Billy Crudup has had one of the more interesting careers out there. From a rock guitarist in Cameron Crowe‘s Almost Famous, to Doctor Manhattan in Watchmen, to an Emmy Award for AppleTV’s The Morning Show, the actor has seemingly done it all. And there is more to come. Let’s take a look at his later career turn and where things are going for Billy Crudup.
BILLY CRUDUP WON AN EMMY AWARD FOR THE MORNING SHOW
This week Billy Crudup won his first Emmy in the Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series category, alongside such formidable nominees as Better Call Saul’s Giancarlo Esposito, Succession’s Kieran Culkin, Matthew Macfadyen, and Nicholas Braun, The Handmaid’s Tale’s Bradley Whitford, Westworld’s Jeffrey Wright, and Crudup’s own The Morning Show co-star, Mark Duplass.
Despite receiving eight nominations, Crudup was the only winner from The Morning Show and with Apple+ receiving 18 nominations from their first-year contention, the sole award for the new network went to Crudup.
In the series, Billy Crudup plays Cory Ellison, the CEO of UBA. He’s the angle-shooting executive trying to play every angle and everyone against themselves in the name of ratings. Crudup is fantastic in the role.
BILLY CRUDUP IS MARRIED TO NAOMI WATTS
Billy Crudup is dating Naomi Watts. They began dating in 2017. He has one son, William Atticus Parker whom he had with his ex-girlfriend, actress Mary-Louise Parker. In a scandalous turn, Crudup left Parker in 2003 when she was seven months pregnant with their son.
The two have been together for more than five years now after meeting on the set of Netflix’s Gypsy. They were married in 2023.
HE WAS IN ZACH SNYDER’S JUSTICE LEAGUE BUT WON’T BE IN THE FLASH
One of Crudup’s most recent performances was in 2017’s Justice League, a brief role as Henry Allen, the father of The Flash’s Barry Allen. His short scene at the very least set up that Henry Allen is in jail, wrongfully accused of the murder of his wife.
With DC’s The Flash film set for release in 2023, it would have seemed like Billy Crudup would return. But that won’t be the case. He’s being replaced by Ron Livingston in the role. This was because of the film’s timing. There was a delay in production and then the directors switched. During that time, Billy Crudup signed on for The Morning Show and he couldn’t fit it in his schedule.
HE STARTED AS A STAGE ACTOR AND WON A TONY AWARD
Predating his career in film and TV, Billy Crudup has had a tremendously impressive career on the stage. A year after earning his Master of Fine Arts at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Crudup made his Broadway debut in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia.
With over 20 years of stage experience, Crudup has played such varied characters as Oedipus, John Merrick in The Elephant Man, and Lucky in Waiting for Godot.
Billy Crudup won a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play for his performance as Vissarion Belinsky in The Coast of Utopia.
Crudup has also been Tony-nominated for his roles in 2002’s The Elephant Man, 2005’s The Pillowman and in a 2011 version of Arcadia, the show that Crudup began his Broadway career with.
HE BROKE INTO FILM IN THE 1990s
Billy Crudup’s film career began with a trifecta of substantial roles. His first performance was in the 1996 Barry Levinson-directed crime drama, Sleepers, with such actors as Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, and Brad Pitt. He would then appear in Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I Love You, and in his first starring role in 1997’s Inventing the Abbotts, with Liv Tyler and Joaquin Phoenix.
At the end of the ’90s, Billy Crudup’s career featured two critically-acclaimed performances, first in Stephen Frears’ The Hi-Lo Country, which earned Crudup the National Board of Review Award for Breakthrough Performance, and 1999’s Jesus’ Son, a performance that earned him the Festival du Film de Paris Best Actor Award and was nominated for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Male Lead.
However, Crudup’s breakthrough role was in 2000’s Almost Famous, the auto-biographical Cameron Crowe film, in which Billy Crudup played lead guitarist Russell Hammond in the fictional band, Stillwater.
The rest of the 2000s gave Billy Crudup a slew of memorable performances in major releases in such films as Tim Burton’s Big Fish, J.J. Abrams’ Mission: Impossible III, and in the Robert De Niro-directed, The Good Shepherd. In 2009, Crudup starred in arguably his biggest film to date, playing the man-turned-blue-god Dr. Manhattan in Zack Snyder’s Watchmen.
For the 2010s, Billy Crudup mixed work in major feature films with great performances in smaller independent films. He was in big title films like Alien: Covenant and Justice League and independent films like The Stanford Prison Experiment, Jackie, and 20th Century Women.
In 2015, Crudup would appear in the 2015 Best Picture Winner at the Academy Awards, Spotlight. The film would also earn Crudup an Independent Spirit Robert Altman Award and a SAG Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture.
Most recently, Billy Crudup appeared in a pair of 2019 films: After the Wedding, in which Crudup starred with Julianne Moore and Michelle Williams, and the latest film from Richard Linklater, his adaptation of the Maria Semple novel, Where’d You Go, Bernadette.
HE’S HAD A SUCCESSFUL TELEVISION CAREER
Billy Crudup has a surprisingly small amount of television work on his resume, yet his projects are impressive nonetheless. His first television performance came in HBO’s Curtis Hanson-directed TV movie, Too Big to Fail, in 2011.
Crudup played Timothy Geithner, the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Too Big to Fail would be nominated for 10 Emmy Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, and two Screen Actors Guild Awards.
Crudup’s first television series was 2017’s Netflix thriller, Gypsy. While the show was canceled after only one season, he met his current partner Naomi Watts on the set, playing Watts’ husband, Michael Holloway.
Billy Crudup would win his Emmy for The Morning Show, where he plays Cory Ellison, a television executive who takes over the eponymous Morning Show’s news operations. Beyond his Emmy for this performance, Crudup previously won a Critics’ Choice Television Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Drama Series and was nominated for a SAG Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Drama Series.
BILLY CRUDUP WILL STAR IN HELLO TOMORROW!
Billy Crudup’s relationship with AppleTV+ won’t stop with The Morning Show. He’s also going to star in the series Hello Tomorrow! on the streamer. The series will have an old-timey, but futuristic feel.
It is about a group of salespeople who are trying to sell timeshares. But these ones aren’t in Florida or some other vacation spot. Instead, they are selling spots on the moon.
The series is set to debut on February 17, 2023.
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