Billy Crudup & Denise Gough To Star In ‘High Noon’ Stage Show

Billy Crudup, The Morning Show’s Emmy award winner, and Andor’s Denise Gough will star in the world premiere production of classic movie western High Noon in London’s West End this winter — and the clock is ticking.

Crudup (Almost Famous, Jackie, Spotlight, and upcoming Jay Kelly) and Gough (Under the Banner of Heaven, The Stolen Girl), will assume the roles created by Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly in director Fred Zinnemann’s 1952 picture, scripted by Carl Foreman and produced by Stanley Kramer.

The story’s about Will Kane (Crudup), a marshal, who on the day of his retirement — and wedding to his bride Amy  Fowler (Gough) — learns that a notorious criminal he’d put behind bars is arriving on the noon train with a gang of gunslingers, and his target is Kane.

It’s a story taut with tension as the lawman prepares in real time, with the pendulum ticking in full view on stage, to rally his town’s community to help him confront the killers headed his way.

Over the years there’ve been a few efforts to open a production of High Noon on Broadway involving other producers and creative teams.

However, producer Paula Wagner (Mission: Impossible, Marshall, and on stage, The Heiress, Pretty Woman: The Musical) told me back in May that Oscar-winning writer Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, Munich, A Star Is Born, Dune: Part One) had nailed the adaptation and that she was intending to open the play in London.

And so it has came to pass: High Noon, with script by Roth and directed by Thea Sharrock (Wicked Little Letters, Me Before You), will premiere at the Harold Pinter Theatre for a limited season from December 17 through March 7. 

Wagner’s producing with Tom Werner (The Cosby Show, 3rd Rock From the Sun, and on stage, Boop! The Musical, The Picture of Dorian Gray) along with Thomas Tull, Danny Cohen, and Len Blvatnik. 

High Noon’s culturally significant, both artistically and politically. It was released at the height of Joseph R. McCarthy’s Red Scare and has been interpreted as Hollywood’s rebuke to McCarthyism.

While completing his High Noon screenplay, Foreman was subpoenaed to appear before McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee. He appeared three months later and refused to name names. Later, Foreman and his family exiled to London where he later resumed his career, even though black-listed in the US. Hits included The Bridge on the River Kwai and The Guns of Navarone. 

In the period between being summoned and his actual appearance before the Un-American committee, Foreman began to rethink his script. I’m grateful to Glenn Frankel’s great 2017 book High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the making of an American Classic for the bumper background information. I remember purchasing a copy at Book Soup over on Sunset and reading it in one wallop on the fight home to London

Frankel writes: “For Foreman, it came down to a Solomonic choice: betray his friends or lose the career he’d worked so hard to achieve. As he pondered what to do, he began to rethink his script. High Noon’s protagonist — Marshal Will Kane — was now Foreman himself. The gunmen coming to kill him were the members of H.U.A.C., and the hypocritical townspeople of fictional Hadleyville were the denizens of Hollywood who stood by passively as the forces of repression bore down.

“’As I was writing the screenplay, it became insane, because life was mirroring art and art was mirroring life,’” he would recall. ‘It was all happening at the same time. I became that guy. I became the Gary Cooper character.’”

But the bullies who dominate the political landscape in 2025 are bigger and more powerful than they were in the early 1950s. The story’s relevance has not dimmed.

So, there’s a lot at play with High Noon at the Harold Pinter Theatre. It’s gotta keep the audience on tenterhooks.

A few years ago, Sharrock (Wicked Little Letters, Me Before You) directed a stunning revival of Terence Rattigan’s After the Dance with Benedict Cumberbatch and Nancy Carroll — both sublime — at the National Theatre and it has stayed with me. For that alone, Sharrock’s a super pick to direct.

Her and Wagner’s creative picks are pretty juicy as well. The play’s being designed by three-time Tony Award winning production and costume designer, Tim Hatley (Life of Pi, Shrek The Musical, Private Lives, Back to the Future: The Musical) and Neil Austin’s creating the lighting. He won Tony Awards for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Ink, and Red. His work for Leopoldstadt and Company was also top rate.

And good to see they’ve addressed the age difference between the movie’s Will Kane and Amy Fowler. Gary Cooper was 51 ,and Grace Kelly was 22 years old. Crudup’s 57 and Gough’s 45.

Crudup, who has won two Emmy Awards for his Cory Ellison in The Morning Show (season 4 begins Wednesday), is no stranger to the stage. He won the Tony Award for his powerful marathon role in the parts 1 and 2 of Tom Stoppard’s trilogy, The Coast of Utopia that mesmerised audiences, this writer included, at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater in 2007, and he has returned to Broadway several times since. The actor made his London debut in one-man play Harry Clarke last year.

Gough, who has won plaudits for her resolute lieutenant Dedra Meero in Andor, has long been a creature of the stage. A breathtaking performance in People, Places and Things, at the National Theatre and Wyndham’s Theatre won her a Best Actress Olivier Award. She collected another, for Best Supporting Actress, in director Marianne Elliott’s thrilling revival of Tony Kushner’s 2-part Angels in America, again at the National, followed by a transfer to Broadway where it won the Best Revival Tony Award.

There’s a strong chance High Noon could head to Broadway if it’s hot at the Harold Pinter.