Billy Crudup and Matthew Goode Watchmen Interview

MoviesOnline sat down with Tony Award winner Billy Crudup and Matthew Goode to talk about their new movie, “Watchmen,” the big screen adaptation of the most celebrated graphic novel of all time, brought to life for the first time by visionary director Zack Snyder. A complex, multi-layered mystery adventure, "Watchmen" is set in an alternate 1985 America, a world darkened by fear and paranoia where regular human beings who once donned masks to fight crime now hide from their identifies and where the ultimate weapon--an all-powerful superbeing--has tilted the global balance of power, pushing the world implacably closer to nuclear midnight.

Billy Crudup plays Dr. Manhattan, the only Mask with true superpowers. Before the accident in a nuclear lab that forever altered his life, Dr. Manhattan was Jon Osterman, the son of a watchmaker, a brilliant physicist and "a quintessential '50s male," says Crudup, the actor behind the blue light that emanates from Manhattan's body. The accident transformed Jon Osterman into a superbeing, who experiences past, present and future at once and has the power to control matter itself.

Adrian Veidt, aka Ozymandias (Goode), has already established a new purpose beyond his previous life as a Mask. The world's smartest man and now one of its richest, Veidt retired before the Keene Act outlawed costume heroes and made his fortune exploiting the masked vigilante era in the form of action figures, cartoons, perfumes, books and movies. Nevertheless, he believes he has a higher calling and seeks to perfect the human condition.

Billy Crudup has tackled a diverse mix of roles on both the stage and screen. Most recently, he starred in the independent films "Pretty Bird," which screened at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, and "Dedication," opposite Mandy Moore. In 2006, he was seen in Robert De Niro's drama "The Good Shepherd," with Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie, and in J.J. Abrams' "Mission: Impossible III," starring Tom Cruise. He next portrays J. Edgar Hoover in the 1930s-set crime drama "Public Enemies," directed by Michael Mann.

An accomplished stage actor, Crudup won a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play for his role in the 2006 Broadway production of "The Coast of Utopia." He has also been honored with two Tony Award nominations in the category of Best Leading Actor in a Play, the first for his performance in the 2002 revival of "The Elephant Man," and another for his role in the 2005 production of Martin McDonagh's "The Pillowman."

Matthew Goode follows "Watchmen" with a starring role in Tom Ford's feature film directorial debut, "A Single Man," based on the Christopher Isherwood novel. He next stars opposite Amy Adams in the romantic comedy "Leap Year," being filmed in Ireland under the direction of Anand Tucker. Last year, Goode starred as Charles Ryder in the 2008 feature film adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's classic novel "Brideshead Revisited," directed by Julian Jarrold. His other recent film credits include Scott Frank's crime drama "The Lookout," with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jeff Daniels and Isla Fisher. He also starred in Woody Allen's widely acclaimed crime drama "Match Point," with Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Scarlett Johansson, Emily Mortimer and Brian Cox.

Billy Crudup and Matthew Goode are fabulous guys and we really appreciated their time. Here’s what they had to tell us about “Watchmen”:

Q: I saw the movie with a friend last night and she told me that she did not recognize you at all.

MATTHEW GOODE: In this? Yeah. It’s the Bowie thing that I’ve got going. I can live with that. Well that’s good.

Q: That’s gratifying.

MATTHEW GOODE: That’s very gratifying and also probably one of the things that’s stalling my career... (laughs) …but in a good way. Did she enjoy it?

Q: Yes, she did.

MATTHEW GOODE: Good.

Q: But I had to explain. She said “Who was that?” “Matthew Goode.”

MATTHEW GOODE: That’s kind of nice, isn’t it? It’s good for when performances don’t work out and they’re bad and they didn’t realize it was me in the first place.

Q: Dr. Manhattan is supposedly the only character who has true superpowers. In the movie and the graphic novel, they’re very coy about Ozymandias who does things that could be construed as more than human. Was it important to you to define how he got all that?

MATTHEW GOODE: Well there’s so much of Adrian that’s not defined at all. You could say that about a lot of the characters, but mostly, even more so for Adrian, everything is incredibly hazy and he’s in very little scenes in the construct of the book. Really, with the way that the film works, they take that interview that’s done right at the end and they sort of amalgamate that into a couple of earlier scenes. Really and truly, Adrian exists as part of a literary conceit of the idea that Germans are guilty for what happened to the Jews and Americans don’t see the guilt that they were involved in dropping bombs on Japan and that’s one of the reasons I think we went for that sort of interesting duality with Adrian, but to answer your question, yeah.

