Billy Crudup (Actor)

"Acting is hard for me. What's rewarding about acting is when I learn something and grow. So it's just as hard for me doing a sweet little happy-go-lucky role as it is doing a guy who's having a nervous breakdown." - Crudup quoted to the Associated Press, June 21, 2000

"Crudup is a gentle, slyly sexy man who has palpable charisma onstage and off." - Sydney Weinberg quoted in Time Out New York, Jan. 31-Feb. 7, 1996

"I suppose in terms of my career, I just have not attended to other people’s ideas about what’s best for me. I think I am the best judge of what’s best for me, though plenty of people have room to express opinions for what’s best for me. I sort of stick to my own agenda." - Crudup quoted to Jonathan Harvey of Stage9, 2004.

"I think I'm a good actor because I try really hard. That also means that when I suck, I aggressively suck. That probably happens as much as it doesn't, but at least I'm always in search of the moment where I can do something I haven't done before." - Crudup in Interview magazine, January 1996

"In the leading role, Crudup creates an extraordinary portrait of utter guilelessness, of a cork bobbing upon the waters of life with no intended destination." - from Todd McCarthy's review of "Jesus' Son" in the Daily Variety, Sept. 14, 1999

"Like anyone, I want everything I've done to be enormously successful. I want as many people who saw 'Titanic' to see 'Jesus' Son,' so it's not as if I'm trying to work towards some elitist community that includes my family and several people I know." - Crudup to The London Times, July 6, 2000

"The artistry of spontaneity and technique is sort of lost on me, people who just come in and do it once and it's brilliant, but ask them to do it again and you don't know if they will. Creating a truly rich layered moment that appears as though it happened just once, and would never happen again, that's what I'm most interested in. Especially when you do it again. I'm much better at learning than I am at spontaneously erupting with brilliance." - Crudup quoted in The New York Times, March 19, 2000

"The thing about Billy is that he takes two looks. The first look, Fine. He's good-looking. All that. And the long look, that's where you see that he has all these levels. It's a subtle face." - Cameron Crowe, writer-director of "Almost Famous" quoted in Esquire magazine, September 2000

"There are certainly actors who are interested in marketing a persona. And audiences often like to see the same person enacting a similar level of heroism or whatever. But that's not where my interest in acting is." - Crudup to Interview magazine, May 1998

"You paint your picture of me, who I am, what I'm interested in, what I like, what I'm like when I'm not talking about a movie or whatever work I'm in. I do enough of these and people create this idea of what I am. Generally, this is something an actor works toward, avoiding certain subjects, promoting others, being seen in certain places, finding the right place to stand, being seen in certain causes. All of that is meant to promote a calculated image. That's work I'm not too interested in. If I start in on it, inevitably I have to maintain it. The premise of all that is that anybody would give a shit one way or the other, which I call into question almost immediately." - Crudup quoted in Esquire magazine, September 2000