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 and Andrew Bushell plays Jeffery Carter. The pair 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.”
“This is the most exciting project I’ve ever worked on,” Magnussen says. “You have these wonderful comedic actors playing such grounded, crazy stakes.”
In Magnussen’s hands, Duncan’s endless energy is almost cartoonish. “You talk about irrational exuberance—he plays Duncan with this fire in his eyes, this certainty that he is going headlong toward what I think ends up frequently being a cliff or a banana peel,” Glatzer says.
Several hit film and TV projects have centered on the tech industry and tech revolutions over the years, including the HBO comedy Silicon Valley, which ran from 2014 to 2019, and AMC’s own hit drama Halt and Catch Fire, a fictionalized telling of the personal computer revolution. As AI threatens to revolutionize society, another wave of tech-focused projects is coming: Magnussen will soon also be seen in The Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin’s follow-up to 2010’s The Social Network. “What Jonathan created with the show, it’s like tech was supposed to make everything simple and it’s made it more complicated. And that’s what keeps happening,” Magnussen says.
Lucy Punch plays Duncan’s wife, Lili Park-Hoffsteader.
Glatzer says that with this show, he wants to use satire to highlight the types of people who are shaping society with both their innovations and their own desire for power and influence—all wrapped up in an entertaining bow. “I don’t have any notions that I’m going to change people’s minds,” Glatzer says. “The most I can do is pick up a mirror and say, ‘Look, this is what maybe you ought to be looking at.’ And if there’s anything polemical at all, if there’s any intention to make people think about something, it really is about our humanity and how it’s been flattened by a lot of this tech.”
Meaghan Rath and Simon Helberg in The Audacity. “I think for all of our characters, they have the best intentions – it just doesn’t always go that way,” says Glatzer.
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