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Actor Billy Crudup, 54, stars alongside Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon in Apple TV+’s hit The Morning Show, and he hopes to find success twice over on the streaming platform with Hello Tomorrow! In the new sci-fi dramedy, premiering Feb. 17, he plays a traveling salesman hawking lunar timeshares.
Since you’re already filming The Morning Show, did it give you pause to take on another series?
Because it was with Apple TV+ as well, my representative felt confident that they could make the schedules work. So I said, “OK, send the script.” Of course, in my head, I’m thinking, Well, can you do both, Billy? Can you manage? Once I read the first half-page of Hello Tomorrow! I was like, Well, I better figure out how to do both because this is another piece of phenomenal material, and you do not look a gift horse in the mouth. This is like somebody giving you a chance to do [Death of a Salesman character] Willy Loman, and in the most extraordinary new original kind of setting. And that is an absolute dream for an actor.
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Hello Tomorrow! has this unmoored feeling — viewers are not sure if it’s the past, the present or the future. Sometimes, it feels like all three at once.
Precisely. The question is: Has there ever been a new kind of American experience? Or is the past always going to be the future? ... So to that end, the notion that we don’t know where we are [in time] serves the story. It’s a great place to put an audience in so far as getting them on your side. They have to stick with you in the absence of anything else.
Your character is selling lunar timeshares. Do you have any real-life sales experience besides, of course, selling yourself as an actor?
There’s no doubt acting is mostly salesmanship, but truthfully, we’ve gamed the system. We’ve made you come to us as actors as opposed to going door to door to see a show. I can remember in college, we were just passing out pamphlets about a sales conference, [but] there was a salesmanship in getting someone to hold onto the pamphlet to meet your quota. I was part of a young business club when I was a freshman in high school, and the whole course was about agreeing on a product with your team, developing a product that you could make, then selling the product. We sold Lazy Susans. It was tough.
With “regular people” now doing some space travel, would you be interested in buying a lunar timeshare and visiting the moon?
I’m an astronomy buff. I like pop science and reading pop science magazines. The stars are something I really enjoy thinking about and learning about, and still, until such a time as space seems like it’s for everybody, I don’t think I’ll be going up there. The exploration still seems to be in its infancy.
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