“The Morning Show” stars Billy Crudup and Marion Cotillard break down those bombshells in the season 4 finale
- - “The Morning Show” stars Billy Crudup and Marion Cotillard break down those bombshells in the season 4 finale
Gerrad HallNovember 24, 2025 at 2:03 AM
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Billy Crudup and Marion Cotillard on 'The Morning Show' season 4 finale
Billy Crudup didn't "wanna show up for work" the day he had to shoot a scene for the season 4 finale of The Morning Show that undid everything he thought he knew about his character, Cory Ellison.
“I have spent seven years building a character who I thought invented himself,” he explains to Entertainment Weekly backstage after a day of rehearsals in London for his upcoming production of the play High Noon. “I was gutted, as Cory was, to discover what the writers were going to do to him.”
Crudup, a two-time Emmy-winner for his performance on the Apple TV series, thought Cory had already been put through the wringer in the season 3 finale, when he was ousted as CEO over accusations of grooming Bradley Jackson (Reese Witherspoon) when she first joined the network — and he also had to face the consequences of publicly outing her relationship with Laura Peterson (Julianna Margulies).
But at the beginning of season 4, showrunner Charlotte Stoudt warned Crudup that they would "have to put Corey through the meat grinder," he recalls. "And I was like, 'What? What do you mean? He just lost everything',...and she's like, 'I know, I know. But, yeah, we're gonna crush him.'"
Apple TV+
Billy Crudup on 'The Morning Show' season 4 finale
And that they did in the final few episodes of season 4. Cory had a meteoric rise at UBA — as president of news, then the network, and then CEO (post-merger) of UBN — before being fired in season 3. As the fourth season wrapped up, in the wake of his dementia-stricken mother Martha’s decision to die by euthanasia, egomaniacal Cory learned, however, that he didn’t earn any of that success on his own: He got his job in exchange for his well-connected mom burying an incriminating EPA report about poisoning by the Martel Chemical Plant in Wolf River that would’ve implicated UBN president and board member Celine Dumont (played by Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard) and her powerful family in the eco-scandal.
Cotillard, a confessed Morning Show fan, jumped at the chance to be part of the series.
"There was no question that I wouldn't be part of it," she tells EW while driving through Paris. "It was a dream that I didn't even have that came true."
She previously worked with Crudup on the movies Big Fish and Public Enemies, but this was her first series-regular role. In the corner offices of UBN, her wealthy heiress butted heads with Jennifer Aniston’s Alex Levy, now a network VP, and UBN CEO Stella Bak (Greta Lee), who Celine set up to fire.
“At this level of power and politics, there’s no gender anymore,” Cotillard says of Celine’s dirty ways. “The sorority doesn’t apply. It’s a battlefield.”
But behind the scenes, Bradley, who's made a temporary return to the network at Alex's request, has been investigating Wolf River after receiving an anonymous tip that UBA knew about the chemical poisoning and buried the story. The tip, she eventually learns, is from a credible source, former employee Claire Conway (Bel Powley), but they needed more evidence, and Bradley's investigation leads her to a source in Belarus, but the government there doesn't believe she's a journalist and detains her on suspicion of espionage.
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Meanwhile, Celine has also been playing Cory, trying to make sure the information his mom has about her family's company never sees the light of day. In the process, they get closer. But maybe it's also a little real? Cotillard says she wasn't told when she started the show that Celine and Cory would end up in a relationship, but while filming a scene for episode 3, she "suspected" something.
"I played it a certain way with Billy, kind of flirtatious, and then the director asked not to do that,she recalls, starting to laugh. "I knew that she knew what would happen, and if she asks me to play it down, it means that something's gonna happen between the two of them and they don't wanna sell it."
Erin Simkin/Apple TV+
Marion Cotillard on 'The Morning Show' season 4 finale
"She's smarter than me," Crudup says when EW tells him about Cotillard's suspicion. He didn't see it coming? "Hell no. And I'm supposed to be the guy who plays the guy who sees everything coming."
But Celine couldn’t see the bomb coming her way in the finale, when Cory discovers a USB drive that his mom secretly left for him, containing the EPA report. He now knows everything about Wolf River, and the cover-up — and thanks to a confrontation with Celine's husband, Miles (Aaron Pierre), he knows that Celine is the one who secured him his job as a thank you to his mom for her help. He's, of course, devastated. Until...
Alex has resigned from UBN, blackmailed by Celine, who knows that Alex and Paul Marks (Jon Hamm) unsuccessfully tried to negotiate a deal with a Russian oligarch to help secure Bradley's release. Now, Alex is going to break her NDA and sue the network, and she's planning a press conference to announce the lawsuit. But Cory has a better idea: He realizes he can not only use the evidence to take down Celine, but it will also free Bradley, whom Celine has been orchestrating the continued detainment of in Belarus. So he, Alex, and Chip (Mark Duplass) set the stage for Celine to unknowingly reveal everything she’s done on speakerphone, which Alex broadcasts during the press conference. The takedown is just as epic as the trio hope it will be, with Celine discovering what they've done as it happens live, watching from her executive office.
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Jeremy Irons and Jennifer Aniston on 'The Morning Show' season 4 finale
"Celine can be strong, powerful, she can hide pretty well her emotions, but her emotions are too big for her to be totally in control," Cotillard admits of her character's flaw. "I knew that she would lose control at some point and that her anger would open the door for failure."
While it's a moment of revenge for Cory, it's also a moment of redemption — something Crudup admits he never imagined would come Cory's way.
"The decision that Corey has taken the opportunity to use the moment for something that is of his own volition, clearly claiming his own space, taking responsibility for his mother's malfeasance — and he lionized her — and also protects Bradley," Crudup says, "and also undermines a severe threat in the Dumont family — they are serious people — the fact that he’s willing to take them on begins Cory’s journey of full ownership over his own destiny. So for that reason, I really liked that ending for him.... That’s about as heroic as he’s gonna get.”
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So where does he go from here?
"Cory has a habit of disappearing.... As soon as he crosses the threshold of the door of that building, he vanishes. He goes up in a puff of smoke," Crudup jokes. But as for Cory's long-term future, when the show returns for season 5, the actor teases a more grown-up character. "He's gotta become a real boy — you know, Pinocchio style, unknowing puppet who has to now become a human being. The carnival ride is over, and now it's getting into the reality of how the gears on a roller coaster actually work."
on Entertainment Weekly
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
