To play Duncan Park, the top of a data-mining firm who’s determined to hitch the higher tier of the tech business hierarchy within the AMC drama The Audacity, Billy Magnussen has to discover a deep nicely of neediness and striving.
“I empathize with that,” says Magnussen. “I think we all have that imposter syndrome, and that’s easy to relate to with any character.” However, he explains, “It’s exhausting, his never-ending drive, because he wants to be the top dog. At what point does your bank account look big enough? How much property do you need?”
His character’s reply, not not like many real-life tech founders, would most likely be, “As much as possible, and then some more.” Duncan’s anxiousness about his place in Silicon Valley is his animating drive, an outward projection of deep-seated psychological points.
“Not good enough, weak, just below par,” is how Magnussen thinks Duncan sees himself, pointing to a scene in episode three when his character seeks out a prognosis by taking a neurodivergence check and may’t settle for the psychiatrist’s evaluation that he’s “typical.”
“He’s constantly searching for, ‘Why do I have this pain?’ And he wants it because I think in the valley, the culture is that you want to be a little off to the side. You want your mind to be different,” says Magnussen. “I don’t think he loves himself, and he’s kind of looking for the answer that would give him clarity on why he hates himself. The truth is, chill out, man, you’re fine.”
Duncan, not less than ostensibly, appears to know he must work on some issues, which
is why he sees a therapist, JoAnne Felder (Sarah Goldberg). “I’m on the fence about that,” Magnussen says with fun. “It goes back to the point where he’s hunting — he wants to know that something’s wrong. He’s asking everyone else to identify him instead of him identifying himself. And I think it probably was the cool thing to do in Silicon Valley. Everyone goes to JoAnne for advice.”
The connection between Duncan and JoAnne shouldn’t be a typical client-therapist one, to say the least. He calls her in any respect hours, she’s combative with him — oh, and she or he’s insider buying and selling, based mostly on what he tells her, and he’s making an attempt to promote a possible angel investor, Carl Bardolph (Zach Galifianakis), on his firm utilizing info she let slip about one other shopper.
Billy Magnussen’s Duncan Park woos billionaire Carl Bardolph, performed by Zach Galifianakis (left), in The Audacity.
Offscreen, the actors are far more in sync than their characters, who have been crafted by collection creator and showrunner Jonathan Glatzer (Succession, Higher Name Saul). “[Goldberg] has an artillery of weapons as an actor, and she knows how to wield them with such grace and ease,” says Magnussen. “We would talk about our scenes — do we know what we’re going to do? No, but we trust each other enough to say, ‘Let’s just see where it goes.’ ”
In doing analysis for the function, Magnussen learn up on real-life tech moguls and located himself captivated by a few of them — although not all the time in a optimistic sense. “How can you say that empathy is a weakness? Who are these people who want to live forever?” he wonders. “They fascinated me. I would go on these deep dives trying to understand, what was the thing they were trying to create in Silicon Valley? What was that genesis of the first, probably optimistic, idea they had? I think they realized they made a lot of money doing it a different way, and they got greedy. I find that kind of heartbreaking.”
As for his personal skilled trajectory, Magnussen is relishing the possibility to be on the prime of the decision sheet after taking part in quite a lot of supporting roles in collection like Boardwalk Empire, Black Mirror, Maniac and The Daring Kind.
“A lot of times in my career, I’ve played side characters, just helping the main character move through their story. This opportunity came up, and for some reason, I knew I could show the vulnerability, the fear, the excitement, the anger, all the sides of who Duncan Park is,” says Magnussen. “Every character I’ve played has had some sort of effect on who I was as a person — what I had to discover as Billy. Then Duncan came in, and I had to go to these dark places that Duncan’s asking [of] himself, and weirdly, I’m going to be asking myself the same questions.”
This story first appeared in a June stand-alone concern of The Hollywood Reporter journal. To obtain the journal, click here to subscribe.
