BILLY CRUDUP: CHARLOTTE GRAY INTERVIEW 

By Prairie Miller  
 

    Billy Crudup's role as a Resistance fighter in WW II 
France may not be a big stretch for him. The very 
independent minded star has a solid reputation for 
displaying a bit of resistance himself when it comes to 
getting excited about parts in major blockbusters. Crudup 
is famous for turning down the lead in Titanic, which then 
went to Leonardo DiCaprio, and opting instead for grittier 
indie projects. He's also that Almost Famous kind of guy 
who was turned on by the chance to play a rock star with 
attitude in Cameron Crowe's big screen musical memoir, a 
role that originally was filled by Brad Pitt. 
    Crudup's turn as the hardheaded militant in Gillian 
Armstrong's Charlotte Gray also got his creative juices 
flowing, as he described in this interview. The thinking 
woman's hunk, who has tangled with tough leading babes like 
Kate Hudson in Almost Famous and Penelope Cruz in The 
Hi-Lo Country, talked about all that's fair and not so fair 
in love and war with romantic co-star and British spy for 
France, Cate Blanchett. Then there was the additional 
seductive element of the alluring French countryside where 
Charlotte Gray was filmed.  

*Does your role in Charlotte Gray mean you're letting your 
fans know you have something more serious in mind for your 
creative future? 
 

BILLY CRUDUP: To some extent. Certainly that's true if 
people come to this film expecting to see the sort of tone 
of my characters in Almost Famous or Jesus' Son. This 
character Julien is very different. He is by and large a 
very serious minded person, and lives in a very serious 
time. Julien does not have a tremendous sense of humor 
about himself, or about the circumstances that are 
surrounding him. So no, they won't get the same sort of 
thing. But for me it's not much of a departure of many of 
the things I've done before, no. 

*Well you are still a rogue kind of character, even though 
it's a bit of a different sort of rogue. 
 

BC: Yeah, to some extent. Maybe not between those other 
roles, exactly. But I'm sure I could draw a distinction 
between every character I've played, insofar as I 
implicitly bring things to a role. Just because it's hard 
to contain.  
     You know, as much as I may want to transform myself 
completely into another person each time I act, there are 
obviously things I bring to it that I simply can't 
disregard. So there is a continuity. On the other hand, I 
do like to think of each of my characters as unique.  
     And certainly there's no plan in my career to play 
rogue, isolated figures against the man. I just look for 
parts that I think are three dimensional in material, and 
that I think have some potential value. And also working 
with people that I admire.  

*What was it like having Cate as your leading lady? 
 

BC: I actually became extremely self-conscious, because you 
know how good her work is, and you begin to wonder why 
yours isn't as good! But more often than not, I think what 
you find is that it forces you to elevate your own skills.  
     And that was one of the primary reasons I wanted to be 
in Charlotte Gray. Because Cate is an actress that I admire 
a great deal, and I felt like it was an opportunity for me 
to learn from what she does. 

*What do you see as your relationship to Hollywood? 
 

BC: I've always been completely ambivalent to fame. And I 
still dislike being asked whether I feel I'm a star, or if 
I want to be a star. That has never been a concern for me. 
I just want to be an actor.   

*How have you managed to stay successful at sustaining that 
image of yourself as a serious actor? 
 

BC: I just try to stay anonymous. You know, in the sense 
that the more audiences know about me, the harder I have to 
work to make my characters believable. 

*You go through some pretty gut wrenching ordeals as an 
underground French partisan in Charlotte Gray. How rough 
was that portrayal for you? 
 

BC: You know for me, I kind of felt like my duties on this 
were really small. The last couple of things I had done 
required everyday presence. And that's the kind of work, 
regardless of what the story is, that becomes really 
tedious.  
     Because the hours are long, and your mind is always 
working. There's no real down time. So this was like a walk 
in the park in a lot of ways. Like I didn't have to work 
every day. I had several days a week off. And we were in 
absolutely the most glorious part of France that I've ever 
seen. There were these beautiful old medieval villages. And 
we don't have that kind of history and that architecture 
here in the States. So to come upon a town that's built 
into the side of a rock face and was built there in the 
twelfth century, is stunning.  
     And I really felt the profound affect of living in a 
different country, and working there. And having the 
history of these towns all around you. So it was not all 
the work maybe that I should say it was. It was a pretty 
great experience. 

*How did you get that French accent going for the movie? 
 

BC: Well, it's kind of a made up accent! The thing about 
the film, is that we are speaking French to each other, but 
the audience hears English, you know? So it's like the way 
the accents were in The Sound Of Music. The characters are 
not speaking Austrian there, but obviously they're not 
speaking English either. 
     So that's a popular conceit in films. And we wanted to 
have some kind of accents. A French person has an accent, 
not when he's speaking French, but when he's speaking 
English.  
     And what we decided to do so that the actors wouldn't 
sound American, British, or Australian - because we were 
all from different places - we created a dialect. And that 
dialect located us in a part of the world, but is not a 
dialect that you would hear anywhere. 

*How do you go about making up a dialect for a movie? 
 

