Who Is the Inspiration for ‘The Audacity’s Tech CEO? Billy Magnusson & Creators Explain

Silicon Valley may be part of sunny California, but in AMC’s satirical new series The Audacity, the comedy is way dark. Creator Jonathan Glatzer (Better Call Saul, Succession) sets this tale about interconnected neighbors all trying to get theirs in San Francisco’s tech hub, and he deftly infuses it with gallows humor, sharp writing, and surprising emotion. It’s an elevated soap in three-quarter zip vests and open-design workspaces.

“These characters live in a world where they all have kids going to the same school and they know each other, because they’re all in the same business or adjacent businesses,” says Glatzer of the insular, money-soaked setting. “So it’s sort of like, ‘Well, what if we turned Silicon Valley into Peyton Place?'”

Call it Big Little A.I.s.

On the Vancouver set last summer, Glatzer gave us the rundown of The Audacity, which is as sprawling as its multiple soundstages. “It’s an ambitious project,” he explained. “There’s 10 characters or so that we are meant to care about. There’s the top of the pyramid, which is very clear, but we don’t have anybody step into a scene — whether they’re a spouse or the girlfriend or any of those parts that are frequently underwritten — who is [unimportant]. We went for it.”

That is also, he adds, “why casting took so long. We just really needed to get everybody to be stellar and for it to not just be a platform for the top three actors or something.”

The show is led by a terrifically unhinged, Emmy-worthy Billy Magnussen as Duncan Park, the CEO of a data-mining firm known as Hypergnosis. He’s not an Elon, Zuckerberg, or Bezos. He’s more like the WeWork guy with dimples and a delusional amount of drive. “Throughout the show he plays basketball in his office but he never once gets it into the hoop,” laughs Glatzer. Yet the exquisitely adrenalized Magnussen somehow makes you, if not root for the guy, at least feel for him. Even at his manipulative, hysterical worst.

Ed Araquel/AMC

“That’s because he’s playing it with three dimensionality,” notes Glatzer, weeks before the show’s premiere. “You see the scared little boy inside of the venal tech bro, and I think that’s what he brings to it. That’s what I saw in the first few seconds of his audition.”

Magnussen, a long-underrated force of nature in The Franchise, Made for Love, and the Road House reboot, is equally magnanimous when it comes to his showrunner’s creation. “I’m working with Jonathan Glatzer, probably one of the greatest living writers of our generation right now, so it all stems from his creative mind.” And while he doesn’t cite any particular tech giant, the actor admits that he’s cut-and-pasted a few into his performance.

“We see these names in all the headlines in the papers, these titans are up there,” Magnussen states. “And my job as an actor is to come in and take little pieces from each of them and put something together to be the guy that’s not a tech titan, but is just under them and is hungry enough to find and fill that space.”

Ed Araquel/AMC

In the series opener, it is revealed that Duncan shares an disturbingly codependent relationship with his harried therapist JoAnne Felder (Industry‘s wondrous Sarah Goldberg), who also treats Zach Galifianakis‘s Carl Bardolph, a billionaire suffering an existential crisis. A triangulated entanglement grows exponentially after Duncan realizes just how invested JoAnne is in his professional wins, which soon could depend on whether an unimpressed Bardolph agrees to partner with Duncan on a risky venture.

“She perhaps, at one point, got into her career for idealistic reasons, wanted to help the world,” assesses Goldberg, pointing out that JoAnne and her husband Gary (Paul Adelstein) are not 1-percenters. “[Then] she slowly got seduced into this kind of monied world, working with people who earn obscene amounts of money and living in that reality, but she is also living outside of the reality. So, yeah, it’s a complicated existence for her, and her moral code gets tested over and over.”

At the same time, Duncan’s enigmatic board member Anushka (Meaghan Rath), the Chief Ethicist at a Cupertino-based tech firm, is facing an ethical crisis of her own regarding her engineer husband Martin (The Big Bang Theory vet Simon Helberg) and his obsession with developing a therapy-bot. “She is full of contradictions,” agreed Rath last July while sitting with us on Hypergnosis’ cavernous, gadget-filled office set. “But she also has a dark side.”

We see that emerge early on when it is implied that her work entails covering up catastrophic events off-site. “I think she spent a lot of her career signing off on these really atrocious things when it comes to the workers in their factories and what is ethical,” Rath reveals, adding that Anushka is just as morally malleable at home when it comes to her relationship with Martin and his daughter Tess (Thailey Roberge).

Ed Araquel/AMC

“I think she plays the part of a mother, but she doesn’t really have the maternal instincts and doesn’t really care to,” she continues. “She sees that she’s completely ignored by Martin and feels for her [because] Martin is very all consumed by the artificial intelligence creation that he’s dedicated his entire life to.”

Like Tess, the other teenage spawn of these key players are also victims of their parents’ perpetual self-obsession, adding a fascinating layer to the proceedings as she, JoAnne’s son Orson (Everett Blunck), and Duncan’s daughter Jamison (Ava Marie Telek) navigate the competitive waters of their exclusive high school. And not always as successfully as they are expected to, much to the chagrin of Duncan’s brittle wife Lili (Lucy Punch). 

“They are innocent souls coming into this world and you’re slowly seeing the toxic nature of Silicon Valley seep into them,” previews Magnussen. “And I think that’s what Duncan was. He was hopeful. He was a guy coming here to make something beautiful, something powerful…a community. And then slowly, through the religion of what Silicon Valley is, he became a follower and now is getting delusional and lost. But I don’t think he’s a bad guy.”

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'The Audacity' Scores Early Season 2 Renewal — Everything We Know So Far

Whether or not any of these characters are actually bad, broken, or just plain bored with all of their entitlement, Glatzer promises that this isn’t a condemnation of the privileged as much as it is a right-sizing, via hilariously flawed characters: “My goal was to humanize.”

The Audacity, Series Premiere, Sunday, April 12, 9/8c, AMC