Latest news with #JesseArmstrong
Bloomberg
4 hours ago
- Business
- Bloomberg
Jesse Armstrong: ‘I'm Interested in the Power, Not the Money'
In Mountainhead, the Succession creator's fictional tech titans illustrate 'what happens to people as they try to marry their egos with their moral impulses.' What's the best TV series of the last decade? A fair number of people would name Succession, the HBO drama that was widely seen as a take on the Murdochs and won 19 primetime Emmys over the course of its four seasons. Now creator Jesse Armstrong is back, this time directing as well as writing, and his lens is on tech-bro — rather than family — dynamics. Mountainhead, available globally from May 31 on Max and on June 1 on Sky and Now in the UK and Ireland, follows a group of fictional but fairly recognizable tech moguls getting together for a poker weekend. The atmosphere starts off chummy (albeit in a faux, menacing way) until unforeseen circumstances make everything... rather dark. I sat down with Jesse to talk about his inspiration and his first experience directing. No spoilers, I promise. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Jesse, many of us have been waiting to see what you would do after Succession. So why this particular subject, the tech titans, and why now? I couldn't stop thinking about them after starting to read a little bit in the area. I intended to do something else, and I was trying to write a film, trying to write some prose. And after writing a book review 1 in this area, I started reading more, just as a concerned citizen. And listening to podcasts — these people are quite available. Kudos to the literary editor who commissioned Armstrong to write this review, now that we know what it led to. The book was 2023's Going Infinite — a take on the rise and downfall of crypto-king Sam Bankman-Fried by Moneyball and Liar's Poker author Michael Lewis. They speak to people like yourself, but they also speak to each other a lot. 2 And that tone of voice, where you can feel the assumptions pressing in or forming, their sense of the world. It feels quite unusual to get that much access to a tone of voice, the vocabulary. Armstrong is referring to podcasts like Lex Fridman and All-In, whose hosts are tech industry insiders. These shows are big, and the conversations tend to be long, so it makes sense that they gave Armstrong a deep sense of tech executives' thought and speech. So it started to seem like almost an unmissable opportunity to try and write something and to hit it pretty quickly because the environment moves quite fast. Was it straight after the US election? I know you pitched this at the end of 2024, and I wondered whether you saw Elon Musk at Donald Trump's side and had a sense of this power moving way beyond tech? No, the impulse wasn't that. When I thought of the outline of the story, it was before the election. I pitched in December and wrote in January, so it was pre-inauguration. Then there was the sight of a lot of tech people at the inauguration, 3 which was salutary. And DOGE has kind of bubbled up and almost gone away again, culturally at least, in the lifespan of the project. It wasn't just the number of tech CEOs at Trump's inauguration, it was their placement directly behind the president. This Bloomberg story not only charts who sat where at the inauguration, but the intricacies of their relationships with the incoming administration — including newly high-profile figures such as the CEO of TikTok. So although it feels related, I think when people see the film, it's actually about a group of people who are rather separate from government. 'I just think it's interesting what happens to people as they try to marry their egos with their moral impulses, and in this case with an unbelievably large amount of money.' I'm interested in the idea that the vocabulary drew you in. I've had my own taste of tech titan speech recently when I interviewed Elon Musk and he called me an NPC, 4 a non-playable character. This exchange came when I asked Elon Musk whether DOGE was still aiming to save 'at least $2 trillion' from the federal budget, as he had said last October. He told me, 'I feel you're somewhat trapped in the NPC dialogue tree of a traditional journalist.' Yes. And that I was trapped in the dialogue tree of a traditional journalist. [Jesse laughs.] And you have brought that language into the way that your group of tech bros 5 talk to each other. Mountainhead chronicles a poker-weekend gathering of four men who call themselves 'The Brewsters' and are both cliquey and awkward with each other. Their conversations include references to entire countries as though they were extras on a film set; people are 'fungible human assets' and 'bust a B-nut' means to invest a billion dollars (as in, 'If you bust a B-nut into this app, it will give birth to a unicorn'). There's also a hierarchy in the group: One of the four is nicknamed 'Souper,' short for 'Soup Kitchen' because he's not as rich as the others (he's worth over $500 million). Yeah. I didn't even use NPC because it's such a direct version of the way that some of those people see the world, to think that there are non-playing characters and that you are one of them. Presumably me too. Pretty much everyone, probably. Apart from I guess Sam Altman and Donald Trump. I don't know how many people fit in the playing-character mode. Given Elon Musk's feud with Sam Altman, he might well say even Altman's an NPC. [Jesse laughs.] Yeah. That voice was my way in. Part of that is the terminology, part of that is the philosophical approach behind [it], and some is the characters themselves. Let's face it, you spent a lot of time after Succession with people saying to you, 'This is clearly the Murdochs.' But this group of people: One of them is described as the richest man in the world. It looks pretty obvious that one is modeled on Elon Musk. Another is probably Sam Altman, and one is probably Peter Thiel? 6 The one they call Papa Bear. Thiel was Facebook's first outside investor, a co-founder of Paypal, and is known for many other investments as well as for political activity. He also remains a shareholder of Palantir Technologies, whose CEO and legal counsel recently published a book that champions the idea of a state run by a master engineering class, a notion that also appears in Mountainhead. That's Thiel? Yes. I mean look, one of them is the richest man in the world and Elon's the richest man in the world. Other people have felt that he was more Mark Zuckerberg. And who do you think was Sam Altman? Jeff. Ramy Youssef's character. He's Sam Altman because he's fallen out with the richest man in the world. 