BC: It's made up in a lot of ways. There's a lot of French 
sounds you'll hear in the movie. But there's a lot of 
French sounds that we left out. I've worked on lots of 
dialects for my career. But this one was difficult, because 
we had no reference point. We had no tapes to listen to. So 
you had to be your own best barometer about what was going 
too far. And we had a terrific, intelligent and precise 
dialogue coach. So that was monumentally helpful.  

*How about that French wine? 
 

BC: They have some nice wine there in France, yes! 

*Your character in Charlotte Gray is so much the opposite 
of the one you played in Waking The Dead. What is it like 
going from playing a political opportunist critical of 
Jennifer Connelly's idealist in Waking The Dead, to your 
risk taking French Resistance fighter in Charlotte Gray? 
 

BC: Well, Fielding was a politician in Waking The Dead. He 
thought politically, he thought about compromise. He 
thought about how to get the best he could in any specific 
context. And the opposite of that is a sort of radicalism. 
That is to say, you want what is on your agenda at all 
costs. And that's pretty much Julian's set of ideals. 
     Julien uses very political tools, I think, to get 
that, in terms of the way he treats the other people in the 
town. Obviously there's a priority on keeping a low 
profile. But at the same time, you see him in situations 
where his emotions get the best of him.  
     Not the least of which is when the Nazis pass through 
town. It's not a good move for somebody who leads the local 
resistance, to put themselves in harm's way like that. But 
I like playing both sides of it. I realize the necessity in 
the world, for both voices. Radical voices, and tempered 
voices. And it was interesting to me, this character in 
particular, because I think in America, our sense of the 
rebel resistance fighter is skewed by the propaganda 
movies, really.  

*Where do you see Charlotte Gray fitting in with the other 
war movies coming out now, like Behind Enemy Lines and 
Black Hawk Down? 
 

BC: Well, I think in the end that this is a romance. I 
think the backdrop is really the war. But I think the war 
is there in so far as to discuss how people come together 
in really extraordinary times. And why that becomes the 
foundation for people to fight. 
     My character makes an extremely tactical decision in 
the end. But he makes a decision that's based more on his 
emotion, more for preserving his relationship with her, 
than for something that might necessarily be more effective 
in the moment. 
     So in the end, I feel like he's somebody who has been 
converted to the idea of love beyond anything else. As has 
she. Charlotte comes to France, and she joins up in the war 
with no political agenda at all. She wants to find her 
boyfriend. And she uses her talent speaking French as a way 
of going to France.  
     Then Charlotte learns the difference between the love 
that she had for that boyfriend, and the love that she 
created with someone new, for my character. It's a 
difference between infatuation and genuine love. But I 
think this movie is really different than other war movies. 
This is not heavy handed with it, which is really nice. And 
I think what you want in a love story as an audience, is to 
want to see two people together. Because they share things, 
because they're different around each other, all the things 
that we want from love.  We want to have our best sides 
available, and appreciated by somebody. And our worse sides 
accepted by them.  

*Julian's a pretty impulsive guy too. He's ready to shoot 
Cate at one point. What gives? 
 

BC: Yeah. More than anything, I think that's about 
rejection. I think even more than the possibility of 
betrayal in that scene, his emotional reaction to that is 
disproportionate in many ways. He is by and large a 
cool customer about the work that he does. And so if he 
genuinely thought that she betrayed him, with no romantic 
undertones at all, he would simply go up and shoot her. 
     But what he wants her to say, is I'm sorry for 
betraying you. I'm sorry for rejecting you. Because he has 
all these feelings of love for her, he has all these 
feelings of kinship with her. You see the expression there 
is of that rejection and how violent that is, and how 
much he needed her love. So it's an interesting moment. 
     So for Julian, he did not follow an immediate instinct 
to be like the cool executioner, and to say in that typical 
low, gravel voiced, I'm going to have to kill you. You 
know, that sort of thing. But for him, I think this was 
really a horrifying experience, and he almost breaks down 
in tears in front of her over it. 
     I'm not necessarily sure I trusted that would work. 
One of the things you're confronted with any time you do 
something that seems to be a genre movie, like in this case 
a World War II movie, is all of the other films that have 
preceded it. And the vocabulary that audiences have for 
those kinds of movies.  
     So in some ways you have to acknowledge them, and in 
some ways you have to disregard them. And simply play the 
truth of the scene as you see it, and as realized by the 
character that you've created. And trust that if your 
motivations were well articulated and clear, that it will 
work.   

*What are you cooking up next? 
 

BC:  I'm doing a production of The Elephant Man on 
Broadway, starting in March. I'm going to star with 
Julianne Moore in World Traveler. It will be out in April. 
It's the story of a young man who just loses his way. He 
leaves his wife and child, and just starts driving on the 
road to get...lost! And it's about the understanding that 
he comes to in his life, about how to be a loving person. 

*Being a loving guy seems to be becoming a specialty of 
yours. 
 

BC: Nothing like a challenge!

Copyright 2002 by Prairie Miller

VIA CINEMAN SYNDICATE