Billy Crudup on The Morning Show, moral cowardice, and Minneapolis as a police state

0:02This is a Global Player original podcast. We're going to do things a bit differently on this episode of the News Agency USA. There has been so much American news, so much Trump news wading into our daily show that today we're going to take stock with a bit of a Hollywood legend. It's the actor Billy Crudup. You will have seen him in the morning show as the hyper energetic, hyper magnetic, arch manipulator, severe depressive Corey Ellison. You may have caught him as the actor haunted by his best friend's success alongside George Clooney in the recently released Jay Kelly. Right now, you can catch him here on the London stage in a western.

0:40Literally, the play of the award-winning Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly movie High Noon. At the time that was released, it was intensely controversial as a powerful allegory of McCarthyism, the blacklisting of Hollywood. What is it trying to tell us now? The News Agents USA with Emily Maitlis and John Sopel. Billy, welcome. Lovely to have you here. I'm so happy to be here. Thank you for having me. We came, we saw, we very much enjoyed the play on Monday night. Thank you. But for those who don't know it and for maybe our lot of younger audience who won't maybe know the film at all. Sure. Just talk us through, tell us the story.

1:20Well, the American Western is a genre of cinema that has roots way back to the invention of cinema. And I think screenwriters were most captivated by it because of the disorder and chaos. There's just tons of room for drama in a chaotic environment. And so using the close proximity to this period of time, which was maybe so if they were making movies, 30s, 40s, silent movies into the 50s where they started. That was, you know, it was only 50 years before that there was a civil war or somewhere there thereabouts. And then the Wild West was in the 1880s, 1870s, 1880s. You got into Wyatt Earp and those kinds of legendary stories.

2:08they were all about people trying to describe how to live together in a civil way and the kind of despair, existential despair that people were in without having an ordered society. The way it manifests itself in a lot of men who carried guns was rage. They were all enraged. If you go back and look at these westerns, it's an expression of people who are so disturbed by the state of their society that they don't know how to organize their own feelings into action. They don't understand how to build political alliances that will support the most people at the same time. So they fight each other.

2:47And occasionally you have somebody come in who has their own particular moral belief. It's not tied to a religion. It's not tied to a political order. It's tied to a sense of right and wrong. There's a great philosopher, Immanuel Kant, talking about the something imperative, I think. Categorical imperative. There you go. You got to see it in real time. It essentially says, if you want to live in a civil society, behave in such a way that if everybody behaved that way, you would all get along. That is to say, if you think you should litter on the street, imagine that everybody littered on the street.

3:24And then imagine the alternative. What if everybody picked up a piece of trash? Would you live in a place that feels better than it did. So that idea, the categorical imperative, finding a moral ethical center without depending upon some sort of orthodoxy was all over the Wild West and made for some great drama. You've skipped ahead, Billy, and we've had the philosophy, which is incredible. Was I supposed to be talking about the play? Yeah, you were meant to be telling us the plot, which is basically the old sheriff, William, comes back to town. Now you guys know why I'm doing the play. so in 2024 when eric sent this to me this is exactly where my mind went the play the play that he had written and this is first play it was a retelling of the story high noon which i had maybe seen when i was 10 or something heard stories about but i wasn't really into westerns and it was essentially the marshal of this town and a lot of marshals at the time they were civil war vets and they were really good at tactical awareness and they were good with guns And so the wealthy and the privileged would hire marshals to look over their territory and enforce the laws that the wealthy and the politicians had already organized.

4:37So it's establishing the rule of law and then enforcing that law. So the enforcement of law was a big challenge in the Wild West, and that was a key to it. So you had to have people who were capable of enforcing a law in a disorganized and chaotic community. With guns. Primarily with guns. There were some people who were really good at negotiating. There were some people who were really good at galvanizing groups of people. All of those are different ways to enforce laws. the momentum of a certain number of people that doesn't matter how many guns the other group has if you've got a large mass of people we had this in the 1960s with the civil rights movement it was the volume of people over time that really changed the course of the american thought on on how to to proceed together so eric when he wrote this uh i was actually coming back from london well when he when he sent it to me originally i was doing harry clark which was this solo performance, non-political, though everything is political, I suppose.

