Ayla Ruby
It’s no surprise that Billy Crudup already has an Emmy for his work on The Morning Show. The talented actor recently earned another nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actor In A Drama Series for bringing manipulative TV executive Cory Ellison to life. We recently had the chance to sit down with Crudup and talk about his character and the world of fictional morning news.
Not only did he talk about his approach to playing the character and share about what a privilege it is, but he also was full of immense praise for the show’s writers. Season 3 reveals some of Cory’s backstory, and Crudup shared how he was initially skeptical about the huge family reveal but how it was such an exciting thing to bring to the screen ultimately. Read on or listen below for the full conversation.
Ayla Ruby: It’s lovely to meet you and wonderful to talk.
Billy Crudup: Very nice to meet you. Thank you for having me.
Ayla Ruby: Sure. So congratulations on the nomination. It’s your third one, and that’s amazing.
Billy Crudup: Thank you. I couldn’t agree more. I continue to be shocked by the way in which Cory and the show has been received, not because it’s not great and a great thing to be a part of, you just never know in this business whether or not the thing that you like other people will like.
Ayla Ruby: I mean, it’s so watchable and your performance is just amazing. So the nomination, can you talk a little bit about what the moment was like getting the news for you and anything you want to share about that?
Billy Crudup: I confess, I’ve been flying all over recently trying to juggle a couple of things, and I don’t even remember when it happened. So when were the nominations announced?
Ayla Ruby: I think it maybe a month ago, but I’ve also lost track, so I totally get it.
Billy Crudup: Well, I feel like there was a lot of enthusiasm in general in the household because Naomi was nominated as well, and so that was fun for both of us.
Ayla Ruby: Oh, that’s awesome. Okay, so let’s talk about Cory. He’s chaotic, right? But he’s so watchable, and again, you have such an awesome performance. He goes on this journey in season three and you think he’s going to be down and out by the end of the season, but maybe he isn’t. Can you talk about your approach to him this season and how you find that energy and just, I don’t know… I don’t know, charisma? Chaos?
Billy Crudup: Well, he’s a very resilient person to begin with, and the extent to which normal people might react to extraordinary circumstances, for whatever reason, his biochemical makeup or his life experience, it doesn’t affect him in quite the same way. He doesn’t demure from big moments. He gets exhilarated by them and focused. And I think that’s one of the reasons that people are attracted to him is because this show is about extraordinary circumstances to begin with, the headlines of geopolitical interaction, the biggest kinds of ideas that could be happening in the world, managed by personalities that are extraordinary, that are outside of the purview of normal existence. The TV news anchor, the morning news anchor, these people are lionized and deified.
And so most of us, even when I’m doing talk shows in the morning, I’m a little bit intimidated by the caliber of people that are interviewing me and the circumstance itself.
Cory finds that not just not worthy of comment, he finds it exhilarating and fun like being at a carnival. And I think part of that life experience is that he hasn’t had the opportunity to fail in a very grand way in his life, in a way that maybe set his idea of himself back. And consequently, the notion of everything being stripped from him isn’t really intimidating because that doesn’t equate to a situation that he wouldn’t be able to manage. So when you have that confidence about yourself and you are put in extraordinary circumstances routinely, and you rarely break a sweat, the audience I think has an opportunity to see the world that is so extraordinary in an up close and personal way. Somebody who is not awe-inspired by every twist and turn, somebody who’s intrigued, “But wait, that can happen in life too? Okay, let’s see where this goes.”
Because the show is a little bit like, wait a second, they’re going to space now too?
Ayla Ruby: And that’s how it started, right? This season.
Billy Crudup: Exactly. That’s how it started. And they’re in the middle of the car and Roe gets overturned. These monumental events that are happening to the people who are going to have to report them to the American people are happening in his life, in his car in real time, and he’s able to compartmentalize or I guess be so exhilarated by the experiences to not even blink. And that’s an unusual kind of person. So it’s a great joy to play, and I appreciate that people have fun with it.
Ayla Ruby: So there’s an episode, the season Strict Scrutiny, that has the car scene you just mentioned, I think, where Roe is overturned. And it’s also interesting on a million different levels. I feel like for your character, there’s the stuff with his mom, there’s stuff with Bradley. How did you approach playing that, and what was that like for you as an actor to get into that?
Billy Crudup: Well, first of all, back to the point that I was saying before, I get to inhabit all of these things, but I’m doing it with actors who work at a very high caliber. And so Cory’s trick of being present in the moment, which gives him bright eyes about everything, wouldn’t be manageable with actors who I wasn’t looking at starry-eyed. I don’t think it’s a mistake that there’s a correspondence between those two. He finds the situations as interesting as I find the actors who are playing them. So to get to work with Lindsay [Duncan] and Reese [Witherspoon] on that scene in particular, a different kind of intimacy for Cory that he’s well guarded against exposing, and would only do so under the most dire of circumstances, which he does with Bradley, puts him in an uncomfortably precarious position. He’s fine with a geopolitical upheaval, but a conversation with his mom is like a minefield.
So that’s a great counterpoint, and I was a little bit intimidated when the writers… And obviously all of this is a product of the writers. When you find yourself getting to play a character that people respond to, it’s always about the character. It’s really up to you not to screw up something the writers have already said is going to be interesting to people. So the way that they keep writing for Cory is going to be interesting to people because they’ve created something unique and they have been able to sustain it for a number of years.
