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" It&amp;#039;s raining on the first tee, pouring, actually and for a second the whole thing staggers against the possibility of a rain-out. Billy Crudup locks eyes with me.&amp;quot;Dude,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;I want to play. I&amp;#039;m a player.&amp;quot; The rain, I tell him, doesn&amp;#039;t scare me. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re a player too, then,&amp;quot; he says. He looks at the caddie. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re players,&amp;quot; he announces. The caddie looks at us dubiously. Two nobodies on a Tuesday afternoon. In the rain. &amp;quot;I believe it,&amp;quot; he says, acting as if he does. We&amp;#039;re playing Manhattan Woods, an ambitious new track across the Hudson River and fifteen miles up the Palisades Parkway from New York. Around the seventh hole, the course lurches eastward, back in the direction of the skyline of the city, though the mist allows none of the view. John, the caddie, points to Crudup as he sets up for a shot. &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s got a nice, simple swing. What does he do for a living?&amp;quot; Like every caddie at every private course, this guy has carried bags for princes and kings, or at least he claims he has. Michael Jordan was here only a month ago, he tells me, with Ahmad Rashad. Crudup is an actor, I tell him. &amp;quot;What&amp;#039;s he been in?&amp;quot; the caddie asks. &amp;quot;Jesus&amp;#039; Son,&amp;quot; I sayThis makes him cringe. He looks at  Several years ago, Crudup was parking cars at a place in south Florida. One night, he took the keys from &amp;#039;70s rock icon Peter Frampton, who tipped him five bucks. Last winter, Frampton served as &amp;quot;authenticity adviser&amp;quot; on Almost Famous, Cameron Crowe&amp;#039;s rock &amp;#039;n&amp;#039; roll movie. &amp;quot;Frampton remembered the night. I told him I was the guy. He was like, &amp;#039;Ten years, man. It brings a lot of change.&amp;#039; There he was, changing my guitar strings. I thought, Damn.&amp;quot; Crudup, who&amp;#039;s showing his game now, his swing steady and low, his body completely still.  &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s a hell of a name for a movie,&amp;quot; the caddie says. A moment later, he speaks again. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m thinking he had to have played the son. He&amp;#039;s an awfully little guy.&amp;quot; STARS ARE BIG. HUGE. Incomprehensibly large. So gigantic that the terms used to describe stars are conceptual: It would take five million earths to fill this star. Things like that.  Billy Crudup, by contrast and by independent authority, is small. He insists that all his movie roles to date have been small, even his lead in Waking the Dead, though actually it was the movie that was small. &amp;quot;It was,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;sort of one-weekish.&amp;quot;  He is extraordinarily talented and memorable, but only for a very short time. In truth, thus far Billy Crudup has been a bit of a Zelig, a cipher, an invisible man. You have probably seen him in a film (he has made ten), enjoyed his performance very much, noted it, and then forgotten him entirely. And this is, Crudup says, the way he likes it. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m not a star,&amp;quot; he says on the eleventh tee. &amp;quot;I have no desire to be one.&amp;quot; That may be so--it really may be so. There is no greater challenge today than divining a man&amp;#039;s heart and finding the truth when confronted with the none-of-this-is-important-to-me syndrome. It is a mental struggle, this search for truth. But one must try, or life loses meaning. Instructive in this search is the knowledge that some popular entertainers would have you know that their purposes are more serious than entertainment, that their success at being creative is in itself a paradox, that they are more inward-focused and substantial than all that. Why do they do this? What could be more substantial than pleasing the masses? Than teaching us lessons through art? Than looking quite excellent, and having a smooth stroke, and setting a good example? This is a strange thing to contemplate. Stranger still is that this same Billy Crudup is by acclamation in Hollywood the next thing, the actor who is scheduled to arrive this year, our next star. For example: &amp;quot;Billy is right there,&amp;quot; says Walter Parkes, a producer of Men in Black. &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s as ready as you can be.