Billy Crudup interview: ‘The Morning Show’
In Season 1 of “The Morning Show,” Cory Ellison (Billy Crudup) is the cutthroat head of UBA’s news division who keeps his cards close to his vest and walks in and out of rooms grinning like a Cheshire cat. Cut to Season 3 and he’s still ruthless, enigmatic and grinning his way through all kinds of high-stakes situations, but he’s now the CEO of the fictional UBA network and has, most importantly, been brought to the fore of the Apple TV+ drama’s story. While his enlarged presence in the third season offers viewers more insight into the character, Crudup wasn’t quite sure what to think of it at first.
“The story itself is about an examination of the patriarchy and how industries across the spectrum are affected in small ways and in macro ways. And so, the redistribution of power, or the destabilization of the inherited patriarchy, seemed to me to be one of the targets of the show… And to that end, it seemed to me the most likely protagonists would be people who didn’t occupy the demographic scale and scope of the sorts of figures that we were examining as tacitly inheriting power,” the Emmy winner tells Gold Derby (watch the exclusive video interview above). “[What also] comes to mind is that this particular character works best — or, in my opinion, had worked best — with a level of inscrutability that made not just the characters on the show uncomfortable and destabilized with what seemed like capricious decisions he would make on a grand scale with a joyful levity, but also kept the audience guessing about what sort of conventional figure he was in this storytelling. So to that end, I thought I could be most successful at both — if he comes and goes intermittently and without a level of predictability that allows the audience and the characters to know too much about him.”
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Even when some of Cory’s schemes and motivations are unclear in the first two seasons, though, there is one thing the people around him and viewers of the series alike know for a fact about the character: He is usually the most powerful person in whatever room he’s in. But with tech billionaire Paul Marks (Jon Hamm) entering the picture as he looks to acquire UBA, Cory finds himself up against someone who’s much more powerful than him in Season 3.
“[Paul has] resources that Cory simply doesn’t have. Cory has incredible leverage power and resources by any normal measure, but within the sphere of the 0.001 percent of people, Cory is miniscule. Paul is a monster, he’s monolithic… and with that kind of leverage, you have an army of people around you. It’s not simply you walking down the hall; you’re walking with a horde. And that presents a certain kind of gravity, that this is the first opportunity that Corry has had to get in the ring with someone of that kind of muscle,” Crudup highlights. “To be fair, there’s only a certain number of people like that in the world. So your chances of encountering them, even if you are in the upper echelon, is very slim. So Cory is definitely punching above his weight — and there is an exhilaration and a thrill to that, not the least of which because [Paul]’s another rich white guy. And Cory is not entirely sure how he came about his enormous wealth and suspects, like almost all of our billionaires, there’s a lot of luck and timing that’s involved.”
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In the seventh episode of the season, Cory travels to Connecticut with Bradley (Reese Witherspoon) to shut down a political strategist who has been ringing up their connections at the Department of Justice to discuss UBA’s upcoming deal with Paul. That strategist, however, turns out to be none other than Cory’s mother, Martha (Lindsay Duncan), whom viewers meet for the first time in this installment.
“You get a sense of why Cory is so thoughtful,” Crudup argues when asked what Cory’s dynamic with his mother reveals about him as a person. “Whether he inherited that genetically or inherited it experientially, it was his mom. His mom is a thoughtful, intelligent, considerate, looks-around-the-corner-of-the-room [person and a] political beast, and the chance to grow up around somebody like that and witness that kind of intellectual dexterity, I think, promoted his own kind of pursuit to improve his knowledge and understanding of curiosity, etc. Additionally, seeing the ways in which the world treated her — from his point of view, unfairly — I think created, or is one of the pillars of, his ideology of equity. And additionally, her flaws, not the least of which is her emotional unpredictability, make Cory really good at managing people — and managing people whose egos are… sometimes unmanageable.”
