Billy Crudup Talks ‘Eat Pray Love’

MakingOf: First of all, you have such a diverse body of work, and all incredible work. What has to be there for you to get involved with a project?

(Billy Crudup): Well, a) that’s very nice of you to say. It’s better than saying “you suck.” I think, for a long time in my career, I gravitated towards parts that were curious to me—that I couldn’t quite figure out. It set me off on an enterprise of discovery. I liked characters that were going through internal dilemmas. This film was a great opportunity for me to play someone who’s sort of outside of that. He’s quite comfortable with himself. He goes through something quite difficult, but it’s not internal. He’s not on the enterprise of self-discovery; he’s confronted by someone who is. I really enjoyed the experience of playing somebody who’s seemingly so satisfied with himself. I was approached by Ryan [Murphy, director] and I didn’t know the book very well, but had friends who had really enjoyed it and spoke reverently of their experiences reading it. I was a fan of Julia’s and the other actors as well.

MO: Can you paint a behind-the-scenes picture for us of life on set? You can use one scene as an example, maybe even your favorite scene.

(BC): Well, most of the work we did on the script and with the characters came from the process of rehearsal. It’s great to have the luxury to rehearse. Ryan was interested in improvisation and seeing what we could come up with to expand our understanding of the specificity of their [Liz Gilbert and Stephen’s] relationship previous to their divorce. That was fun and exciting to through out ideas. I’ve never been involved with a job where they encouraged so much improvisation. Consequently, we were able to come up with a lot of things that were singular to us, and that was a real unique way of working. There’s a scene in the lawyer’s office where we confront each other. We were improvising one day and apparently her new boyfriend was a singer-songwriter, so I said “I’ll write a song for you” and came up with the “Quitter” song. I was just doing it as a way of talking through this idea, and Ryan wanted to keep it. I said, “Wait a second, you don’t really want me to do that in front of people, do you?” Sure enough, he did.