Billy Crudup

Like a team player.

There were two moments that I'm thinking of now.

One was because J.J.

Abrams made that movie.

JJ is a brilliant man.

In the movie, I play somebody with duplicitous motivation.

There is one scene in particular where I reveal to Tom Cruise the extent of my duplicity.

And it comes in the form of a monologue while he's tied up and been beaten up.

I only do well with text if I have time with it.

I can memorize things, but not well.

I mean, anymore.

I think everybody who was an actor probably got into the business because they could internalize text.

That was the way their brain worked.

Otherwise, it's just too intimidating.

So as you get older, it starts to atrophy a little bit.

What was once a special skill is sort of gone.

In any case...

I had this monologue that I realized too, like the Jay Kelly thing was pretty important for the plot of the movie.

And JJ, when he sent it to me, he said, don't memorize it yet because we're working right now.

And as we're working on the script and they were shooting also while they were working and about two weeks out, I said, JJ, that monologue is about a page long and I want to kill it for you.