5:45But it was a thriller, like a film noir that was told on stage just by one person playing a lot of different characters. So it was really a celebration of theater because ultimately at the end, you feel as though you've been transported on this journey with this dubious sort of character. And then the lights come up and it's just one guy standing there and you go, oh, theater, that's fun, storytelling, that's great. So I was doing that. He sent it to me and I said, I'm too preoccupied right now to read it. But as soon as I'm finished with this, I'll read it. And sure enough, I finished the play.

6:18I packed my bags. I got on a plane. The first thing I did was read this play. And my response was, I don't know if I'm the guy to do this, to play the martial. I've never been offered a part where there's just a kind of indefatigable moral clarity. I usually play, you know, weirdos, outsiders, complicated people. but I will do everything in my power to help you get this up and going. So let's do a workshop of it or, and it went away for a little bit. I think they were interested in some other actors and it didn't come through. And just this past year, Thea Sherrick, she gathered Denise Goff and a number of other, Tim Hadley, great theater artists to try to workshop and see if we could ferret out what Eric was really interested in trying to get this material on stage.

7:03There's a visceral quality to being in the theater where you can hear somebody else's voice, where you can agonize with them in real time. That makes for a very profound experience in the right hands. And I think he was looking for that kind of revival feeling to this story as opposed to something cinematic. And the story is essentially that. Oh, right. I haven't got to that yet. Hold on. OK, here it comes. One line. One line. Will Kane, the marshal of this territory, falls in love with Amy Fowler, who is a widower. And Will has never been married before. And Amy has become a Quaker. And the religious belief that she holds dear swears off violence of any kind.

7:49So Will decides to hang up his badge because this is the first time he's found love and companionship in somebody. and turn in his badge and marry Amy. And they're meant to run off or move on to a different town so that he can open up a shop. And as soon as he puts the ring on her finger, Messenger comes in saying there's news from the North that this man that you arrested and eventually put away, who was supposed to hang, was freed by some politicians, by some sort of pardon. And he was coming back. His brother and his brother's friend were waiting at the train station for him. And he's going to be here in an hour and a half.

8:36But he's got to decide whether or not he wants to use the agency that he has garnered by being such an effective marshal for this community, turning it into a place where people could survive together, different kinds of people could survive together, all organized around the rule of law. That was his big thing he's a real stickler for the rules and his wife says to him if you decide to go back and help the town and pick up guns i'm at it i'll leave and that puts him in a a pretty difficult interpersonal state which makes for some great drama and no one in the town is willing to get the whole plot out no because you've you've forgotten like the townsfolk well now i'll take my point of view on it.

9:24So unlike the movie, you might say it's about a hero. It's not. It's about cowardice and capitulation because this person who has been dedicated to his community for 15, 20 years, when he goes and asks them for help under the threat of this big bully coming back, they all find ways to prevaricate. They all find ways to justify not helping. And in 2024, I was seeing a lot of that in America, a shocking amount of moral cowardice and an interest in negotiating with a bully. Yeah. And a lack of clarity about the kind of support you might have if you decided to take a point of view in opposition to this movement.

10:16OK, so let me do that annoying sort of journalist thing at that point, which is, I guess, like going through my head was, is this about the cowardice of Congress in the age of Trump? Maybe even the cowardice of a Democratic Party in the age of Trump? Was it at one point I was thinking, is this moral ambiguity about, you know, NATO wanting to fight Russia, but not with its own sons and daughters? You know, let Ukraine do it, whatever. We're at one remove. And then I started thinking, well, what if William is like the Joe Biden in this? What if he's just the guy who keeps coming back when his time is over?

