Billy Crudup on The Morning Show, moral cowardice, and Minneapolis as a police state

Speaker 00:00

[upbeat jingle] This is a Global Player original podcast.

Emily Maitlis· Host0:05

We're gonna do things a bit differently on this episode of The News Agents USA. There has been so much American news, so much Trump news wading into our daily show, that today we're going to take stock with a bit of a Hollywood legend. It's the actor Billy Crudup. You will have seen him in The Morning Show as the hyper-energetic, hyper-magnetic, arch manipulator, severe depressive, Cory Ellison. You may have caught him as the actor haunted by his best friend's success alongside George Clooney in the recently released J. Kelly. Right now, you can catch him here on the London stage in a Western, literally the play of the award-winning Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly movie, High Noon. At the time that was released, it was intensely controversial as a powerful allegory of McCarthyism, the blacklisting of Hollywood. What is it trying to tell us now?

Speaker 00:56

[upbeat music] The News Agents USA with Emily Maitlis and John Sopel.

Emily Maitlis· Host1:02

Billy, welcome. Lovely to have you here.

Billy Crudup· Guest1:04

I'm so happy to be here. Thank you for having me.

Emily Maitlis· Host1:07

We came, we saw, we, we very much enjoyed the play on Monday night.

Billy Crudup· Guest1:11

Thank you.

Emily Maitlis· Host1:11

But for those who don't know it, and for maybe our lot of younger audience who won't maybe know the film at all- Sure. ... just talk us through, tell us the story.

Billy Crudup· Guest1:21

Well, the American Western is a genre of cinema that has, uh, roots way back to the invention of