Jonathan Glatzer has always been fascinated by the personalities that come out of Silicon Valley — and not just the ones you’d expect.
Sure, the tech billionaires that now dominate our lives and our headlines come with plenty of drama to mine. But for Glatzer, he tells Variety For the Love of the Craft, that he was interested in those “below that echelon of the known… those who want to get to that very, very tippy top, and there’s just not enough room for them, so the wannabes, the also-rans, were the ones that really made me curious.”
So when AMC Global Media chief content officer Dan McDermott approached Glatzer about doing something in the tech space, the writer had the idea for “The Audacity” in mind. Glatzer immediately brainstormed the character of Duncan Park, the insecure CEO played by Billy Magnussen in the series.
But AMC and AMC+’s “The Audacity” isn’t just about looking at the tech world through the lens of an infantile tycoon. Glatzer says his main entry point for the show is through Orson (Everett Blunck), the 15-year-old who moves from Baltimore to Silicon Valley to live with his mother JoAnne (Sarah Goldberg), a psychiatrist to business titans like Duncan.
“Orson was somebody who was really based on me,” Glatzer says. “I grew up with a therapist mother and a psychiatrist stepfather. Both of them had offices in the house hauntingly similar to the set that we built for them. Every 50 minutes, somebody new was coming in and people leaving, and it was people frequently that I knew from our little town in New Jersey.”
Orson is right at that impressionable age where he’s going through puberty and he’s pressured to fit into a new, strange community — which Glatzer says supplies the emotional heart of “The Audacity.”
“Then you add to that the fact that this age group is the target demo for most tech, and that kids his age have been handed tablets from birth, practically,” he says. “There’s a data footprint that I think most parents don’t quite realize that’s being created on every single one of these kids.”
The “audacity” of the series comes from the adults in the show who are mostly cravenly greedy, ambitious and self-obsessed. That includes JoAnne, whom Duncan discovers is doing some insider trading based on the privileged information she gleans from their therapy clients.
Read more Here’s How to Watch FOX Sports Online for Free
“There’s nothing more fun than writing a character’s reasoning for doing what they’re doing,” Glatzer says.
As for Duncan, Glatzer found in Magnusson the idea actor to play Duncan’s insecurity, and how it fuels the character’s arrogance.
“First time I saw him was on ‘The Leftovers,’ and he was arresting to me,” Glatzer says. “Billy has this antenna as an actor that just pulls in everything that’s applicable.. he’s able to do that in a way that I’ve never seen quite like anybody else. And so it’s terribly exciting, and then you combine that and scenes with Sarah Goldberg, who is a fucking rock.”
Also in the cast is “The Big Bang Theory” alum Simon Helberg, an inventor with more of a moral center as he attempts to create an empathetic AI. “We’re always looking for the perfect combination in these people in the tech world,” he says. “Like Sam Altman, for a while was somebody who we were like, ‘oh, there’s a good guy… oh shit, he’s not.’”
In casting performers with comedy backgrounds — Helberg, Rob Corddry, Lucy Punch among them — Glatzer (whose credits include “Succession”) says he’s been impressed when comedy actors are given a dramatic role. “They infuse that with a much rounder humanity,” he says.
“The Audacity” takes place in Silicon Valley, but it isn’t really a character in Season 1, as Glatzer preferred to stay intimate with the characters. “My approach was to make sure that the tech world remained as a backdrop,” he says. “The foreground was always these characters. The first few episodes we are asking the audience, ‘can you care and get intimate with nine to 11 characters?’ Because that’s the size of the world. It’s not just tech, it’s the private school that they all send their kids to, it’s the therapist’s office, it’s these guys coming in from DC, it’s Orson coming in from Baltimore.”
In creating the pilot for “The Audacity,” Glatzer said he was inspired by his “Better Call Saul” boss Vince Gilligan, whose AMC pilot “Breaking Bad” is considered flawless. “It’s very rare for a pilot that also is trying to build a world that you’re perhaps not familiar with,” Glatzer says. A lot of protein needs to be chewed in the pilot, so that was the hardest thing for me to do. I was gratified that it essentially communicated across the goal line what I needed it to, The pilot is always the one that’s shown to audiences, and it’s been really gratifying to see all of those things seem to be hitting and in the right spots, they’re laughing at the jokes, not at the dramatic bits, and that’s really what you want!”