Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Vocal exercises. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Oh no, it's a mess. Armchair Expert. I'm Dax Shepard and I'm joined by Monica Padman. Hi. Hi.
I was giggling because I tried to do it quietly. They're going to hear it. I'm going to leave that in. Oh, you're going to leave that in. Okay. Today's episode is someone I idolize as an actor. His name is Billy Crudup. He is a Tony and Emmy Award winning actor. He's very sparkly and magic-y. He really is. Yeah, he's very special. Almost famous watchman, big fish, sleepers.
Of course, The Morning Show. New season is currently out now on Apple Plus TV. And he is in a new movie in theaters November 4th. Now in theaters now and on Netflix on December 5th. Jay Kelly. And it's got the Clune Doctor in it. It sure does. And Adam Sandler. It's a big movie. It's a big old movie. No bomb back. Yes. Incredible. Please enjoy Billy Crudup.
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I got you guys a pumpkin spice latte if you want one. No, I don't know what that is. You did? How charming. Are they? I've never had one. This smell really puts me off. That's not a real taste. Distilled pumpkin? Pumpkin spice?
Well, no, there's pumpkin spice. That's real. All spice is real.
Okay.
These are real spices, you guys.
But how do you make pumpkin spice? That's a great question. Is it from the peel? Like you dry out the peel? That's a great question. The seeds?
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Chapter 2: What insights does Billy Crudup share about his family background?
Total agreement, but I just need a second with my star.
It also is funny because, you know, in the pictures, you're always sitting by the star, but you're sitting in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard.
Oh, correct.
And it's disgusting.
That is not for the faint of heart.
No.
But neither is this business. No, you're right.
The cesspool of this business. They did a number on Trump Star. Have you seen that? I have not. Oh, people have gone. Have you seen it? They've gone to town on it? Oh, it's got to be hundreds of people. There's no way one person could be responsible for the amount of damage. It looks like there's been acid involved and pickaxes. I mean, it is. It's a mess. I guess I'm not terribly surprised.
I think I just saw an article that the city was finally like, we're going to have to remove it. It's a big hole in the ground now. Oh, boy. Now. Well... We're doing voices. I just heard my voice there, which doesn't always happen. Do you have people who do impressions of you?
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Chapter 3: How does Billy Crudup describe his journey into acting?
I don't know the precise one, but there was quite a bit of yarn coming out of North Carolina. And so my dad would sell the cotton to the garment district in Manhattan. Now, grandpa... Was he charmed by that? Did he say, oh, my son has pluck? There was almost nothing my grandfather was charmed by. Okay. He was a fascinating guy. He was extremely cantankerous. We called him Pops.
My grandmother, Dee, who died the day I graduated high school, was an absolute angel. She was the greatest. Priscilla was her name.
Oh, where'd D come from?
Well, I'm not sure. It's a great question. It was D and Pops. But I don't know why. Both of my parents were only children, so they didn't have grandchildren before us. They were the names that they went with. But it's a good question. I'll ask my mom. But when my grandmother died, my grandfather was a widower. And I was going to school now, 45 minutes away from him. At UNC Chapel Hill.
Great school. I love Chapel Hill.
Great school, great campus.
Yes. Tar Heels.
Tar Heels. Yes. Jordan. Well done, Dax. Yes. Now we're getting somewhere. Unfortunately, two years or a year before I got there. So we did not have the Jordan era teams. And then after I left, we won the championship, I think, a year later or two years later. So you were kind of a rebuild period. We were a rebuild period.
You got Jordan there. He followed Jordan. Oh. Right? Jordan came before you. It was the opposite of what I wanted.
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Chapter 4: What themes emerge in Billy's reflections on success and identity?
Oh, wow. He was a tough guy. And then he went to World War II. And the bombers, he was the radio guy. And the thing blew up in his ear and made him deaf. And I'm not sure if his just general vibe was anger. He was tough on my dad. My dad was an only child. So he did not take kindly, back to your question before, about my dad working for a competitor. Would they get into it at like Christmas?
They got into it all the time. It was a lot of passive aggressive kind of stuff. When I was at school going to lunch with him, then I was in the middle because my dad, he wasn't terribly reliable financially. He's a fascinating guy. Totally charming.