BILLY CRUDUP: (laughs) To answer your question, yeah?

MATTHEW GOODE: It’s just very hard. I know I’m not Adrian physically and I didn’t have time to prepare and do that because it was two days after Brideshead (Revisited) that I popped up so I couldn’t really have been giving it that with Charles Ryder and then once you’ve shot your first scene, you can’t suddenly be that. He’s on the cusp of being superhuman, isn’t he, but that was Zack’s take on it, because he’s not muscular. He’s all about speed and that sort of links nicely into the fact that he’s that intelligent that maybe his reactions are going to be blithe.

BILLY CRUDUP: Blithe.

MATTHEW GOODE: (accented voice) I’m done. Billy Crudup, ladies and gentlemen. Ask him.

Q: Billy, after all the screaming about casting, so many people commented on what a great acting job you did, was that a concern considering how much your performance was filtered through a computer?

BILLY CRUDUP: You know, I think we should just leave it at that. Why ask questions when you’ve made a comment like that? (smiles) Thanks very much.

Q: How tricky was it as an actor to give yourself over to the director in a way that you hadn’t before, especially when you really didn’t know how this was going to turn out in the end?

BILLY CRUDUP: Well first, I’m very pleased that anybody was saying [that]. That’s very nice to hear. It was an exotic and interesting job to undertake and my typical response after playing almost every scene because there was something unsatisfying about playing somebody who was lost in terms of their own motivation and their disconnect from humanity. It was often very unsatisfying. You don’t have the gratification that you do playing… Let’s see, how can I put this? Most things that are written to be filmed are dramatic in some way so you have a kind of catharsis and there’s a narrative to follow each scene in the characters that you are playing. There’s an event that happens. Dr. Manhattan lives in a kind of netherworld. He knows what’s going to happen with things. He’s just going through the motions of things. There’s no catharsis in playing most of the scenes that you do so you’re kind of left like “Heyyyy” at the end of them. I remember turning to the CGI guys each time going, “Well, good luck with that one.” There was a kind of levity to being involved in that collaboration. I felt really lucky. I was really enjoying that part of the process. Because had you said to me, “People came out thinking ‘you kind of blew,’” I could have said, “Well, that’s the CGI guys, the dope smokers over there. They didn’t get it.”

Q: Did it take a long time to hit that precise tone of passivity?

BILLY CRUDUP: It was a weird thing to find and it was never something we kind of settled on. Also too, it’s one of the problems with ADR which is looping and you can see it all the time in people when you know that that scene has been voiced, has been dubbed, and people have done it in post. It’s usually because there’s a disconnect between the voice and the body. There was always a disconnect between the voice and the body for me because this guy was 6’4 and 240 and finding which placement of voice was going to work for that body was a difficult thing to find. It wasn’t really until post production that I think I found what it was we were after most of the time and was able to piece together some of the things that worked and some of the things that didn’t.

MATTHEW GOODE: That’s what I always find so funny with foreign cinema is the fact if you’ve ever seen anything…then there’s always one guy who does DeNiro or whatever…but it’s hard enough for us to fuckin’ do it, let alone they have to do an entire movie.

BILLY CRUDUP: Yeah, it’s true, it’s true. It must be. I mean, that’s a talent.

Q: Were both of you familiar with the source material prior to making the movie?

MATTHEW GOODE: No, not at all.

BILLY CRUDUP: No. We were not.

Q: Did you realize at some point that this is like the Citizen Kane of graphic novels?

BILLY CRUDUP: My younger brother is a big graphic novel fan. In fact, after I had read a couple of pages of it and saw that it was so different from what I had expected, I called to see what he thought of it. There was a pregnant pause that told me all I needed to know about where it sat in terms of the value for people who were fans of comic books.

MATTHEW GOODE: No, I wasn’t aware. I was actually working on a film and one of the other actors saw that I was reading. He said, “What are you reading?” “Oh, it’s the film for Watchmen.” He was just like (blown away), “Which character are you going up for?” “Ozymandias.” And then he was (envious), “Fuck! Well, good luck with that. I really hope you get it.”

BILLY CRUDUP: That was my brother’s response too. He’s not an actor but he was like, “Fuck you!”

Q: When you were reading the script, what was it about the character that really made you want to do it?

BILLY CRUDUP: I was curious about it. I didn’t understand how you could accomplish playing somebody like that, you know, both in the practical aspect of it and in the philosophical or psychological aspect of it. Whenever there’s something where there’s a problem to be solved in the character, it peaks my interest. I guess that was part of the excitement and exhilaration for me was to try and figure out Dr. Manhattan.

