The weird and wild world of Silicon Valley tech billionaires is the setting for The Audacity
If recent history has taught us to fear personal information in the hands of tech billionaires, The Audacity is here to show us what happens when people with no ethical boundaries really get their juices flowing. Created by Succession writer Jonathan Glatzer, the satirical take on Silicon Valley’s finest stars Billy Magnussen as Duncan Park, the morally questionable CEO of tech company Hypergnosis. Duncan is data mining on a level that past political administrations would find illegal, but the current one appears to encourage (See: DOGE). He feels compelled to use that information to blackmail those that won’t satisfy his every need.
Among the people he feels a need to control is his own therapist JoAnne Felder (Barry’s Sarah Goldberg), who in turn engages in patient-cleaned insider trading to make up for her disdain for her man child of a client. Terrifying? Yes. Funny? Astonishingly so. “I was surprised when I watched the episodes, how funny the show is. And I’ve read all of them and I was in them,” says comedian Rob Corddry. “But my character is not in a comedy.”
No. In fact, Corddry’s character —Tom Ruffage, Deputy Undersecretary of Veterans Affairs — is in begrudging need of these tech billionaires, and initially feels like the straight man to these wealthy clowns. “Tom has been given a mission and he has thrown himself headfirst into solving this problem that is the backlog at the VA, because if he doesn’t, people will literally die. He’s also a closeted gay man from the ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ era of the military, and he has PTSD, and he self-medicates with alcohol,” says Corddry. “And while he does not like Silicon Valley, he doesn’t understand just how poisonous it is. And he is definitely corruptible.”
Whether you’re laughing or crying, odds are that the characters on this show won’t leave you unaffected. Corddry recalls the first time he read Glatzer’s scripts for the show, and the effect they had on him. “Every time I read something that I like and might want to do, I think, ‘This is the best thing I’ve ever read.’ But this was the best thing — literally the best thing,” says Corddry. Part of it was that everyone can see themselves a victim of these people and their products. “Do you accept cookies?” asks Corddry. “Do you know how much of your persona you are signing away? You’re signing a contract when you do that. And it’s insane how intricate the system they have designed is to end up knowing us better than we know ourselves.”
Proving the point of our vulnerability is a motley crew of Silicon Valley characters, from Director of Ethical Innovation Anushka Bhattachera-Phister (Meaghan Rath), who is married to AI innovator Martin Phister (Simon Helberg) — a scientist who cares more about raising his artificial creation than his own daughter. And then there is troubled tech billionaire Carl Bardolph (Zach Galifianakis), who is as bored with the industry as he is dying to be part of it. “Some of them have redeemable traits . . . I think,” says Corddry. “Anushka is probably the trickiest because she’s the ethicist at Cupertino, which is our Apple stand-in, and I think she probably, in her heart and soul, knows that she wants to do good, but will probably end up going to hell. Duncan, I don’t think he’s redeemable. The way Billy plays him, too — he’s so brilliant playing that character that I don’t want to see a redeemed Duncan.”
The idea that money corrupts is nothing new, but the power of the tech billionaire is an evil we’ve only recently started to fully contend with. “I understand that [tech billionaires] probably, for the most part, most of them think they mean well. And no one’s going to argue that they aren’t some of the smartest guys in the room,” says Corddry. “But I think ultimately, when you start making billions of dollars, it becomes something else and they all turn into Dr. Evil.” Now, in fiction, despicable characters are hardly a turn off, as television shows from Seinfeld to Breaking Bad have shown us time and time again. “Isn’t that funny?” marvels Corddry. “I think the majority of people tend to enjoy these — I don’t want to say antiheroes because that doesn’t apply to The Audacity — but these kinds of immoral people, maybe because we feel like we can compare ourselves to them favourably.”
For the funnyman, best known for his work on Ballers, Childrens Hospital and his long-running gig on The Daily Show, middle age has opened up a broader range of career opportunities. “The audience, I’m sure, has some expectations of me, but also on the other hand, an audience is pretty savvy and they understand that to do comedy, you must also be sort of at least as serviceable in drama,” he says. “It seems to me that, as you get older, comedic actors tend maybe to gravitate more toward dramatic roles, whether that be because they’ve acquired some wisdom from all their experience and they have gravitas or they are just grey and ragged looking.” But in terms of job descriptions, Corddry is looking for one particular quality in a script. “It’s usually just as simple as, ‘Does it fit in my mouth? Do I know how to do this?’ If I read something and say, ‘I can do this,’ or I know how to get to a place where I can do this, then I’m in. As long as there’s good people and a good thing, that’s what I need to be happy in life.”
Luckily for Corddry, the deck was stacked with good people to work with in The Audacity. “We had a really, really great time,” says Corddry. “I’ve worked with Zach before and it was great to be able to hang out with him on set again. Simon’s another comedy guy that I was able to reconnect with. And I made a lifelong friend in Billy. There’s not a person in that cast that I, myself, wouldn’t cast in something.” When asked if that is a professional draw, Corddry says, “It’s the whole goal. Especially in Hollywood, where I guess there are some bad apples out there. Really, the secret to happiness in this business is just doing good stuff with people that aren’t d**ks. And that usually comes from the creator on down. Jonathan, I want him to be my dad. So, I knew he was going to cast a group of very, very good people like himself.”
The Audacity airs Sundays on AMC