&amp;quot; AT THE GOLF COURSE, as in life, no one knows who he is. Earlier that morning, Crudup flopped his bag down, rattled his clubs, and shook hands with the caddie.  &amp;quot;I should have never agreed to play golf,&amp;quot; Crudup said. &amp;quot;I can&amp;#039;t keep my guard up if I&amp;#039;m trying to get into your head.&amp;quot; Keep his guard up?  He ran his hands through his hair, which is long, thin, and fairly, well, dirty. &amp;quot;If you were my brother,&amp;quot; he continued, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;d be messing with you before we even set the stakes.&amp;quot; Warming up, Crudup drifted from one club to the next, going by the book, from a wedge to a 7-iron and on to the driver, hitting high, short drives that fell reliably and reasonably to the wet grass without a hint of a slice. I can&amp;#039;t tell whether he&amp;#039;s any good at all, but he certainly looks good. His game is creamy and soft, like butter. Slipping on his glove, he chats with the caddie. He blends in, using his sturdy set of Callaway clubs, his greasy hat, and his worn-out golf shirt as camouflage. Keep his guard up? Maybe this is acting. Maybe the guard is up and Billy Crudup is really working it. Maybe this is a full-out actor&amp;#039;s representation of Tuesday morning.  BILLY CRUDUP IS AN ACTOR. A capital-A Actor, if you know what I mean. He played the marauding shooter in Sleepers, the creepy, charismatic Steve Prefontaine in Without Limits, the cruel older brother in Inventing the Abbotts, an unlucky rancher in the somnambulant The Hi-Lo Country. He was there. He was in them. You can rent them and check. In each film, he flashes across the screen, angry, angular, and is out of your way before you know it. Even if you remember him from such recent flameouts as Waking the Dead or Jesus&amp;#039; Son, odds are you never noticed him, not in the sense of connecting the dots between movies, between roles. &amp;quot;What distinguishes him is that he&amp;#039;s not choosing parts to get the next part,&amp;quot; says Bryan Lourd, an agent at CAA, which represents Crudup. &amp;quot;I always tell clients you have to be able to remember why you chose to do a movie, to always be able to look at a movie and know, whether it&amp;#039;s good or bad, why you chose to do it. Billy does. He hasn&amp;#039;t made one wrong move, either.&amp;quot; Who can say? Crudup hasn&amp;#039;t really taken his shot. He&amp;#039;s an unknown quantity in Hollywood, defined by supporting roles rather than by the spotlight, the guy who pulled himself out of consideration for Leo&amp;#039;s role in Titanic. Whether this is taste or a lack of smarts seems to be a matter of interpretation for everyone except Crudup. Lets talk about stars for a moment. A star is a spinning ball of fire. A star is a source of light and energy. A star shines. A star is the force that keeps the planets in orbit.  Billy Crudup is not a star. Billy Crudup doesn&amp;#039;t want to be a star. He doesn&amp;#039;t want any part of it. Not the hot gas nor the magnetic fields nor the responsibility of the various orbits of fame. He can&amp;#039;t deal with the possibility of his own solar flares. Call him a star and he winces.  In the new Cameron Crowe movie, Almost Famous, the director&amp;#039;s paean to rock &amp;#039;n&amp;#039; roll in the seventies, the movie that many people expect will catapult Crudup toward fame whether he likes it or not, Billy Crudup plays a star.  &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s completely infectious,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s sick. We&amp;#039;re at the Palladium, working with seventeen hundred extras. We walk out into the darkness. Then the roar, you know? When I come up on a solo, even though I&amp;#039;m working from playback and everybody knows it, I give them the little face--you know that little guitar face?--and they go fucking nuts. Berserk. You look into their eyes and they flip out.&amp;quot; He&amp;#039;s smiling now at the memory, at the whiff of power. &amp;quot;That is some pretty high-dosage shit. In an instant, you understand how people can get fucked-up on that.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a pretty narrow plank,&amp;quot; Cameron Crowe says, &amp;quot;letting an actor play a rock star. And it&amp;#039;s a pretty steep plunge when it doesn&amp;#039;t work. There&amp;#039;s very little crossover. It&amp;#039;s hard to do convincingly. Billy succeeded because he cared so much. He had us believing.  &amp;quot;Led Zeppelin was referenced all through the movie, so we decided to show what we had to Robert Plant and Jimmy Page. We fly to London, and the two of them sit down to watch it, and I&amp;#039;m cringing. When it&amp;#039;s over, Robert Plant gets up and starts pacing. He keeps saying, &amp;#039;I know that guy.&amp;#039; And we say, &amp;#039;Yeah, Billy Crudup! He&amp;#039;s been in.&amp;#039; and Plant says, &amp;#039;No, no, I know him, the guitarist. I&amp;#039;ve met that guy.&amp;#039; He was sure Billy was a pro.&amp;quot; Crowe laughs. &amp;quot;That was a blinding moment. Billy had him. Robert Fucking Plant.&amp;quot; Billy Crudup is not a star. Over and over again people walk right by him. Tell people who he is and they stare straight at him and squint. They get nothing on the radar. He looks like a kid. The hair. The ratty shirt. The shitty belt. He could be a waiter, a busboy, a farmer. He looks for all the world like someone you might meet three times a day. &amp;quot;The thing about Billy is that he takes two looks,&amp;quot; says Crowe. &amp;quot;The first look. Fine. He&amp;#039;s good-looking. All that. And the long look, that&amp;#039;s where you see that he has all these levels. It&amp;#039;s a subtle face.&amp;quot; Crudup actively and passively defies biography. He hates the mythology others (publicists, mostly) have set up for him--that he was a wrestler in college, that he&amp;#039;s a master chess player--with only a marginal basis in fact. (He wrestled in high school. He watches chess in Washington Square Park.) Still, he displays the traditional movie star&amp;#039;s refusal to help draw the picture, talking about himself only by discussing the roles he&amp;#039;s played, forcing the conversations away from the facts of his life, even when people have them wrong.  For instance, he offers that he bought his car to share with his brothers, who also live in New York. It seems to me like a good, brotherly thing to do, a generous act, or at the very least somewhat thoughtful.  &amp;quot;Let me ask you about the car,&amp;quot; I say.  &amp;quot;I wish you wouldn&amp;#039;t,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s just a car.&amp;quot; Crudup closes down. He&amp;#039;s private about his family life, he says. But this is not family--this is a sport-utility vehicle. What&amp;#039;s worse is that Crudup looks wounded that I would ask. &amp;quot;You paint your picture of me, who I am, what I&amp;#039;m interested in, what I like, what I&amp;#039;m like when I&amp;#039;m not talking about a movie or whatever work I&amp;#039;m in.&amp;quot; He&amp;#039;s pensive now, squinting as he talks, reeling in the casual gestures, cooling the surface even more. &amp;quot;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&amp;#039;s work I&amp;#039;m not too interested in. If I start in on it, inevitably I have to maintain it.&amp;quot; He holds his palms up and laughs. &amp;quot;The premise of all of this is that anybody would give a shit one way or the other, which I call into question almost immediately.&amp;quot;  Even when he does talk about his roles (he refers to them as &amp;quot;choices,&amp;quot; a term that implies calculation, pluses and minuses), he insists that they are small, that they&amp;#039;re not about him. Even his role in the Cameron Crowe movie, he says, is &amp;quot;small.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Yeah,&amp;quot; Crowe says, &amp;quot;so small that we end the whole movie on his face.&amp;quot; We&amp;#039;re at a turn and Crudup is peeling an orange. The caddie eats a sandwich, waiting for us at the tenth hole. I ask about the Tom Stoppard play, Arcadia, in which Crudup played a friend of Lord Byron&amp;#039;s, his first big role onstage. It&amp;#039;s an &amp;quot;actor&amp;#039;s role,&amp;quot; the kind of thing actors like to talk about. Crudup nods. &amp;quot;That was a run. I&amp;#039;m working with Tom Stoppard, being directed by Trevor Nunn, great fucking play. There&amp;#039;s no way I can&amp;#039;t take the job seriously, no way I can&amp;#039;t see myself as the luckiest actor on the planet at that moment.&amp;quot; But what&amp;#039;s lucky? Are these the roles he wants more of? Or does he intend to move on, to press toward something else? Writing? Directing? &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t write, and I don&amp;#039;t want to direct. I want to act. I enjoy the work. I like being a tool, an implement for a great director. I got what I wanted here, on the stage.