MATTHEW GOODE: I was one of the people who came on, let’s face it, later…

BILLY CRUDUP: Oh, and the money.

MATTHEW GOODE: (laughs) Yeah. I wasn’t the latest to be cast but I knew that Billy was involved and obviously Zack had done “300,” so there was that. And then, I seemed to be so wrong as the choice for Adrian that I was just curious – that’s absolutely the right word – I just wanted to find out why Zack thought that it would be a very good idea for me to do it and then, obviously having read it, I thought, “Well God, that’s going to be hard, isn’t it?” Having already played a villain in something in which I’d had certain ambiguous villainy blah, blah, blah, verti-commas, it sort of peaked my interest. I’ve done the villain thing and sometimes people get pissed off when you don’t give them a “aha ha ha” villain. They don’t like their villains sometimes to be human and intelligent. They want two dimensional and that sucks when you put your soul into something and you haven’t fulfilled what they want. And so, with this, you say [to yourself] well what do people want and what is right and yeah, I’m still not sure about it. I like to work on things that scare the shit out of me and with this really there were no bowel movements left. (laughs)

Q: This is a case where the text is sacred. Zack really wanted to tell the book as much as he could. For you guys, how did you approach that?

MATTHEW GOODE: We’re heathens so we didn’t give a shit.

Q: Did you keep returning to Alan Moore’s Dr. Manhattan to figure him out?

BILLY CRUDUP: Yeah, I kept returning to it because to have the depth of that kind of source material, particularly on something that was so challenging to comprehend and to play, I found sometimes that I would solve the problem of a scene in my head and then, when it came down to playing the scene, I was left frustrated that I couldn’t accomplish what I thought the scene was about and so having the source material to go back to, to try and articulate motivations or nuances, was really helpful.

MATTHEW GOODE: I think in some of the writings behind some of it it’s laid out. Obviously you don’t want your performance to be as two-dimensional as the book. As opposed to if there’d been a TV series available or something and you’d been watching it, you might pick up something subconsciously or whatever. There are so many great gesticulations and things that do shape the character – be it the catching of the bullet – and you’re thinking that would be really interesting to try and absolutely get that right. You have to find the character first and I think Adrian is quite changed because we gave him the public and the private persona. You sort of can hear the voices actually when you read the book.

BILLY CRUDUP: Yeah. But also, do you remember in Absolute Watchmen? There’s this version of the Watchmen called the Absolute Watchmen that has a lot of different source material in it too, but it also has whole character descriptions, like pages of text about the characters that Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons came up with that I thought was incredibly helpful. I referenced it quite a bit.

Q: Were there influences besides Watchmen?

BILLY CRUDUP: No, actually this to me was enough. It was a big enough task to try and accomplish what it was asking of me. I didn’t have time to pull references from… You know, I don’t do that so much as it is anyway. I tend to use the text in my imagination for better or worse. Some actors are really great at associating that character with somebody they’ve seen before or with a piece of music and I’m not really that kind of actor. I’m not smart enough for that.

Q: Matthew, you did some David Bowie for it?

MATTHEW GOODE:  Yeah, well I think that’s just one of the design elements to the character that they used referencing that and obviously having it with the Studio 54 where Bowie and Mick Jagger are hanging out outside. I didn’t want that because obviously I’m not the same frame so they had to find somebody who’s… and obviously the whole thing is about pop culture referencing so it just seems to make sense with them I think. (to Billy) It was an interesting workday, wasn’t it?

Q: With this kind of story, was it easy to escape to an alternate world and inhabit your character when you have a costume that allows you to be so free and uninhibited?

BILLY CRUDUP: It’s interesting that the actual process of it was quite constrictive because the suit that I was wearing was constricted in terms of it was also a lighting instrument. I was there to light the other characters basically and because Dr. Manhattan is supposed to glow blue when I move my hand like this, they want to see the blue move across his face. So the way that they accomplished that was with about 1200 blue LEDs that were all over my body and all over my head. I had a cap there and it was really elaborately wired so that they could dim the LEDs based upon what the camera could accept and what they needed to do for lighting and it was powered by battery packs that I wore on my hip. This is not technology that they had used for anything before. It was brand new. They built the suit for this. There was quite a bit of trial and error. That was very constrictive actually, so it was not as free an experience playing the character as it may seem from his nudity.

