Billy Crudup speaks about Watchmen, Public Enemies, life and humanity.

This is a great interview by Stephen Whitty of The Star-Ledger. Thanks to Pam for sending it over.

When Billy Crudup started getting Hollywood attention a decade or more ago -- for "Without Limits," for "Jesus' Son," for "Almost Famous" -- he set a couple of rules for the interviews he was expected to do.

One, he would not talk about his personal life.

Two, he would not talk about his professional life.

Not surprisingly, this made the usual pre-release publicity junkets an unusually frustrating experience for both him and the person with the tape recorder.

It's a little better now.

"I think, very early on when I was acting, I had a very specific agenda -- work, make money and hopefully get better," says the 40-year-old actor. "But I didn't have any ideological point of view, and all of a sudden I had people asking me for my philosophy."

"So," he laughs, "I tried to come up with (something). And I think I ended up developing a voice before I had a chance to figure out what my voice was, and I was very dogmatic about not polluting anybody's experience of the piece."

It was something he held to for a long time, once saying he'd pay the studios not to have to do publicity; he's still not entirely comfortable with it.

(One place he will still definitely not go today is his love life, which included a messy split from long-time, then-pregnant lover Mary Louise Parker in 2003, and an affair with Claire Danes.)

But things have still changed.

The New-York based Crudup sees the world a little differently now. "Journey" is a word he will use a lot. He's willing, in fact eager to talk -- intelligently, intently, politely -- if not about the romantic details of his life, then about the philosophy behind his work, and his diverse and difficult choices as an actor.

Which is really perfect timing, because his most recent choice is, in many ways, his most daring -- playing Doctor Manhattan, the mostly nude and vaguely godlike blue superhero at the center of Friday's "Watchmen," a sci-fi epic about masked avengers.

It's a huge risk for the studio. Based on a property routinely hailed as the greatest of all graphic novels, it's a complicated story facing some demanding fans (who don't want to see any changes) and possibly confused newcomers (who have several storylines and a league of characters to keep track of).

A risk for its actors, too. Patrick Wilson's Nite Owl battles insecurity and impotence. Jackie Earle Haley's Rorschach is a masked sociopath. And Crudup's Doctor Manhattan -- except for a brief flashback sequence -- is a glowing ("I felt like a glorified light fixture"), nearly emotionless, special-effects giant.

And that risk was exactly what appealed.

"Usually, as an actor you start with the practical things about a character -- where does he live, what does he eat -- and that starts to answer your questions," Crudup says. "And the most basic is: What does he want? But Doctor Manhattan is almost literally beyond that. .. I think, in the end, what he wants is to preserve some piece of his humanity -- but answering that question was a real process of discovery."

Crudup's journey to being an actor was its own process. Born in suburban Long Island, he was the middle child in a family that moved a bit (first to Texas when he was 8, then Florida) and had some unconventional approaches to marriage (his parents divorced when he was in junior high, then remarried each other several years later). At first, acting was just a way to stand out a bit.

Actually, he's not that sure things have changed.

"The first time I was onstage was in second grade, playing Uncle Sam in a Fourth of July show," he says. "And I realized I didn't mind going up there and looking silly; I liked the attention. As I grew up, I discovered I had different desires as well, to grow as an actor, to render things more complexly, to be better than I thought I had the potential to be."

Crudup went on to study his craft seriously, eventually getting a master's degree from NYU. "But it's always hard to shake that original necessity you were trying to fill," he admits. "That quest for gratification is always part of my work; it's just a question of what percentage it occupies."

From the start, Crudup's quest led him to difficult plays -- a year after grad school he made his Broadway debut in Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia." He's since done Chekhov, "The Elephant Man," and Stoppard's mammoth "The Coast of Utopia," for which he won a Tony.

His taste is just as demanding in movies. Although he'll be playing J. Edgar Hoover in the upcoming "Public Enemies" ("From a big blue superhero to a guy in a dress -- just another day at the office"), he's shunned most conventional fare. Asked to audition for "Titanic," he demurred. Although he's had chances at "a couple" of big popcorn movies over his career, he's always turned them down.

"I never had any idea of what to do with those characters and I just would have ended up overcomplicating things," he confesses. "Those sorts of roles need someone with specialized skills, someone who has masculinity and a clarity, and there are people who do that so much better than I could. Harrison Ford -- he can run from anything and I'll watch it. He is so compelling. He occupies those spaces of heroism so perfectly. And that's not where I excel."

Where Crudup excelled, he discovered, was in playing characters who were neither villains nor heroes, but somewhere in between -- flawed people who struggled to figure out the right thing. Yet what was maddening about them was, even if they did figure out the proper course, they rarely took it.

If you had to sum up Crudup's best characters in one word -- the selfish rocker in "Almost Famous," the gentle junkie in "Jesus' Son," the wandering husband in "World Traveler" -- it would probably be "disappointing."

"Yes, I think that's very true, actually," he says. "Most movies, even when the characters disappoint, there's no danger they won't redeem themselves before the end. I prefer characters who -- well, you don't know if they're going to make it all the way back. You hope they get better but you sort of worry what happens to them after the movie ends."

That taste for flawed characters is in everything the actor does -- only Crudup would, choosing a superhero to play, pass up more mainstream-friendly icons for an R-rated, unpleasantly superior behemoth. And he understands the consequences. So he subsidizes his risks by doing lucrative commercial voiceovers. And he accepts that his own interest in playing, say, a cross-dressing Elizabethan in "Stage Beauty" may not be matched by the audience's.

"I don't go to the movies to be challenged all the time, either," he says. "Sometimes I just want to be satisfied, too. But as an actor and a person, I'm more interested in work that doesn't aim to satisfy as much as it aims to explore a character's journey.. I suppose it's kind of an indulgent enterprise, but it's a chance for me to learn something about people and learn something about myself, to play these characters in search of their own humanity."

Which, in its own weird way, made the spring's biggest, loudest, most special-effects driven fanboy movie the absolutely perfect pick. Because who is more literally in search of his own humanity than Doctor Manhattan, a scientist accidentally turned superhuman? A superior being who's advanced so quickly that he can no longer empathize with the motivations of his old, all-too-human friends?

"Actually, it's such an obvious part for me," Crudup says, laughing. "Because it's another character who's disassociated and deeply flawed -- he's a master of matter but he has no morality. (Writer) Alan Moore's done some really wonderful, subversive things with the genre. Characters like this, you're expecting truth, justice and the American way. You're not expecting a guy who's only interested in how light travels."

Crudup's emotional travels are clearly continuing. He has a five-year-old-son, William Atticus, with Parker; Danes and he broke up (she's now engaged to Hugh Dancy). And while he still avoids talking about his personal life ("It's hard enough to convince an audience I'm somebody else even when they don't know anything about me") he's begun to open up more about his professional career.

"I think I discovered that whatever philosophy I had may have been more a product of the time than the entire way I feel," he says. "Also, the older you get, the more patient you are with different kinds of experiences. I still feel like my job is to act -- I'd still rather expose as little of myself as I can -- but I find it easier now to talk, at least about the material, and the approach and the creative agenda. Maybe it's because I'm kind of bored being a contrarian. Maybe it's just part of the journey."

If you enjoyed that interview head on over to The Star-Ledger and give Steve Whitty some love.

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