The Beauty of Billy Crudup

American actor plays Ned Kynaston in Sir Richard Eyre's movie about famous 'actress'

Despite his delicate beauty, Billy Crudup has yet to become a household name. Ever since making his debut as a vengeful child abuse survivor in 1996's Sleepers, Crudup has had his share of high-profile roles that have hinted at imminent stardom but never thrust him into the A-list category. But while turns as runner Steve Prefontaine in Without Limits, a cowboy in Stephen Frears' Hi-Lo Country, and a budding politician in Keith Gordon's Waking the Dead garnered the 36-year-old actor a lot of critical heat, all three movies bombed at the box office.
He received a Best Male Lead Independent Spirit Award nomination for 1999's Jesus' Son, and the following year, the role of a larger-than-life rock icon in Almost Famous offered Crudup his most charismatic role to date, but the only real star to emerge from that movie was Kate Hudson.
He's had much more success on the stage, where he won an Outer Critics Circle award in 1995 for his Broadway debut in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia and, two years ago, received a Tony Best Actor nomination for his turn as the deformed John Merrick in a short-lived revival of The Elephant Man.
So now's the chance for the charismatic actor to combine his stage talents with his cinematic opportunities as 17th-century actor Edward "Ned" Kynaston in Sir Richard Eyre's adaptation of Jeffrey Hatcher's play Stage Beauty.
According to Samuel Pepys' diaries, the androgynous actor was the most beautiful woman to trod the English boards at a time when actual females were barred from acting. In Stage Beauty, Kynaston's illustrious career screams to a halt when Charles II (Rupert Everett) opens distaff roles to women and bans men from playing them. The edict promotes Kynaston's dresser, Maria (Claire Danes), into the ranks of stardom, while throwing him into a spiraling identity crisis.
Tandem talked to Billy Crudup when he was in Toronto.

Did you have any qualms about playing this cross-dressing character?
"I had qualms because it was an incredibly demanding role. It's slightly easier when the script asks of you to be a poor cross-dresser. It's something else when the script asks of you to be an exquisite cross-dresser and so I didn't have full confidence in myself that I would be able to pull that off. But that's only one of the demands of a very demanding role. Character goes through a sort of identity crisis, an emotional deconstruction, and that was an incredibly challenging thing for me. To be able to chart that journey through the script and execute it in a space of chaotic time that's all jumbled, is a lot to act."

The richness of the writing allowed you to jump in and find it all.
"You depend on that, you count on that with those kind of requests. If you don't have the support structure you can forget about being in a good movie, let alone to sustain that kind of rigorous pursuit."

The support structure you're talking about is the word but also Richard Eyre.
"Yes, I'm talking about Richard Eyre, the script, the other actors. A writer can give you something very dynamic to do, but if they don't base it in some kind of reality, that is to say within the confines of a three-dimensional character or someone that could exist in the world, it would be very hard for you to pull it off. Also, if they don't construct it in a clock that holds up, that is structurally sound, that people understand why it goes from A to B, and people care about the characters, then again you're going to be flailing. This was a script that had all that soundness, and had Richard Eyre on top of it, who I'm very familiar with and whose work I've seen two months previous in the theatre. One example, he was a producer in one of the first plays I did on Broadway."

What about research?
"One of the mandates I had for this film is having the proper amount of time for preparation. For me that meant five weeks which is a typical rehearsal process in the theatre and unheard of in a film. It's unheard of and the only time I had that long to rehearse on was in Almost Famous because Cameron [Crowe] wanted us to work as a band. But Richard was the exact same mind as I was and we were able to get to work right away and spend an appropriate amount of time with cast members, a dialect coach, a movement coach."

You were constructing a style of acting which is really quite foreign to you.
"Absolutely, and it's also one that's a bit of fantasy, a bit of fiction. We are counting on other people's perception of what it was at the time. As Richard was so great at pointing out, when Laurence Olivier first started working people recounted his incredible realism. When we look at Othello, it is baroque in style, there's no realism of what we think it is today. So to take their superficial analysis of what acting was like, is not so helpful. What we had to do is depend upon the structure of the story, and appreciate that Jeffrey had done his work. And for that to work, we had to make artifice the most important thing. I think there's fairly good reason to believe that that was the case and Richard's template was Kabuki. So we spent a great deal of time explaining the effect of Kabuki and the regiment of Kabuki and begin to apply our own version to the material."

By the end of the film you bring us up to the 20th century...
"We do the great 250-year leap in 30 seconds. I was so happy to be the guy who created realism and naturalism on film [laughs]. It is a conceit of the film. The part of it that I find rich is that I can certainly envision an artist like Ned who was so confined by the scriptures of his cultural identity that he wanted to find other forms of expression in his field. I feel the film attended that in a way that was comprehensible."

Does this movie connect you in with the great tradition of performing?
"Yes. But it is one of the reasons I was attracted to it too, because I loved actors, the theatre, the pursuit, the struggle, the issues of self-esteem, insecurity, creative collaboration, inspiration, and politics. It's a wonderfully ripe platform to explore humans in motion. I was proud to be able to display that environment because it is one that is so heartwarming."

Quite a cast. How was life on the set?
"Days were quite long for me, and I tended to pal around with myself. I spent a long time in make-up and a long time out of make-up. Eyre and I spent a lot of time together. I am sort of notorious for talk and try to play out new ideas or new discoveries or understand something in a more... It was not an enormous budget movie so we were quite constricted in our execution of it because our rehearsal process was so liberal."

Were there differences in opinion with Eyre on seeing the characters?
"There'll always be differences of opinion. The question is collaborating and negotiating because obviously he's going to cut my performance, he's going to choose what my performance is exactly. If we're not on the same page with him, he's going to have a very hard time and consequently my performance is going to have a hard time. It's in my interest to find the most ways to agree with each other, and his interest too, and we share that mutual respect. One of the great problems with acting is it's elusive. I can't always express myself in the perfect way. Some of the things you see are my 'C' version, it's not my best interpretation. Acting is in part the choices that you make and the execution and I can't always execute things the way I would like to be able to."

Would you recreate Kynaston on stage?
"Frankly, I'm happy to be out of the corset. It was as demanding a role as I've ever done and I don't know if I'd want to step back into those shoes and do it everyday. More than anything it was the extent to which the depravity that he felt about himself and it is a hard thing to sit in for very long, and I felt bad for him. It is hopeful at the end obviously; he's able to embark on a journey, but he spends most of the time in some kind of denial or confusion."

What's the best advice you got about acting?
"Olympia Dukakis said the reasons that we continue to be actors is not the same reasons we decide to be actors. The reason it is important to me is that I didn't want to feel that I was pursuing this craft for superficial reasons. I felt if that's why I'm doing it then I'm going to have to find something else, or it needs not to be so important to me. It was a relief to me that I could disregard those old motivations and pursue new motivations. The truth is it is really too hard a profession to pursue just for those reasons. For me, there are too many ups and downs, too much rejection, every step of the process. I want to have to do it because it's important and because I feel grateful to be able to express myself."

Do you think this film will bring you to a new level for choices?
"I don't really. I feel pretty fortunate about the things I've been able to do. Every play and movie that I've done has been something that I've wanted to do, and not a lot of people can say that. I feel I'm at a sort of pinnacle."
Stage Beauty is currently playing in local cinemas.

Publication Date: 2004-10-24
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=4536