Is he with us?
He's not with us. He died in 2005. The same age as my grandmother died at 63. They both smoked. And, you know, my dad liked palm oil. My dad's 62 vantage menthol 100s. Yeah, so his whole body went cancer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He didn't want to mention the lung cancer part of it because then that would mean he had some responsibility in it.
So he would always talk about the blood and the brain and the bone and all the other ones, but it was also lung cancer. He was really a lovely person. I liked being around him. Huge dreamer. There was no obstacle that couldn't be overcome. Framed things a little differently, but that also meant he was kind of divorced from reality.
It also, I think, stemmed from his father being punitive towards him growing up. My dad felt like he had hit the jackpot in order to be a success because my grandfather's way of loving was to toughen you up. Every lunch with me started with, all right, what are you screwing up now?
Oh, wow.
Luckily, the list was long. It didn't help, by the way, that my first semester I had a 1.7 GPA. I had to learn a few things about college. If you don't go to a class, you should probably drop it rather than taking the zero. You know, you do that a couple of times. Doesn't matter if you make A's in the other ones. The average works out. But my grandfather did that to my father growing up.
It planted the seed that my dad was never good enough. So my dad had the inclination to pay him back with major success. I think that was internally what was going on with my dad. But that never happens to people, right? You just don't hit the jackpot. You have to grind out of life, and occasionally a door opens, you get a ray of sunshine, then it closes.
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Chapter 5: What challenges did Billy face during rehearsals?
And then I'd come in for rehearsal, me and George and Noah rehearsed. And George is like, yeah, I hear you're going to try some new things out. And I was like, yeah. And, you know, we wouldn't quite get to them. And I was noticing that the script wasn't changing. And like two weeks before I was like, geez, I better figure out some fucking method shit. Yeah.
Chapter 6: How did Billy prepare for his role in the Morning Show?
So I did a quick and deep dive into whatever I could in their repertoire. And during the day's work, I said to Noah and George, I got no idea how this is going to go. So I've got a lot of backup plans, but just bear with me if you could. Is that easy or hard for you to say out loud? It's okay to say now because I know that I want to be helpful. That's my baseline. Yeah.
Chapter 7: What insights does Billy share about working with Tom Cruise?
It's not ego.
I don't want to be destructive to it. It doesn't mean I'm not passionate about, I'll have these discussions with the writers, great writers on Morning Show, Carrier in the first two seasons, then Charlotte Stout in the second two seasons and their whole team. And if something doesn't sound right to me, or I feel like it's going down a way that I don't understand, we have big creative discussions.
I don't have any problem having that kind of discussion if I don't understand the story. This one was more about accommodating my ability to tell it in a way.
Like what Noah probably wanted to say is like, I understand you work that way, but the character you're playing doesn't.
Chapter 8: What reflections does Billy have on his father's influence?
It doesn't work that way. Correct.
And I'm like, but no, I'm a 57-year-old actor. I've been doing it for so long. That's great that you do that. But this character that I wrote that you're going to come play, does it different? Precisely.
This kind of life imitates art a little bit.
It was. It was really great. And to be asked to do something that you don't know how to do, that's a big gift. But the reason why I'm saying all of this is because that's the pretext for George's character to go on a journey of discovery. So if I don't make that work... Him going away dramaturgically doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Failure to launch, we'd call it.
It's a failure to launch.
It was a really great experience. And I had known George and wanted to work with George. But moreover, the stories about George and Adam Sandler and their partnership is...
Does Adam play his agent or something? Plays his agent. Yeah, yeah. They didn't give us the movie. Normally I would have watched. Yeah, we tried. I could only watch the trailer. So I'm piecing together who Sandler is.
Sandler is his longtime agent and Laura Dern is his publicist. I mean, there is.
a murderer's row in that cast of great actors and Noah the way that he described it he was feeling somewhat disenchanted with movie making after he made a film called White Noise and it wasn't received in the way that he imagined it would be received or the story didn't land in the way that he had hoped that it would land and felt kind of cynical about it and this is sort of a beautiful not necessarily love letter but description of the carnival life that we lead it's gilded with the George Clooney charm and also a
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