NEWSBilly Crudup is Larger Than Life
Mar. 3 2009, Published 4:59 a.m. ET
In Watchmen, Billy Crudup's character, Dr. Manhattan, basically bares it all, as a glowing, blue, totally naked superhero. So the question just has to be asked: Was the star actually walking around set in the buff to get into his part?
"I am naked often, but was not naked that I recall during filming," he reveals in a new interview with Parade.com. "I wore a pair of what were pretty elaborate pajamas and they were studded with about 1,200 blue LED's so that Dr. Manhattan would glow blue. There were also motion capture electrodes on my body and I had over a hundred on my face. They all sent data into a computer that really created the Dr. Manhattan you see on the screen. My performance was basically just laying the groundwork for the CGI."
As for that in your face nakedness, Billy says he got teased a little bit about the endowment Dr. Manhattan sports during the flick.
"I'm not saying how much the computer helped. Actually, I didn't fully expect the interest that Dr. Manhattan's genitalia has received. But I understood his motivation for baring it all," he says. "Why would the guy with all this power really care about a uniform? He doesn't need to obey society's constraints because, if he wanted to, he could destroy society. So I think he kind of feels like, 'You know what? I enjoy a good breeze on my private parts.' "
Don't we all?
