Jonathan Glatzer has always been fascinated by the personalities coming out of Silicon Valley. It’s not just the people you might expect.
Sure, there’s a lot of drama for me with the tech billionaires who are currently ruling our lives and making headlines. But in Glatzer’s case, he told Variety for the Love of the Craft, “I was interested in people below the known ranks…people who wanted to rise to the top of the very tipsy, but there wasn’t enough room for them, so the wannabes and contestants were also the ones who really intrigued me.”
So when Dan McDermott, chief content officer at AMC Global Media, approached Glatzer about doing something in the technology space, he had the idea for “The Audacity” in mind. Glatzer immediately began brainstorming the character of Duncan Park, the volatile CEO played by Billy Magnussen in the series.
But AMC and AMC+’s “The Audacity” is more than just a look at the world of technology through the lens of a young tycoon. Glatzer said the main entry point into the show is through Orson (Everett Blank), a 15-year-old who moves from Baltimore to Silicon Valley to live with his mother, Joan (Sarah Goldberg), a psychiatrist for business titans like Duncan.
“Orson was someone I really modeled after,” Glatzer says. “I grew up with a mother who was a therapist and a stepfather who was a psychiatrist. They both had offices in their homes that were hauntingly similar to the sets we built for them. New people came in and left every 50 minutes, but people I knew from a small town in New Jersey often came.”
Orson is at the impressionable age of adolescence, and is under pressure to fit into a strange new community, which Glatzer says is the emotional core of “The Audacity.”
“Add to that the fact that this age group is the target audience for most technology product demos, and kids their age have effectively been given tablets since birth,” he says. “I don’t think most parents realize it, but each child creates a data footprint.”
The “boldness” of this series comes from the adults in the show, who are mostly greedy, ambitious, and self-obsessed. Among them is Joanne, who Duncan discovers is involved in insider trading based on privileged information collected from therapy clients.
“There’s nothing more fun than writing why a character does what they do,” Glatzer says.
As for Duncan, Glatzer found in Magnuson the ideal actor to play Duncan’s insecurities and how they fuel the character’s arrogance.
“The first time I saw him was on ‘The Leftovers,’ and he was fascinating to me,” Glatzer says. “Billy has this antennae as an actor that takes in everything that fits. He can do it like no other, in a way I’ve never seen. And that’s very exciting, and then you can combine that with a scene with Sarah Goldberg, who is fucking rock.”
The cast also includes “The Big Bang Theory” alumnus Simon Helberg, who plays an inventor with a more moral center and attempts to develop an empathetic AI. “We’re always looking for the perfect combination of people in the technology industry,” he says. “There were guys like Sam Altman, for a while we thought, ‘Oh, here’s a good guy…oh, he’s different.'”
In casting comedic actors such as Helberg, Rob Corddry and Lucy Punch, Glatzer (whose credits include “Succession”) said he was impressed when comedic actors were given dramatic roles. “They imbue it with a more rounded humanity,” he says.
Although “The Audacity” is set in Silicon Valley, Glatzer is not actually a character from season 1, as he prefers to maintain a close relationship with his characters. “My approach was to leave the world of technology as a backdrop,” he says. “The foreground was always these characters. In the first few episodes, we’re asking the audience, ‘Can you care about and be intimate with nine to 11 characters?’ Because that’s how big the world is. It’s not just the technology, it’s the private school they send their kids to, it’s the therapist’s office, it’s the guys from D.C., it’s Orson from Baltimore.”
In creating the pilot for “The Audacity,” Glatzer said he was inspired by “Better Call Saul” boss Vince Gilligan, whose AMC pilot “Breaking Bad” is considered perfect. “Very rare are pilots who are trying to build a world that is perhaps unfamiliar,” Glatzer said. That was the hardest thing for me because in the pilot you have to chew a lot of protein. “I was happy that it essentially got across what I needed across the finish line. Pilots are always something that is shown to the audience, and it’s really nice to see them all seem to be working, and in the right places, laughing at the jokes rather than the dramatic parts. That’s what you really want!”
