by Sean M. Smith photography by Taryn Simon October 2000

The cuts across the pavement, a loose-shouldered stride, -direct but unhurried. He pauses, glancing at the blazing sand, the blinding blue of the Pacific, and decides against remaining outside. Too bright. Too exposed. He turns away and disappears into the soft shadows of a beachfront café.

He's an actor, a good one. He's made ten movies in four years. You probably haven't seen them. He wishes you would. He'd prefer you saw more theater, too. He's a stage -actor at heart. Five years ago, he landed a lead role on Broadway straight out of NYU grad school, in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. He won an Outer Critics Circle Award for that one. He's 32. He lives in Manhattan. And ever since the camera first closed in, lingered there on the intricate architecture of his face, people have predicted (insisted, even) that Billy Crudup will be a movie star.

They're wrong.

"I don't want to have a good time," he says, almost smiling. His caramel-colored eyes flash as he rises to the riff. "Give me the pain! I want to walk down Avenue A in my leather jacket, weeping in the rain, crying out to the night!" Cute. But he's only half-joking, right? "Yeah," he says, suddenly serious. "That's why it's funny."

His 11th film, out this month, is Almost Famous. It took writer-director Cameron Crowe (Jerry Maguire) several years to come up with that title, and it suits both the story and the star. (That's why it's funny.) At 15, Crowe bluffed his way into writing for Rolling Stone magazine and the year after went on the road with the Allman Brothers Band. The film is an epic love letter to that 1970s adolescence: witty, -romantic, and heart-rending. o Crudup plays Russell Hammond, the lead guitarist of Stillwater, a fictional rock band on the rise. Charismatic and passionate, Hammond secretly believes that he is the real source of Stillwater's success. But when his own fame begins to eclipse the band's, he hates it. "He wants to be uncluttered," Crudup says. "He wants the music to speak for itself, but ego, fans, the record industry, are starting to get in the way. The music is starting to get compromised." These are parallel concerns for Crudup. "Acting, drama, it's important in my life, and I want to believe that I'm doing something valuable with my energy," he says. "I don't understand what a lifestyle of fame gets you." Well, a jet, for one thing. "What am I going to do with a fucking jet, man? The costs to me are so much greater. My occupation is to make people believe that I'm somebody else. I don't want people to know too much about me. Fame makes my job just that much harder."

Most of them are lying when they say this. Hollywood teems with almost-famous actors who smile and rake their fingers through their hair and gaze into your eyes and tell you they don't want to be movie stars. "I just want to -develop my craft," they say, and then they polish off their Perrier and scamper away to make Top Gun III. They lie because they want you to -believe, as much as they want to believe, that it's the art that matters. Because aspiring to movie stardom smacks of narcissism and greed, like admitting you want to become a trophy wife.

Crudup could be lying, too, of course. Except that he politely declined when asked to audition for the lead in Titanic. Except that he says things like "[Stardom] is a product of the media's -impulse to create commodities that they can -exploit." Except that his choices, both in the roles he pursues and how he chooses to play them, -reveal a man with an agenda divorced from mainstream popularity.

On the surface, his list of characters reads like a standard leading man's rap sheet: a randy working-class stud in Inventing the Abbotts; an Olympic track star in Without Limits; a high-plains cowboy in The Hi-Lo Country; a handsome young politician in Waking the Dead; a rock guitarist with smoldering mystique in Almost Famous. But beneath the two-second descriptions lies a remarkably unhappy lot. Embittered, brooding, arrogant, or morally anemic men, these characters all strive for something honorable that they can't quite grasp and fail because of their own weaknesses. Not the sort of heroes, in other words, that inspire $20 million opening weekends.

"It's when people want to do good, and can't, that interests me," Crudup says. "There's got to be some undercurrent of faith that keeps people from being pricks all the time, you know? As oppressive and difficult as the world can be, it continues to astound me that people still seek out the beauty, the affection and poetry, the joy. Failing as a way of succeeding, it's what makes people human, so I keep searching for characters that make big mistakes."

He may have reached the apex of that search earlier this year with Jesus' Son, playing a gentle lost soul named Fuckhead. "He's a junkie and a petty thief," Crudup says. "But he's got this incredible empathy and compassion churning through him. He's one of the few people who, if you met him, would make you feel whole as a human being, because he recognizes something in everybody and gives it back to them as a gift."

The same could be said for what Crudup gives back to his characters. "Billy could easily have been 'the dastardly rock star' in [Almost Famous], because he does some villainous things," Crowe says. "It's to his credit that audiences understand his complexity and love him for it. It's amazing. Billy puts himself at a distance from you in a very inviting way."

Everything Crudup does seems considered. In person, he never races through a sentence. Never tosses off an incomplete thought. In the years since his performance in Inventing the Abbotts induced rampant swooning, he has even begun to acquire a character actor's face: tiny gray flecks at his temples, mature lines at the corners of his eyes. And he's eerily still. Doesn't fidget. Rarely moves his hands when he speaks. He -radiates gravity. Intensity. Precision. Then again . . .

"He's a dork!" Frances McDormand says, laughing. In addition to appearing together in Almost Famous, the two starred onstage in a four-hour dramatic interpretation of the Oedipus myth. Crudup played Oedipus; McDormand was his adoptive mother. "Billy's dorkiness is just contained within a different package," she adds. "He's really handsome and charming. He and Edward Norton, they're both dorks."

He's pretty quiet about it, though. "A lot of actors beat their chests about their 'process, man,' " Crowe says. "You don't get any of that with Billy. It's just: 'Can I take the guitar back to my hotel with me? I'll see you tomorrow.' He never makes himself the story, which is probably one of the -reasons he's still gloriously under the radar."

"I know he has a reputation for being a very actor-y actor, and probably strikes you as being very serious," says Kate Hudson, who plays Crudup's groupie girlfriend in Almost Famous. "But let me tell you something," she says, and starts to giggle. "He's not! The guys on-set had this flicking game that drove me insane. They had this special way of flicking you [with their fingers] that left welts on your arms, and Billy was well involved in all of that."

Crudup rarely presents his playful side in interviews, however. There's a reason for that, the same reason he isn't perched atop the A-list, where so many critics and industry mavens insist he -belongs. He dislikes this part of the job, finds the spotlight too bright, too exposed. He'd be far happier if you would see his movies without his having to promote them. "I wish somebody had said, 'If you do the work you really want to do and people appreciate it, you'll have photographers at your doorstep watching your every move,' " he says. "Nobody talks about how difficult the idea of success is to an actor. They say, 'If you do something you really want, you will be fulfilled as an artist.' But that's not what happens if your art form is film."

Which raises the question: Why not just skip all this fame angst and only act onstage? Crudup's girlfriend of four and a half years, Mary-Louise Parker (Fried Green Tomatoes), has, in fact, spent much of her career on the boards. "Well, unfortunately," Crudup says, "the last play that I did, I made $200 dollars a week. I don't know how to live on that in New York." The sentence hangs in the air. He hates what this may say about him. Fears that succeeding may be a way of failing. "And the truth is, doing movies is exciting. I'm thrilled by movies. But there are lots of cheerleaders for the movies, so I like to talk about the things that don't get much airtime, like theater. But that doesn't mean I don't really, really appreciate . . ." He stops, realizing that this sounds like a rationalization. "Fuck, man," he says with a sigh. "There's a certain level of hypocrisy to all of it. If I thought theater was the only thing that needed saving in the world, I should live in a youth hostel and do theater year-round." He exhales, and when he speaks again, the panic that had scraped along the edge of his voice has gone. "I'm doing the best I can, you know?"