THE REAL STAR OF 'JAY KELLY'

BILLY CRUDUP ON HOW HE DELIVERED ONE OF THE SEASON'S MOST STRIKING PERFORMANCES IN JUST TWO SCENES AS AN ACTOR WHO NEVER MADE IT IN NOAH BAUMBACH'S HOLLYWOOD SATIRE

- BY JOSH ROTTENBERG

CRUDUP won two Emmys for "The Morning Show," below right. In "Jay Kelly," his raw turn alongside George Clooney's aging actor, left, is drawing attention.

BEXX FRANCOIS For The Times

BILLY CRUDUP KNEW the first time he read it that the part was nearly impossible. In Noah Baumbach's sharply funny, at times melancholy Hollywood satire "Jay Kelly," George Clooney plays an aging movie star reckoning with what his success has cost him. Early in the film, a chance reunion with an old acting-class buddy named Timothy, played by Crudup, sends him into an existential tailspin of doubt and regret.

In just two scenes and roughly 10 minutes of screen time, Crudup's Timothy - once a promising actor and now a child therapist who long ago walked away from the business has to rekindle a friendship, surface decades of envy, swing from reminiscence to resentment and pick a fight that devolves into clumsy fisticuffs. The centerpiece is a moment in which he performs a Method reading of a dinner menu that dissolves into sobbing. On paper, it's the kind of sequence that could go wrong in a hundred ways.

"I was like, 'F-, that's really hard to execute," Crudup, 57, says with a self-deprecating laugh over Zoom from his New York apartment, wearing a hoodie and baseball cap. "I really wanted to be in one of Noah's movies, but that particular stunt has a high degree of difficulty. The whole scene is like a novella. And the narrative is predicated on it working. It has to."

Against all odds, it does, and then some. "Jay Kelly" (now in theaters; on Netflix Dec. 5) is anchored by a starry ensemble, including Clooney as the conflicted leading man, Adam Sandler as his steadfast manager and Laura Dern as his long-suffering publicist.