Billy Crudup is opening up about that time he had a full-blown panic attack while on stage. The actor forgot all of his lines, and he couldn’t even depend on castmates to help him out.
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At the time, Crudup was in the middle of a one-man performance of David Cale’s play, Harry Clarke. Crudup forgot a large part of his lines while standing in front of an audience.
Crudup began to panic.
“What made me think I could do it? I have no idea,” Crudup said on a recent episode of the podcast Off Camera With Kelly Ripa.
Billy Crudup Panics
Crudup knew that it was an ill-fated project for him when he saw how thick the script was.
“Who is going to try to memorize a 48-page monologue? This is an idiotic idea. So I was like, ‘No, I’m definitely not gonna do that,’” Crudup said. “And then I wake up that night and — it must be because I have two brothers — I feel pretty competitive. And I thought, ‘What, you can’t do this? You can’t get off your a– and do something like this? Somebody thinks you can do it. You should get off your a– and do it.’”
But on the first week, Crudup forgot all of his lines during a performance.
“And about three minutes in, I can’t remember my lines,” Crudup said. “I started to have a full-blown panic attack. I get tunnel vision. My heart’s going outta my chest. I can’t breathe. And I call for line — and I have never called for line before, so we didn’t have any systems set in place — and so the poor stage manager from the booth [makes muffled noises].”
Crudup fudged his way through the rest of the performance.
“That show came in at about 55 minutes because I dropped about 20 pages. Nobody understood s—,” he said. “And so afterwards the director [Leigh Silverman] comes up and hugs me and I’m just, like, absolutely mortified. I feel terrible for the playwright. I feel terrible for the theater. All the people that were there.”
But Crudup is thankful for what it taught him.
“You have to really apply force and technique to overcome the anxiety of that kind of experience,” he said.