&amp;quot; At this point, I&amp;#039;m thinking, Be a star. Dazzle me, please. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ll be expressive about that,&amp;quot; he says, cranking his voice up a bit, declaring for the first time a level of enthusiasm. But he sounds a little like your old man expressing the importance of maintaining an IRA. &amp;quot;I learn from the theater. The theater is more of an argument. I love an argument. I&amp;#039;d prefer an argument about a movie, but no one ever brings one.&amp;quot; Yeah, yeah. I try to think of an argument. Then I buy a sandwich.  There are many stars in the galaxy. Each star has a huge gravitational field. Stars send light out into space, where it travels for many years, over distances we call light-years, until, sometimes, it reaches other stars. Stars exist in tension with one another. Billy Crudup lives with a star named Mary-Louise Parker, a veteran stage and movie actress. She opens a play on the very night of our golf match. I wrangle a ticket, figuring it&amp;#039;s a chance to talk to Crudup one more time, that maybe we&amp;#039;ll get past the theater-school rhetoric and shake out something clearer.  It&amp;#039;s funky going to the theater by yourself. Especially on opening night, when everybody is glittering and giddy. Maybe Crudup is right. Maybe you need to talk, to argue about a play before it means anything. I have a critic&amp;#039;s seat, dead center, four rows up. Linda Lavin is sitting to my right. The whole thing feels a little lonely. The play is good, though, and Parker is just plain hot. She oscillates between being sexy and haggard, plays the character at different ages without a hitch, cranks around the stage in blue jeans, a housecoat, and a little black dress, all without once giving the sense that she is costumed. No one can take their eyes off her. In this pathetic way, I start to feel that I am not alone after all, that I&amp;#039;m in the presence of someone. I realize that I&amp;#039;ve been looking at her my whole life--in movies--and that she&amp;#039;s made me feel who she is through movies, movies I didn&amp;#039;t even really like. Fried Green Tomatoes, Boys on the Side. But she convinced me long ago. And she&amp;#039;s convincing me tonight. The woman is a star.  Crudup is there, shaven, clothes crisp and unrumpled, looking impossibly younger (he&amp;#039;s thirty-two) than he had on the golf course. At intermission, he steps outside for a cigarette, where he talks feverishly to a young guy wearing the clunky black glasses that decorate the faces of New Yorkers now, lighting one cigarette off another, standing in the very spot where he picked me up in the family SUV this morning. Traffic rumbles by. The crowd is abuzz. No one locks in on Crudup, though he&amp;#039;s looking for the first time today like a movie star--streetside, beneath the marquee, in the drizzle, Marlboro dangling from the corner of his mouth. He nods at several of them, stares a few people in the face. No one recognizes him. He seems to enjoy some power--being public, being open, being Crudup--that allows him to light himself slowly, throughout the day, until he illuminates into a look that tells people what he is, at least for the time being. The thing is, no one notices.  &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a pretty good deal for me,&amp;quot; he says of watching Parker work. &amp;quot;Because I don&amp;#039;t have to go into it worried about what I&amp;#039;m going to say to her. She&amp;#039;s not going to fuck up. She&amp;#039;s just not going to fail. And I know I can learn by watching her. That&amp;#039;s why I go to the theater. So I&amp;#039;m just going to say thank you. That&amp;#039;s what most actors want.&amp;quot;  I head back to the lobby to gawk at the still photos of Mary-Louise Parker. I&amp;#039;m thinking about her as I walk away from Crudup. It&amp;#039;s fucked-up. I&amp;#039;m thinking that she&amp;#039;s taller than I would have guessed, that she&amp;#039;s bigger than he is. Still, I wouldn&amp;#039;t guarantee it. It&amp;#039;s an impression. She just feels bigger.  For a while, a rumor floated that Crudup might be cast in the next Star Wars. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s a new one on me,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Where do they get this shit?&amp;quot;  What if it were true? Would you take it?  &amp;quot;No chance,&amp;quot; Crudup says without hesitation. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s just not for me.