finally to acknowledge a connection.

It was also important, Crudup says, to have clear ideas about the nature of the earlier relationship between Isabel and Oscar. “I think both Michelle and I did some work independently on that. and once we were finally together and shooting some of those scenes we began to collaborate, intuitively and extensively about how whatever it was that drew them together is still present in both of them.”

Oscar understands what Isabel is thinking, and how she might be critical of him, his wife and their life. There’s an example of this, a defensive outburst when he says to Isabel, anticipating her judgment: “You don’t have to be poor to have good intentions: there are people with money and principles, OK?”

This also reflects another aspect to Oscar’s art practice. Money — his wife’s money — has undoubtedly made it possible for him to pursue it. This is never explicitly discussed, but it hangs in the air.

As Crudup says, Oscar is a man of few words. And Freundlich makes use of this. A look, an exchange of glances, a close-up — they’re essential storytelling elements. The fewer words the better, Crudup says, and in fact he asked Freundlich to cut back his lines. “There are elements to this story that are melodramatic, and a great way to explore melodrama is with unspoken communication and incredible scoring and cinematography.”

At the heart of the film, he says, “is an incredibly dramatic notion. So from an aesthetic point of view if you lay off it a little bit and let the moment speak for itself, it has the best opportunity to have some authenticity.”

Finding the way to play Oscar involved paring back the dialogue. But for another recent project, Crudup had to embrace language in a very different way, in something he describes as one of his most rewarding experiences as an actor.

He has maintained a stage career alongside his film career. He was in the original Broadway production of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, not long after he graduated from the Tisch School of the Arts

He was John Merrick in the 2002 Broadway revival of Elephant Man. He played Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman opposite Jeff Goldblum, and alongside Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart when they brought productions of Waiting For Godot and Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land to Broadway. He’s been nominated four times for a Tony award, winning in 2007 for a featured role in Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia.

That unprecedented, rewarding experience was a solo work, an off-Broadway production called Harry Clarke that involved playing 19 characters with the minimum of adjustments. David Cale’s play is about a man who already leads a double life, with voices to match and illusions to peddle. And Crudup plays supporting characters, the people who pass through this character’s life, or lives.

It was a perfect combination of coincidences and overlaps. The Vineyard Theatre where it was initially staged was the theatre where he appeared in his first play in New York. Vineyard’s artistic director, Douglas Aibel, is also a casting director, and had worked on several of Freundlich’s films, including After the Wedding.

Yet when he got an email from Aibel about the production, his initial impulse was to say no. “I read it and my first thought was ‘Of course not. Why would I do a 45-page monologue that seems impossibly hard? I don’t want to do that’. It didn’t take long, I kind of woke up in the middle of the night thinking, ‘Wait a second. Who ever gets a chance to do something like that?’. That was such a welcome surprise and gift to me because it was probably the most difficult and rewarding experience I’ve had in the theatre.”

It was the combination of simplicity and complexity that appealed to him — it offers the potential to do so much with so little.

“It is one of the things that I love about theatre, and you can’t do it in other environments. You get a group of people in a room. And you all agree that it’s just storytelling, and we’re going to make it happen in real time, and you somehow transport them.

“This one was so raw, and that specific conceit was out in the open in such a way that people could celebrate it. It felt like we were actively thrilled that there weren’t any bells and whistles.

“And in fact, for the first 20 minutes of the monologue, I didn’t move, I just stood right there in the middle of the stage and there was subtle lighting shifts, but it was really just a chair, a glass of water and a story.”

The production had rave reviews. And for those interested in experiencing, in part, what it was like, Harry Clarke is available as an Audible audiobook, with a range of extras.

As well as returning to theatre, Crudup has recently been drawn to television. He’s been in the Netflix series, Gypsy, a psychological thriller starring Naomi Watts, and he’s about to be seen in The Morning Show (known in Australia as Morning Wars), opposite Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon.

For Crudup, this interest is directly related to the quality of the writing. Somehow, he says, writers who are “super ambitious about cinema all of a sudden have the opportunity to create not a two-hour narrative but a 20-hour narrative”.

“And once that happened, people started to insist on it. Writers began to revel in it. And when you get great writing, there is not an actor on the planet who will say no to it in whatever genre it is.”

Apple TV’s The Morning Show is set in the world of network television. “This one is fantastic writing, I get to play quite a wildly different character than Oscar, one that I was just thrilled to play. He’s a New York hustler who’s making his way in Los Angeles, he’s president of the network and he’s ruthless and dabbles in high-stakes poker games. So that’s the best roles of my entire career over the past couple of years. And that’s a real gift.”

After the Wedding is screening nationally.