10:53And actually, there was no reason to come back. Right? I mean, you can exactly see why the play is of interest and is relevant because it's applicable all over the. And I was thinking about this recently, too, because there are presidents who have associated themselves with Will Cain at a certain point. Will Cain occupies a similar kind of... He was the Gary Cooper. That was Gary Cooper in the film. And there's a couple of iconographic American heroes in cinema. He would certainly be one of them. Atticus Finch might be another. You've got an Atticus. What's that? I've got a son. His middle name is Atticus.

11:34Me too. Oh, you're kidding. No. Well, from the story. Weird. His mom and I always found the movie and the play compelling for those kinds of reasons. And so that's how he got the middle name Atticus. There's an American quality to all of these characters, which is don't turn your back on the stranger. Don't turn your back on the outcast. try to make sure that the rules that we think are descendant from, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, as a foundational idea about how communities survive. No one human, because of their privilege, because of their... And, you know, it's awkward for me, frankly, being broadcast, talking about it, because why do I have any more privilege than somebody else to talk about these things?

12:28So we just got back from Minneapolis, where that is a community under intense pressure right now. And weirdly, there are very hopeful stories actually coming out from the ground. There is, you know, we've seen with our eyes and you've seen. Of the bravery and the defense of the community that we are seeing now from what's going on. I mean, I wonder how you feel when you're out of the country now, you're watching it. Do you feel like relieved to be out of there now? or do you feel like you should be? Both, you know, as an actor, as a performer, it's often very hard to feel useful in the world. You can feel useful in putting on a dog and pony show and getting up dance monkey, you know, that kind of thing because we're facile performers who can do dynamic things over a period of time.

13:19You build up certain tricks that are entertaining to people. So, and that is useful to distract people because we can all only tolerate so much in order to be effective. But I think there's an alternate way to feel useful is to be a part of a piece, hopefully, that says something effectively. I think when you think cinematically, well, Bertolt Brecht was writing to this. He was out of Germany, forced into hiding and writing plays like The Resistible Rise of Arturo Uwe that were about understanding the ascension to power of a fascist. And so there are ways of exploring these kinds of themes on stage and in cinema.

14:05And because the way that I was raised that I need to participate in the society that I live in and try to be civically responsible as best I can, attended to the values that I hold dear. when given an opportunity to participate in something that has the potential. You never have any idea about whether or not it's going to be effective, whether it's going to be a terrible idea. But at least the intention to be a part of something that you can feel useful, that your voice will carry more than the weight of entertainment, has always drawn me. So whenever I've had the chance, I did a film called Waking the Dead back in 1998, I think, or something like that, which was about a young politician struggling with his ideals.

14:47And I did it because I thought that's what happens to people. How do you establish how you go from being an adolescent understanding the world to being an adult participating in the world? And how can you claim and own your own authority, political authority, moral authority, ethical authority? And as an actor, being involved with material like Eric's Enterprise gives me a chance to not just be expressive, but to test the ideas that I have, to challenge the ideas that I have, that in a public forum, put out there an idea that you think might approximate the values that you hold and see what the group of people that come to see it think.

15:30Are they galvanized by it? Are they repulsed by it? And you're forced to confront your own system of values. And I think that's a great way of participating in society. So with respect to being in London. that words like virtue signaling or moral have now become so pejorative. Yeah, you know, I don't really give a crap about anybody who wants to diminish me for talking. That's not the person that I'm interested in talking to. The people who want to engage with me and have a thoughtful conversation, and by the way, there are plenty of them. We're not just talking about the people who are hysterical for MAGA or the people who are hysterical against MAGA.

16:06Talking about people that there are plenty in the middle. They're not being helped by our media. the conglomerates that have decided that clickbait is worth more than discourse. But there are people who want to discuss things. So I'm not going to enter into conversations who, you know, Hollywood elite. I've never lived in Hollywood. Suck it. You know, I'm an American. I've been all over this country. I've got great friends from wildly different upbringings. And my interest is in us figuring out a way to collectively get along well enough so that we can promote the growth of a society in general.