&amp;quot;  This is the essential Crudup assertion. Billy Crudup doesn&amp;#039;t want it. Frankly, that&amp;#039;s fine with me. I wouldn&amp;#039;t want it, either. But then again, I&amp;#039;m not an actor. One thing: Billy Crudup is all actor. He has an M.F.A. from NYU and stage credits from here to the end of your arm. Actor. Yes, sir. So I ask, directly, the one question I&amp;#039;ve been wanting to ask: Don&amp;#039;t you want a big movie? Don&amp;#039;t you want to take it up a notch, maybe just once? Wouldn&amp;#039;t it be nice to have a generation remember you, talk about you, in that one really big picture? Gladiator. Good cop. Jedi knight. Isn&amp;#039;t that, at some level, the whole idea of the game?  &amp;quot;Dude, that&amp;#039;s what I am shooting for every time out. I want to crystallize like that in every performance. Just like that. Just like you were saying. Every fucking time.&amp;quot;  He doesn&amp;#039;t want it enough to care, but he cares just enough to want it. Another wonderful, slippery nugget, this mantra for slackers.  &amp;quot;When Billy makes it,&amp;quot; says Cameron Crowe, &amp;quot;it&amp;#039;ll be a kind of accident. People will say, Where did this guy come from? And they&amp;#039;ll go back and look at his record and they&amp;#039;ll think they made this great discovery, when he&amp;#039;s been there all along.&amp;quot;  On the matter of stars there are a lot of stars still being discovered. At the far edges of the galaxy, new stars are registered by astronomers all the time. These are marked as discoveries. These kinds of stars are often given numbers rather than names. If Crudup is a star, then maybe, just maybe, he&amp;#039;s one of these stars at the very edge of our vision. (&amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s a throwback to guys like Pacino and De Niro,&amp;quot; Bryan Lourd says. &amp;quot;Like them, he&amp;#039;s very smart, very understanding about the long haul. There&amp;#039;s no rushing Billy. Because of that, he&amp;#039;ll be around in thirty or forty years.&amp;quot;) These stars are so far away that despite their size, despite their potential for energy release, they appear to us very tiny and insignificant. Their distance might make us mistake them for less than what they are.  If Crudup is going to become the next man, the real man or the star, it will happen by accident, at the end of some period of hard work, at a time when no one expects him. People will recognize him without really knowing where they saw him. He wants this. He&amp;#039;s not asking for much. To be forgotten, then remembered, then forgotten again.  At the end of the golf match Crudup is defeated. We double the bet on the last hole and stand at the tee, looking up the hill toward the clubhouse. It&amp;#039;s an enormous carry to the fairway. Crudup is taking practice swings, hoping for ten extra yards from his driver. He&amp;#039;s standing askance again, looking away. From the side, I can see that he still could be anyone, a doper, a guitar player, someone famous. Or not. I wonder aloud if he&amp;#039;s even old enough to remember Steve Prefontaine, the guy he played in Without Limits, the gnarly distance runner of the early seventies. So I ask. At this, the caddie perks up.  &amp;quot;You mean the runner?&amp;quot; he says.  &amp;quot;Yeah, Prefontaine.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re talking about the movie,&amp;quot; he says.  &amp;quot;Absolutely.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;I saw that. Without Limits. I just rented that. Now, that was a movie. A good movie.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Billy was in it,&amp;quot; I say.  The caddie looks puzzled, shakes his head. &amp;quot;No, the guy&amp;#039;s name was Steve.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;No, I&amp;#039;m talking about Billy,&amp;quot; I say.  Crudup grins.  &amp;quot;Who?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Him. He was in the movie.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;The guy was a runner.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s what I&amp;#039;m saying,&amp;quot; I say. &amp;quot;He played the runner.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;That guy was a lot bigger.&amp;quot; The caddie pauses, and then it clicks. &amp;quot;That was you? Yeah, it was. Oh, man, I saw that. I just saw that. Now, that was a movie. That was you?&amp;quot;  Crudup is smiling. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a619/crudup-shut-up-0900/>