Billy Crudup gets some exciting, but totally unexpected, news while appearing on the Season Nine finale of "Finding Your Roots" along with Tamera Mowry-Housely.
While tracing his family tree, the actor discovers that he has a distant cousin who's also a famous actor: Terry Crews.
“Get out of here! Are you kidding me?" the 54-year-old says when the show's host, Henry Louis Gates Jr., shares the fun tidbit.
Crudup has never met Crews, who also appeared on "Finding Your Roots" in Season Eight, but says his son "adores him."
"He was on 'Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and when (my son) hears this, this will be by far the most exciting portion of this," the actor says.
Gates then reveals how he and his team made the intriguing discovery, explaining that both actors share an identical stretch of DNA on their 16th chromosomes.
When Crews appeared on the show, he learned that 15 percent of his ancestors from the past five centuries were European and many lived in the same areas where Crudup's family is from: Scotland, Ireland and England. Sometime within the last 500 years, the two stars shared an ancestor.
"The evidence is inscribed on your 16th chromosome and as the brothers say on the street, 'DNA don’t lie,'” Gates says and Crudup laughs.
"That’s incredible and the fact that the first (part) of his name is Crew, we've now got the Cru crew," he says.
Learning that he's DNA cousins with Crews isn't the only eye-opening discovery Crudup learns about his family in the episode.
The star of "The Morning Show" finds out that his fifth great-grandfather, Nathan Boddie, was born in colonial Virginia in 1732 and voted for the Halifax Resolves in 1776, which represented a major step towards independence for the 13 Colonies.
If the British had heard about Boddie's act of defiance, he could've been killed. Crudup is impressed to hear about his ancestor's bravery.
“What could he possibly have been thinking?” he wonders. "Did he have vested interest in some property that he wanted to protect? Was it the notion of escaping some kind of religious persecution? Was it the ideals of freedom that they would start to manifest and document over the coming years?"
Boddie went on to help found a county in North Carolina and serve as a member of the state's legislature.
“Wow, he really had a profound impact on the codifying of an American community," Crudup marvels.
"He did. So what's it like to learn this?" Gates asks the actor.
"It’s incredible to see the agency and I’m flabbergasted that this was not the lead from the time I was born," he says. "I feel like they would’ve put me in that costume as soon as I came out of the womb and say, 'Never forget that this happened, OK?'"