16:45And you cannot do that when groups of people are being systematically oppressed over and over again. So you talked about material. And I guess the point of the theater is that you work off a script, but it is, I mean, by definition, different every night. and to make the political kind of jump you've got an administration now who are actually pulling apart the repository of truth so things that we thought were the script whether it's the constitution whether it's the law whether it is the election result that was recognized are now being just sort of shredded and I wonder when you put it in sort of terms of the fact and the You deal with fiction.

17:32But now we're all having to deal with fiction. You know, the Fulton County officers have just been raided by the FBI because Trump didn't like the result from Georgia in 2020, like six years ago. Your hope in this period of time that there will continue to be slew of American patriots. That's another thing that I think the play is about in general patriotism. There was a line from Mark Twain where he said something to the effect of being patriotic means supporting your country all the time and your government when she's right. There's an interesting corollary to that right now. And I've talked to this about some of my friends who feel that the American flag has been repulsively taken away by the people who believe in it most and brandished as a weapon on January 6th as a different kind of America.

18:27And our instinct is we want to start carrying the American flag in a way again to talk about our democratic values, to talk about the ability for everybody to have the best opportunity to thrive at their greatest potential. Not that sort of America that are demanding people get out of the country and rewriting the truth. I mean, what do you do to that? What do you do when you've just quoted? High noon in London is what I do. And you could see me out there screaming every night. But the things that were self-evident. If I could do this in America, if we were able to, all of us, have our schedule work so that we could have done this in a theater in America, I'd be doing it there right now.

19:12The fact of the matter is it's a collaboration. We all wanted to be involved. And this is the theater that we have. And there's such a vital and incredible theater here, theater scene in London, that there's no way for me to turn that. Do you have the Jan Six scenes playing in your head? Do you think of Frank as being one of the newly pardoned from the insurrection? Well, in the play, he is a newly pardoned criminal. Right. He has been convicted by a jury of his peers and pardoned for reasons that are unclear. And the extent of the pardon power as exercised by Donald Trump is not something I'm completely familiar with.

19:50I haven't seen a lot of that in America before. And so what it represents in the play is the disease that races through the community at the shadow of a threat. They don't know exactly what it is, but they know that there is somebody who there is backing people who are willing to sow chaos. It's a frightening thing. It's the most important aspect, I think, to Trump pardoning the January 6th felons, people who were in prison. is that communities who were receiving them back, I don't think there was a collective belief that, oh, this is a good thing. I think a lot of it was intimidation. Do you draw a parallel between the ICE patrols on the streets now and the insurrectionists that were freed a year ago this month?

20:43Well, I wouldn't want to be reductive because I think it's a broader movement. I think the number of people, and we've seen this kind of, is thuggery a word? We've seen people use intimidation and violence in America, groups of people. They typically wear masks. And in the 50s and 60s, they were the Klan. Anonymity is a crucial part to the intimidation. So whatever justification they've used to wear masks right now, I know people are talking about being doxxed and somehow that I haven't heard of any reports where an ICE agent has been doxxed and murdered by a gang of liberal thugs. I do see a murder happening recently.

21:34There's a reason we have Bruce Springsteen in our play. Because he's just written the anthem. dreams bruce has been an advocate for a kind of american pluralism and empathy for the working class americans for four decades five decades sorry time and effort it means something and he has put in the time to me to earn the kind of american respect that he has from me and from our fellow collaborators and i don't think that it's any mistake that he released the song that he did last night yeah i want to talk also the play is really fun and exciting and denise and the incredible ensemble uh put together a hell of a theatrical show you get to see me do a little line dancing i shout sing some things we're gonna see that later okay we want to i want to learn the the line i just have to keep practicing that because i get so you know the truth is when you're working in the theater it happens in film but not quite in the same way but when you're working in the theater, you're generating the kind of feelings that the character is feeling eight times a week or when you're in rehearsal.

22:42It's difficult to immediately dispense with them. So I'm speaking in some place from the emotional tenor that Will has to carry with him while people turn tail every time he asks for help. And do you think that the chaos that, you know, you've described there, I mean, I now understand what Wild West means sort of metaphorically much better after your description. Do you think the chaos which you describe as so much part of the Trump plan now, do you think that stays in America? Do you think that is there now? He's been using these tactics for a long period of time. A number of real estate ventures in New York and businesses he's started that have folded, that he's obfuscated the truth, run from responsibility.

