Billy Crudup and Nicolas Podany on playing salesmen in the retro-futuristic world of ‘Hello Tomorrow!’

A still from ‘Hello Tomorrow!’ featuring Billy Crudup and Nicholas Podany
| Photo Credit: AppleTV+

Billy Crudup would someday like to go to the moon. “I am going to wait for the infrastructure to settle and then I am going to go for the views,” he says, in a manner less convincing than Jack Billings, the lead character he plays in the ongoing Apple TV+ show Hello Tomorrow!

As Jack, Crudup leads a group of salespeople hawking lunar homes and timeshares for BrightSide Lunar Residences. Set in a 1950-esque retro-futuristic world where there is a gadget imaginable for every inconvenience, Jack goes around successfully selling the dream of living on the moon. For Crudup, this role mirrored aspects of his personal life in a surprising way, and allowed him to view acting in a different light. As the son of a salesman, Crudup says that he wanted to run far away from his father’s profession, but realises now that he instead ran right into the arms of it. “I discovered the proximity that salesmen have to actors.”

“The process of selling a story, selling a character, is one of convincing yourself. Giving other people the opportunity to bear witness to that story for a small fee is so similar to what my dad was doing day to day,” Crudup says adding that he now has a different kind of affection for salespeople.

Describing his character as someone who possesses a relentless drive to share the good word of hope with people, Crudup says that Jack is someone who also fills himself with hope by sharing it with other people through his products. But he also points to the emptiness of someone selling a house on the moon: “An optimism in the face of a reality of despair.”

“They [creators Amit Bhalla and Lucas Jansen] created somebody that I thought was gorgeous to observe… Jack to me, is a soul to embody,” adds Crudup.

A still from ‘Hello Tomorrow!’ featuring Billy Crudup
| Photo Credit:
AppleTV+

Naturally, Crudup’s father emerged as his primary inspiration when he set out to embody Jack, a character who sells a dream, a hope for a better life to those around him. He even recalls the present his father got him for his high-school graduation: a tear-out advertisement for a cruise. “He had seen an advertisement for a cruise in a magazine and he pulled it out and he said, ‘We’re going on that cruise’. Of course, we never went on it, but I got that little piece of paper from the magazine. That optimism that he had was rather relentless and sometimes that ran to disappointment for his children,” says Crudup.

On the other hand, Crudup’s co-star Nicholas Podany found inspiration for his character Joey Shorter. For a character who is dropped fresh into the fast-moving world of sales, Podany says he harkened back to his own experiences. “I told Billy I feel like I am playing myself up there!”

“It felt like I was taking pieces of myself that I have learned through leaving my hometown and coming to New York,” he says. Podany got his major start on Broadway in 2018 with the role of Albus Potter in Harry Potter And The Cursed Child. Therefore, having to build his onscreen via auditions over Zoom is another aspect that he connects with the newbie he plays on Hello Tomorrow!

“His [Joey’s] naivete starts working for him in an advantageous kind of way,” Podany says elaborating that as the season continues, his character is able to raise a lot more questions than other characters who have bought in entirely to the idea of living on the moon. “Taking that away, if I see something when I am getting into this world of filmmaking and professional acting, and something doesn’t sit right with me, it’s important to keep in mind that sometimes an outsider’s perspective is really helpful,” he adds.

And as for Podany’s opinion on whether he would someday like to live on the moon? “It’s lacking a few trees and a few pits of water but if it becomes affordable, I’d like to go at some point.”

Hello Tomorrow! is currently streaming on Apple TV+