MATTHEW GOODE: And also, I guarantee that there were days when people were like grizzly because they had to be in make-up for 7 or 8 hours. People were like, “Wish we had Billy’s fucking pajamas to put on.”

BILLY CRUDUP: Oh yeah, that’s true. From that point of view, some of the other guys…oh yeah, that was just about every day. Yeah. I was a pain in the ass about it for about 3 days until I saw Jeffrey Dean Morgan in his get-up. He came in about 3 hours before I did and basically all I had to do was go into the make-up chair and put on this little mask that was a template for the dots and they would go ‘do,do,do,do,do’ and do all the dots. That would take about 20 minutes or something and then put on the elaborate pajamas, that was another 20 minutes, but it was nothing compared to the 3 hours that they were doing before so I was very self-satisfied after I …

MATTHEW GOODE: Yeah. He had 6 hours of make-up each day.

BILLY CRUDUP: And I didn’t have to train either.

MATTHEW GOODE: Yeah.

Q: Did the fact that you had no eyes, or point of contact that people could identify with, affect your performance?

BILLY CRUDUP: Again, the experience of doing it was definitely different than the rendering of it in film. There was some idea before that Zack was going to use more of the eyes so I never considered sort of being blind or obstructing my…

MATTHEW GOODE: I think it would be very off putting if we weren’t able to see your eyes. I think it would have been very…

BILLY CRUDUP: Really?

MATTHEW GOODE: Yeah.

BILLY CRUDUP: Considering the fact that I had all those dots on my face and I was wearing the blue pajamas.

MATTHEW GOODE: Once we got over that, but I mean, without joking about it, you know.

BILLY CRUDUP: Yeah?

MATTHEW GOODE: Yeah. It was [inaudible] looking at you…

BILLY CRUDUP: Well that was part of it too, that we were going to have some more eyes. I never used that sentence before. (laughs)

Q: Now that you’ve had the experience of making a comic book movie, how do you feel about any future roles that you might take?

BILLY CRUDUP: Is that an offer? Because I accept.

Q: On the web there were always people speculating who’s going to play Iron Man or Superman or Batman and sometimes your name has come up with other roles. Did you go out for any of those?

BILLY CRUDUP: I don’t think I was ever offered any of those but the thing that was most interesting was the script for this was so subversive. That’s the thing that got my imagination going more than the fact that it was a comic book movie, that it was expansive and it was confusing and subtle and theatrical. Yeah, I don’t know.

MATTHEW GOODE: For me, I honestly don’t know if the fans would let me get away with it. I’m not sure. This is the best of the best. I don’t think there’s anything… If Alan Moore wrote something again… No one really wanted me to be in this one in the first place so I think I’ll just cut my losses and run with it, but you never know. Who knows?

Q: Did you have a favorite superhero movie prior to Watchmen -- something that you liked either as a kid or just recently?

MATTHEW GOODE: I liked the Rocketeer when I was young. It took me a while, when I was 5 or 6, and I’d seen the old black and white one. I used to be scared shitless of it until someone told me that he was the hero and then I was like, “Oh cool!” I used to run out of the room. So that was one I used to think was kind of cool but maybe that’s because it was again set in the 30s and 40s, which seems to make more sense for that sort of good and bad. That was a great era for it rather than being updated now although Iron Man did it brilliantly, I think. I don’t know where superheroes fit in these days set in the 2000s. Good answer, Billy. (laughs)

Q: This is such a new frontier with some of the best superhero material we’ve seen in years. It’s really interesting to see you guys take these roles.

MATTHEW GOODE: Chris Nolan really helped, didn’t he, with the redoing of Batman. Batman became quite bastardized and not as dark as the original material. I think that’s one of the great things that’s come back into superhero movies is the adult. It’s the fact that these are quite serious. It’s quite nice to see people get killed and dark shit happens to them rather than it’s like the 18s and everyone goes home…

BILLY CRUDUP: Did you say it’s quite nice to see people get killed?

MATTHEW GOODE: Yeah, it is. That’s one of the great things…

BILLY CRUDUP: You mean as in a scene.

MATTHEW GOODE: Yeah, in the film. That’s one of the things that’s slightly shocking in Watchmen is people get their arms cut off. It’s quite jolting.

BILLY CRUDUP: Yeah, I’ll say.

MATTHEW GOODE: I’m in shock. I’m really having a bad session today.

BILLY CRUDUP: (laughing) What are you talking about?

MATTHEW GOODE: Exactly.

“Watchmen” opens in theaters on March 6th.