23:25They're innumerable. And so I don't think it's his tactic in politics. I think it's his tactic in life. And unfortunately, there was a powerful movement that arrived after Barack Obama was elected that felt like they were going to be disenfranchised to the point that they wouldn't recognize their own country. And I mean, the Tea Party, well, the Tea Party morphed into something different. And what I saw was a reluctance to accept that all people are created equal, that we should really choose the best of us, regardless of their skin color, of their gender, in order to promote the ideals of self-governance, of agency for all.

24:11And Donald Trump, he's been trying to divide people for as long as I can remember. I mean, he took out an ad when the Central Park Five work. I mean, what does it take to buy an ad to tell your fellow citizens that you think these people should be murdered or they should be executed? I think he I think he asked for the death penalty in the ad. I can't recall. But and I'd be happy to fact check me and be wrong about that. But it was something as provocative before there was even a trial or and they'd been exonerated since then. They were black. They were black. Exactly. Back to his race baiting.

24:45And and I have no idea if he's a racist or because I don't know him. but the tactics that he used are meant to be employed so as to divide people when you bring coalitions together saying listen we don't agree on everything but collectively we want the simple decency of a shared community to live in that's it when you can like rest on those sorts of things you can reliably we've had periods of time like of that in america where you can't actually get along. You can't have bipartisanship. But when you have somebody stoking the kind of division that an opportunist like him is stoking, very difficult to navigate.

25:26We'll be back with Billy talking about The Morning Show and more politics in just a moment.

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26:44The News Agents USA. I want to talk a little bit about The Morning Show. A lot of our viewers will know you from The Morning Show. I was an early adopter of The Morning Show. I think you did it in 2019. We probably got it about two months later. Okay, yeah. Just pre-COVID. This is a perfect example of another situation that seemed like an opportunity to feel useful. The show in its premise, our iteration, there was an original iteration that I never read, but it did not take on the Me Too movement, the Time's Up movement in the same way that this one did. But some of my films that I loved growing up, Network and Broadcast News, they were really entertaining, incredibly well done and executed.

27:28And they involved, again, discourse, civil discourse. And television felt at the heart of the American home at that point. No question about it. As in television news, as in being in the newsroom, being part of that. Big part of how we were learning about what works and what doesn't work. And social media as well that was being used and exploited to try to promote these ideas of equality. Because one of the first ideas in the morning show is that question of complicity, of whether when a newsroom knows who speaks up and who doesn't. Alex Jennifer Aniston kind of knows right she knows what her co-host is like and it's the question of whether it's on you then to to speak out let me tell you Corey is a lot more like Trump than he is like me insofar as he is a capitalist he's a stone cold capitalist his idea of self-worth self-promotion the best of society is we all have to work as hard as we can to ascend in the capitalistic ranks.

28:36That's the best expression. It turns out he's completely unlike Trump in so far as he wants to use the same platform and the same tools to take down people like Trump, people who have inherited wealth, people who have used bullying tactics to keep people down. His idea is, I'm going to be smarter than you. I'm going to be more tactical than you are. That's why he goes after Fred Micklin. Fred Micklin has inherited this company and he's done it by way of, you know, proxy votes of the board and different kinds of corporate machinations. And Corey's like, well, I'm going to use ratings as my tool.

29:15So as to gain power and displace the inherited patriarchy. That's his interest because he actually does believe in a pluralistic society. He learned it from his mom. He saw his mom being undermined time and again by people who were ascending around her when And she had the gifts that he thought would be most effectively employed in that job. And so he's a bit of a sneak insofar as he can wear the clothes of a corporate titan and he can talk the talk and walk the walk. And he doesn't mind getting into a stare down with somebody. But there's a bit of Iago in him. There's a bit of a he whispers in the right ears.