So I objected frankly when I read this script at first and objected to Charlotte saying, “We’re going to learn more about Cory.” Because as far as I was concerned, part of the way that Kerry and I built it, Kerry Ehrin, a writer for the first two seasons, was his inscrutability is based upon a long backstory that the two of us collaborated on that did not include ever exposing anyone in his corporate world to his personal life. That’s part of his power, that level of inscrutability, and he knows how to wield it. He’s now in his fifties, he’s been doing this for a long time. He knows where the pitfalls are for… It’s all about power disbursement and how he can manage fluctuating power disbursement.
He’s great at it because people don’t fully understand his motivations. He has his own moral compass and doesn’t get too nervous when events brush the edges of his moral certainty. So this was one where I thought, “Please don’t write more about who he really is, because then his magic powers start to diminish a little bit.” That was in my frame of mind. But the writers obviously being smarter and more capable and more trusting of the audience’s interest started to explore what happens to this personality under these circumstances. And it is and continues to be a fascinating experience for me because I’ve never played a character for this long and I’ve never seen them undergo changes, which I had particularly… What’s the right word? Not included in my story of who that person is.
He was never the kind of person who would let people get too close to him in my mind. So for the writers to then come in and say, “We’re going to challenge that point of view, Billy, what if he does get in that kind of circumstance? What would happen?” It’s actually a thrilling thing for an actor to discover that there are dimensions to a character that you get to keep exploring. And so it’s a real gift to me to get to play him as he evolves.
Ayla Ruby: Well, that’s wonderful. And I think that makes a lot of sense too, as I’m thinking back to it and thinking back to all of the, just everything in that scene and just everything we learned. That’s wonderful. So I will go back to that episode too, and I think you’ve talked about it with other people before, but you sing and play the piano in that episode, I think.
Billy Crudup: I also play the CEO of a multinational corporation.
Ayla Ruby: But we care about the singing now.
Billy Crudup: Yeah, no, I mean, the point being, I don’t do any of it. Okay? I’ve never been a CEO. I’m not a singer. I can’t play piano. When I was growing up from 4th grade to 12th grade, I took piano lessons and I actually performed rather routinely and wasn’t particularly good, but I was a dedicated enough student. And once I got out of high school, I never touched a piano again. Much to my chagrin.
Ayla Ruby: I understand that.
Billy Crudup: And it’s heartbreaking. When I did a movie called Rudderless, I had to play a guy whose son was a singer-songwriter, and he passed away. And so as a way to try to conjure his son’s spirit and proximity, he plays and sings his songs. And so the director really wanted me to be able to do that. So I worked really hard to be able to at least fake it.
So I’ve discovered that when you, for film in particular, and I’ve had to sing on stage, but only as a character who’s not great at singing. And there’s a tremendous joy in that because frankly, I love singing and I keep waiting for my voice to improve, but it doesn’t, or my tone or my placement or any of it, the phrasing, there’s just no component of that that I do well. But when you’re recording it, if there’s 10 notes in the song, give me a shot and I’ll probably get one right every couple of takes. And so then you piece them all together and then I can sell it on the day. That’s my primary job is being able to sell all the fakery that’s going on, me being a CEO, me being able to play piano, me being able to sing, but it’s an uncomfortable and sweaty experience.
Ayla Ruby: Okay. That works. So you alluded to this earlier, you mentioned when you’re being interviewed and stuff. Has working on this show changed your perspective on the news industry or even media in general?
Billy Crudup: Well, if you’re an actor who has to live in proximity to press, or if you’ve been lucky enough to have jobs that people want to interview you for, you discover that the anchors, the reporters, the fact-checkers, the editors, they’re all people. They’re just people with jobs.
And I think you have a leg up as an actor to understand that even though they’re high-pressure situations all of them are occupying, there’s still people who are trying to manage their careers, manage their families, manage their own personal growth, manage their competitiveness with their colleagues, all of those things, which we can all relate to. They’re just doing it while there’s big, bright shiny lights on it.
So The Morning Show’s investigation of the people within the news explore something that I’ve already seen. That being said, in terms of corporate power structure, it’s still hard for me to imagine that it’s people making these decisions. Even though we have scene after scene, Cory has occupied that space, it’s still hard to imagine that there are people with the degree of confidence, maybe aptitude, to make decisions that could cost tens of thousands of people their jobs, could be worth billion dollars to stockholders in the company and could shape their legacy in perpetuity.
I have met some of those people now because many of them are fans of the show and they think it’s hilarious, not just the news people, but the corporate people as well, the titans of industry. And it’s fascinating to see them reduced to people in reflecting on the show. So with respect to learning about that world, I’ve learned about it more from the people who have been interested in the show and have told me about it because they immediately, whatever social power structure exists between you, because this person’s worth I don’t know how many millions of dollars, and I’m an actor, there’s a normal social hierarchy, which immediately becomes reversed when they’re like, “Oh, you’re on that show that I like.” Then all of a sudden you get to see a different side of them. So that part of it has been pretty interesting.
Ayla Ruby: Interesting. So I know we’re just about at time, but is there anything else you want people to know about The Morning Show or your work or anything else?
Billy Crudup: I’m just, I’m old enough now to understand the depth of my good fortune, and it’s a privilege to be on the show and to be able to talk about it.
Ayla Ruby: That’s wonderful. And thank you so much. This has been wonderful.
Billy Crudup: Thanks a lot.
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