Billy Crystal is going darker than audiences have ever seen him before in “Before,” a new Apple TV+ psychological thriller premiering on Friday. But it was not a role that the actor and comedian expected to take on.
Crystal, who is best known for light-hearted roles in “When Harry Met Sally,” “City Slickers” and “Monsters Inc.,” plays child psychiatrist Eli, who encounters a troubled young boy named Noah (Jacobi Jupe) after recently losing his wife, Lynn (Judith Light). As Eli attempts to help Noah, their mysterious bond deepens, sparking haunting memories and unearthing unsettling secrets from the past.
He told TheWrap that the series, which he executive produced and developed in partnership with Eric Roth, went through many twists and turns to get to where it is today.
“[Eric] and I were working on a show, along with Sam Sprecker and Howie Miller, called ‘Death Bed.’ It was a show about a 100-year-old guy who was telling his life story to an aide who was dealing with him and he had a list of people that would help tell his story. It became like a romance novel of different decades of this guy’s life,” Crystal said. “It was based on tapes that my grandmother had made before she passed away about her life, and how she came from Russia to America with the family.
It would have been a really cool series, but we could never crack the story,” he added.
During the development process, Miller asked Crystal about a book recommendation for his grandson. He recommended one he read in junior high called “The Search for Bridey Murphy,” which followed a 28-year-old woman who undergoes hypnosis.
“In it, she talks about her life as this woman living in Ireland, 200 years before. And then when I checked out everything she talked about, it turned out to be true. It was real. How did this happen? And it was a great mystery,” Crystal recalled. “So he said, ‘Well that’s unusual but that’s perfect for me because I did research at the University of Virginia on kids who present with past lives’ and he gave me a book called ‘Life Before Life.’ So I read it and there’s some amazing things that these young kids present with. So in the middle of one of the writing meetings with Eric, I said, ‘What if he’s not 100? What if he’s eight, but he has these memories and it could take us any place?’ And we went forward.”
So Roth brought in Sarah Thorp, who serves as the series’ creator and showrunner. Within 10 days of being asked to join, Crystal said she came back with a narrative and descriptions for Eli, who has a cut and dry, fact and science-based approach in the way he handles his patients; and for Noah, a troubled and mysterious boy who shows up on Eli’s front doorstep unannounced.
“It became a really cool mystery, with all of these surreal and horror elements that she was talking about. And in the middle of it, I said, ‘Sarah, I’ll play him,’ ” Crystal continued. “I wasn’t looking for it, but when it came up, I said, ‘I’ve got to do this.’ It’s so good and rich and an interesting world to play in. It was never a decision of ‘I want to do something different.’ I just knew when I saw it that it was the right thing to do.”
Crystal reviewed the scripts from Thorp and gave notes while starring on Broadway in “Mr. Saturday Night.”
“I think earlier, there was probably a lot more humor,” Thorp told TheWrap when asked about how the show evolved over the course of the writing and development process. “What we discovered was we really wanted to jar people right off the bat, and we thought that it was a great way of saying, ‘Look, this is going to be something you haven’t seen from Billy before’ and start you already off a little bit unsettled in that way.”
Thorp told TheWrap she’s most interested in audiences getting to see the relationship between Crystal’s Eli and Jupe’s Noah progress and unfold over time.
“Eli is completely dissociated from himself because of the grief that he’s stuck in. And this child who’s mute is being chased by something horrific,” she said. “What was interesting in that relationship is that right from the beginning they’re facing all these challenges in being able to communicate to each other, but there’s a great need on both parts to break through that and communicate.”
“I thought it was really fun to take a character who’s like ‘I’m a man of science, I’m a doctor. I believe in facts, I believe in evidence, I’m always right, I’m always the smartest person in every room,’ and then to keep throwing stuff at him that he keeps scrambling to explain in a scientific way,” she added.
While acknowledging the role of Eli is somewhat of a departure from how audiences typically know Crystal, he argued that that’s exactly what an actor is supposed to do.
He cited roles in other recent projects like “Standing Up, Falling Down,” where he played a pot smoking dermatologist whose haunted by his failures in life, and “Here Today,” where he plays a comedy writer who’s on the onset of dementia, as examples of opportunities that have allowed him to stretch and grow as a performer.
“Eli Adler is like the epitome of that for me now. The demands of the role on me physically and emotionally are exhausting and relentless, but Jacobi Jupe and I work so well together through very tense emotional scenes, along with Rosie Perez and Hope Davis and Judith Light and Robert Townsend,” he added. “It’s a great group of people and an amazing group to work with.”
When it comes to evaluating future roles, Crystal says he wants to keep playing characters that excite and surprise him.
“I want to do what’s good and what’s challenging, what can lead me to keep growing and keep stretching,” he said. “There’s a great feeling about doing something where you can say, ‘Well, I didn’t know I could do that,’ or ‘I always wanted to do that and now I did.’ It’s very satisfying and at this point in my career and life to find something that excites me this much is a real blessing.”
“Before” premieres Friday on Apple TV+.
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