Billy Crudup Interview - Watchmen at Comic Con 2008
Billy Crudup plays Jon Osterman and the supercharged, super-intelligent Dr. Manhattan in one of the most anticipated movies of '09: 'Watchmen.' At Comic Con, Crudup discussed his part in the film version of the greatest graphic novel ever written.
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Transcript: Billy Crudup Interview - Watchmen at Comic Con 2008
Rebecca Murray from About.com Hollywood Movies at the 2008 San Diego Comic Con.
Billy Crudup – 'Jon Osterman' / 'Dr Manhattan' in Watchmen
You're basically doing two different characters so how tough is it to take him from there and put him to Dr Manhattan?
Billy Crudup: "Well, I guess Osterman gets lost pretty quickly when he's annihilated so there was very little of him left. There's only a kind of tepid fight internally in him about trying to preserve his humanity, you know? He becomes pretty transfixed with the physical world, with the way particles move, and the way stars grow and die. So I just, rather than thinking of it in terms of Osterman losing himself, I was always trying to think of what he had gained. He's still stuck in the human interactive world so that was really the obstacle, because his passion was then about the physical world."
How tough is it to play a character who knows everything all the time?
Billy Crudup: "It was impossible. It was ridiculous. Because asking the questions that you normally ask as an actor, you set yourself up for expectations and then in the course of the set, they're either fulfilled or diminished, or not attended to or new ones come up. So as you know everything as an actor, it leaves you kind of depleted of some of your most fundamental tools. Zack and I had a lot of conversations. He had to put up with me chatting it up quite a bit for a while because I couldn't figure out what to do."
Did you turn to the graphic novel a lot?
Billy Crudup: "It was a great resource for it, but it's not… In order to internalize it requires a kind of paradigm shift that I didn't possess. I had to sort of develop it."
One last question about the motion capture suit – how quickly did you forget you had it on?
Billy Crudup: "Never. It was terrible. It was so hard to imagine that I was the master of all matter while I was wearing the saggy pajamas."
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