Jonathan Glatzer wasn’t particularly familiar with Silicon Valley when the president of AMC Studios, Dan McDermott, approached him about making a show set in the tech capital. Still, he was intrigued. “I don’t know shit about tech, but those people do seem to be quite curious to me,” he told McDermott.
After the Emmy-winning writer and producer spent some time inside the Northern California bubble, he was fully on board. “I found this world to be such a strange, silly place. It humanized them for me, as these big-brain people, and it also terrified me a little bit,” he tells Vanity Fair.
Glatzer’s upcoming eight-episode series, The Audacity, is a darkly comic drama about ambition in the tech bubble, centered on a rich cast of characters led by Duncan Park (Billy Magnussen)—an audacious data-mining CEO who will stop at nothing to amass profit and power. As exclusively announced by Vanity Fair, the eight-episode series will premiere Sunday, April 12 on AMC and AMC+, with additional episodes debuting weekly on Sundays.
Zach Galifianakis (pictured with Sarah Goldberg) plays a disillusioned tech entrepreneur who has no interest in getting back into the game.
Duncan is an intense and ambitious guy. He’s not sitting at the top of the mountain—but is determined to do whatever he can to rewrite his story, teaming up with a therapist (Barry’s Sarah Goldberg) to realize his dreams of being the next tech titan.
Glatzer, who serves as executive producer, writer, and showrunner of the new series, sought to focus on wannabes rather than billionaires, and also consciously expanded the story beyond tech bros. “I wanted it to be the also-rans, the more desperate ones, and then brought that out to their families, the kids, and the spouses,” he says.
The standout cast also includes Zach Galifianakis, Lucy Punch, Simon Helberg, and Rob Corddry, with many of their characters also striving—and carrying delusional views of their own worth. “Everybody seems to believe that they are the chosen inventors of the future and that they are the right people to disrupt how we all should be human beings,” Glatzer says. “And this is coming from a group of mostly men, who are famously terrible at communicating, so I think that that was just a fascinating notion.”
Rob Corddry (left) plays Tom Ruffage, who is meeting with companies in attempts to get support for veterans.
About 60 seconds after Magnussen’s audition, Glatzer knew he was the right choice to play Duncan. Magnussen, whose credits include Bridge of Spies, Game Night, Aladdin, and the miniseries Maniac and Made for Love—in which he played an Elon Musk–esque mogul—brings a scrappy, obsessive energy that lends itself to both humor and tragedy. “Duncan is somebody who is constantly grinding his gears, shifting between confidence and insecurity. And every time he grinds it, there’s something delicious about it,” Glatzer says.
In the first few episodes, we find Magnussen’s Duncan turning to his therapist, Dr. JoAnne Felder, to help him manage disappointments at work. But when he realizes his therapist has been using insider information from her clients to pad her own pockets, he hopes to use this discovery to his own advantage. “Creating this guy was like a roller-coaster ride,” Magnussen says. “This guy is an insecure, narcissistic child running down the street saying ‘everything’s okay’ with his pants on fire, but he still wants to do the best he can. He is not the villain in his story.”
