In ‘Hello Tomorrow!’ Billy Crudup channels his own father’s ‘annoying’ optimism

For Emmy-winning actor Billy Crudup, playing the role of a hopelessly optimistic salesman on Apple TV Plus series “Hello Tomorrow!” hit close to home: the character reminds him of his own salesman father — and an unending optimism that “got annoying as hell.”

In the show, which debuted Friday, Crudup plays Jack, who hawks lunar time shares in a futuristic version of the 1950s, inspiring both co-workers and customers with his unshakable faith in a brighter tomorrow.

“There’s no question the optimism that Jack is imbued with through me is coming from old Tom Crudup queued up there or maybe down there,” he laughed. “I’m not sure where he is these days. In the face of any obstacle, there was nothing but opportunity … sometimes he would go around them, sometimes he would go under them, sometimes he would erase them, sometimes he would turn his back and run the other way. The key to each of those moves was he knew that around the other side was going to be a brighter path forward.

“For us as his children, his three boys, that got annoying as hell, too. When he would say, ‘No, no, we got everything taken care of.’ And then the lights would go out and my mom would go, ‘Tommy!’ He would then say, ‘Goddamn, I mailed them the bill. Not even mail works anymore. Let me wander outside and see if I can get this taken care of,’” Crudup said in an interview.

Creators Amit Bhalla and Lucas Jansen wanted to tell a story about people chasing the American dream: “negotiating that distance between the shiny sales pitch and the reality in which we inevitably have to live,” Jansen said. “By the time you’ve taken the journey of the 10 episodes of the first season, you will see it’s far more fraught than you could have ever imagined.”

“We desperately wanted to make something that people had never seen before, which was a fraught idea and a very difficult one and an ambitious one,” added Bhalla, who’s from Toronto. “The world came out of 1950s mid-century advertising, where you’ve sold the kitchen of tomorrow, and everybody’s smiling and there’s special soap that makes everything cleaner.

“And we said, ‘Well, the show is about dreamers. Let’s put them in this dream, and see what happens when the dream becomes lived in and the robots don’t really work all the time, and the people in the world treat them the way we treat our technology, which is it’s run of the mill. They’re not saying, ‘Oh, my God, there’s a hover car!’ It’s just a car to them.”

Crudup said Bhalla’s and Jansen’s work helped him understand Jack profoundly, even though “Jack feels totally apart from me … what they have done in their creation of who Jack is felt very clear and I related to their really humane exploration of him.”

Jansen praised the actor’s “dedicated sense of the role where he was both willing to wade into the pain of his own past to encounter his father as an idea and also to draw from it (such) beautiful details all over the story.”

The writer recalled a scene at the beginning of the series when Jack sits down at a bar and the first thing he does is rearrange his silverware. “Billy said to us, ‘Whatever you do, you do not cut that moment with the silverware because my father would do that every time he goddamn sat down.’ And the reason is that he lived a life that felt so out of control at all times, he had a compulsive need to order the few things he could in his world. ‘If I can set my silverware in place, well, maybe I feel like I can make it through the next five minutes, maybe the next 10, maybe the next hour, maybe the next day.’

“It was such a pleasure to have an actor who was so dedicated at that minute of a level and it raised up the work … of everybody around us on set,” Jansen said.

Crudup has recently drawn a lot of attention late in his career, with his work as Cory Ellison on “The Morning Show” earning him an Emmy.

“It’s astounding when you get to be 41 … OK, 54,” he said laughing. “You’ve seen the ups and downs throughout your career, you’ve seen the expectations and the failures, and the things that almost became, the roles that you almost got and the roles that you got that you weren’t quite ready to play. And I feel now, having been in the business for so long, I’ve built up some calluses, I’ve built up some muscles and I’m ready to play these extraordinary characters, and people are giving me the opportunity.”

As Jack, Crudup leads with a force that is quite palpable and not just to viewers. In fact, he brought crew members to tears.

“On set we had crew members weeping every week because the performance is so rugged,” Bhalla said. “He’s giving his all; he’s fighting and the rest of the cast is trying to move up to his level. And in that way, he’s Jack, he’s inspiring everybody to commit to this crazy thing. It was as profound a gift as you could ever ask as a writer to have.”

“I never expected to be crying in public as much as I was over the last year,” Jansen added.

There were also tears for Nicholas Podany, 26, who plays Jack’s son, Joey. “We have a scene in Episode 9, and I went home and I told my girlfriend that that experience of doing that scene is something I want to hold on to for as long as I can because it was pretty amazing to watch. You get to an emotional place, so much so that you’d start tearing up.”

When asked how he defines his own American dream, Crudup said that growing up, “my parents made all of us participate in civics in one way or another. We had to be on the student council or we had to go out canvassing for local political candidates. I had to sign up for Boy Scouts and things like that.

“That was all indoctrinating you into the American culture of dreaming possibilities, duty, civil service, all those things and then you forget to ask the question when you’re a kid: ‘What is this for? What is the thing again?’ Your dad says, ‘Well, it’s for America and the American ideal life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ and you don’t stop to think, ‘OK, what does that mean to a nine-year-old exactly?’

“Now I think of the American dream as potential: if we can reach for some of the possibilities that make for a better society for everybody we will be fulfilling the most rich aspect of the American dream.”

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