Actor Billy Crystal on Apple TV+ show Before: ‘Having lost friends to suicide, you beat yourself up’
Yolanthe Fawehinmi chats to Billy Crystal, Rosie Perez, Sarah Thorp and Jacobi Jube about the difficult themes explored in Apple TV+ show Before.
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There are only a few things that get Billy Crystal mad: stupidity, hate, and disinformation.
The 76-year-old Emmy Award and Tony Award-winning American actor, best known for his role of Harry Burns in When Harry Met Sally, and as the voice of Mike Wazowski in the Pixar animated Monsters, Inc. franchise, stars as Eli, a child psychiatrist, who also recently lost his wife Lynn to suicide, in the new 10-part Apple TV+ psychological thriller Before, which he’s also an executive producer on.
“Can we get political? Stupidity makes me mad. Hate makes me mad. Disinformation makes me mad,” says Crystal, who has received numerous honours including a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1991.
“Lack of kindness or empathy makes me mad,” adds the Emmy Award-winning American actress Judith Light, 75, who stars in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and ABC comedy-drama Ugly Betty, and plays Eli’s wife Lynn in the atmospheric drama. “Unprofessionalism, disregard, disrespect for other people.”
During a therapy session, Eli plays ‘The Mad Game’ – where you have to state what makes you the most mad after adding a building block to a ever-growing tower – with a troubled young boy called Noah, played by British actor Jacobi Jupe, 11, who stars in Peter Pan & Wendy, and Hamnet, and seems to have a haunting connection with Eli’s past.
As the character-driven series goes on, viewers begin to see why Eli is haunted by his personal demons, needs to face his deepest fears and how he’s coping with being the one his wife left behind.
“Eli’s the one who’s been left behind. And for somebody like him who is a brilliant therapist for the young [with] troubled minds, to not figure out [what was going on with his wife Lynn], and how he can help himself, [this has an impact on him]. How did he miss this?” says Crystal.
“There’s a mystery about it that’s more complicated than just that. Having lost friends to suicide, you beat yourself up. What could I have done? What should I have said? Was I part of this? Why didn’t he or she reach out to me? I could have helped.
“If someone’s made up their mind to do it, they’re going to do it, but in our show, it’s more complicated than that, and the audience will find that out as we go, what appears to be one thing, maybe is something else.”
This is one of the reasons why Sarah Thorp – the show’s creator, show-runner, writer and executive producer – felt it was important to explore themes like grief, suicide and confronting the traumas from our past in Before.
“For me, I love psychological thrillers that are rooted in character and some emotional core. This show really is that. All of the genres come out of the struggles that these characters are having with grief and unresolved trauma, and how do you manage these things that we all experience to a certain extent?” says Thorp.
“There’s no fix-all for that, you have to work your way through it. And so, that’s the kind of show that I love to see, where you get to have the tension and the scares and some genre stuff. But at the end of the day, we’re telling an emotional story.”
Through the complex relationship Noah (Jupe) has with his foster mother Denise, played by Academy Award-nominated American actress Rosie Perez, 60, who previously starred as Tina in Do the Right Thing, Thorp was able to also debunk some of the myths attached to foster care.
“They came to me offering a different role. I turned it down, and I said, ‘But this is going to be a hit, and whoever you get to play Denise, make sure she plays it [like] A, B and C’. Billy [Crystal] knew my past, but they did not, and we ended up speaking for an hour. By the end, I was crying. They came back a couple of days later and said. ‘We want to offer you Denise’. I was terrified,” says Perez
“What I wanted to bring to it was all the people that gave me hope, who gave me love in a terrible situation of being in foster care. Because there are good people. Yes, there are a lot of bad people, but there are a lot of good people.
“I wanted to bring a person who just wanted to give love to somebody else, who wanted to pay it forward and help them not have a terrible life. That was my approach. And what was written on the page was a great asset. Another thing that was great is that the communication lines were very open with Sarah, Eric and Billy – we discussed it a lot. It wasn’t me creating this character, it was a team effort.”
“The second that we spoke to Rosie [Perez] about this, you could tell there’s the character on the page, and then there’s what she was going to do with it. She brought such intense emotion and connection, and every scene that she and Jacobi [Jupe] have is incredibly emotional and powerful, and she just felt very tapped into that,” says Thorp.
Jupe couldn’t agree with Thorp more, and says acting alongside Crystal and Perez was an amazing experience.
“They’re both such incredible actors and such lovely people. They really helped me to get to the place that Noah is at, because he’s in a very difficult place that I’m not sure your everyday child would be in. But he’s holding on, and Sarah [Thorp], Rosie [Perez] and Billy [Crystal] all helped me to build on this character, and I’m proud of him,” says Jupe.
“I have to say, it never felt like we had a child actor on set. He was always right there with Billy [Crystal], right there with Rosie. There was no question of whether we [were] going to need a little extra time because Jacobi [Jupe] needs to take a break or go lie down, he was never like that. He was right up with everybody else. He was incredible,” adds Thorp.
Before will premiere globally on Apple TV+ with the first two episodes on Friday, October 25, with new episodes weekly every Friday through December 20.