7 Musk and Altman were together at the founding of OpenAI, but now lawsuits are involved. You can dig into the backstory here. When I asked Musk about Altman directly, he compared OpenAI to a conservation nonprofit that became a lumber company, and confirmed that he plans to push ahead with his lawsuit. Well, listen, I steal from everywhere in terms of the story dynamics and although there's quite a lot of ideological similarity, there are also some very bitter personal rivalries, which is good for fiction. They really are amalgamations of a number of different people. I have played this game with other people and I don't mind playing it, but Succession really wasn't the Murdochs. And if you thought it was, who is Jeremy Strong's character Kendall, and who is Kieran Culkin's character Roman? They didn't really map onto the kids of Rupert Murdoch directly. Are those people the models? Yes. Is this a tech moment? Are those the leading figures? Yes. But I wouldn't have felt as free to write what I did if I felt that I was writing a version of Musk or Thiel. You are writing about that world of the super rich again. 8 If you look at the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, you can see exactly how tech is top of the league. The six wealthiest people (all men!) made their money that way: Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. Sorry. [Laughs] I wondered why? Is it because you have a fascination with wealth? Perhaps we're all fascinated with that world to some extent— Yeah. You definitely get a lot of great visuals from it, right? In Mountainhead, they are on top of a mountain in this extraordinary but horrible house full of hard surfaces. In Mountainhead, the house in which the four Brewsters meet is named in tribute to the Ayn Rand novel The Fountainhead. This fits the movie's vibe, as Rand's work — featuring dogged, individualistic, egoistic characters — has become a lodestar in some business circles. I'm willing to take a follow-up where you don't believe my initial reaction or justification, but I believe I'm doing it because I'm interested in the power, not the money. So I hope I haven't become completely seduced by hanging around in nice houses. 9 Although, as you mentioned, they're not actually particularly nice places to be. They're like fancy hotels, quite beige, quite oatmeal, 10 often quite poorly finished, thrown up and sold off often as assets. The characters in Mountainhead, who take pride in their razor-sharp banter, have a great time mocking the mansion owned by 'Souper' (played by Jason Schwartzman). After walking into the house and finding out what it's called, Jeff (played by Ramy Youssef) asks if his interior decorator was 'Ayn Bland.' The visuals help the drama, don't they? There they are, on top of the world. There's a Mount Olympus feeling 11 to these four men gathering. It's also a very male world, of course. They look down, physically down, on the cars waiting for them, on their staff. The location is actually Park City, Utah, well known for its skiing and as a playground for the ultra-wealthy. It's also where the Sundance Film Festival takes place — at least until 2027 — and the city saw its resort offerings grow after nearby Salt Lake City hosted the 2002 Winter Olympics. Yeah, and as a director — this is the first thing I've directed — is it nice to have Utah out of the windows? Yes. It's a considerable advantage visually, for this film takes place in constrained physical circumstances. I can't say that helicopters don't look good when you shoot them from another helicopter or a drone, I think people respond to that. 12 We did always try to remind ourselves not to be selling anyone anything. One fascinating detail on portraying the rich came from Kieran Culkin talking to fellow actor Dan Levy about how wealth consultants helped the Succession cast. They told the actors that they were getting out of helicopters wrong. The rich don't duck down, because they know instinctively where the blades are; they've been traveling this way all their lives. Are you in a world where you do get pitches for that, because companies want to see their products in your work? We've resisted product placement. Tell me about your relationship with the characters. You've spoken about your Succession characters and said that, at the moment you are writing, you have to like them to an extent, or at least suspend judgment of them. Yeah, I think that's true. This is a slightly different tone of a piece. I'd be interested whether you agree, but I think it's more of a dark comedy than Succession was. 13 I do agree. When the action turns from verbal to more deeply threatening I was taken aback, and Armstrong plays with the shifting tone. The way the world is, and tech's relationship to it, seems really troubling to me. 14 However, when we write the history of the world, maybe Elon Musk will have saved it, with what he has done with Tesla. Maybe Starlink is going to do extraordinary things. Overall, Armstrong is measured when talking about Mountainhead, but Bloomberg's own review zeroed in on this angst. 'The anger that spurred Mountainhead 's creation is also its best quality,' Esther Zuckerman writes. 'Armstrong is pissed off and has decided to channel that into brutal jokes. If we can't laugh at these people, what else can we do?' The achievements of these people are significant and real. And I'm not one of those people who thinks Musk just slaps his name on everything and takes the credit. I think he has got extraordinary talents. He seems to have taken a very dark turn in terms of his politics. 15 Musk hasn't just weighed in (verbally and financially) on US politics. He's also been supportive of Germany's far-right AfD party. 'It's good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything,' Musk said in January, speaking during an AfD campaign event alongside the party's co-leader, Alice Weidel. I'm worried about all the parts of tech that everyone else is, especially AI. But I wouldn't want that to diminish a sense that these people — it sounds banal, but they're very important figures and very talented figures. I just think it's interesting what happens to people as they try to marry their egos with their moral impulses, and in this case with an unbelievably large amount of money. Tell me about the format, because I wondered about the choice to do a film versus the development that you had over successive, not only episodes, but seasons of Succession. Was it liberating to focus your energies on a single film, or did you miss the scope to develop this more? No, I feel it is a target that I've tried to hit, and it's a one-use thing. The things that happen in the film are relatively extreme. It'd be difficult — not completely uninteresting, but difficult — to come back, quote, 'next week' from the events. The relationships are thinner, they're not family, which is great for drama. They can break apart. It was liberating, just liberating on a human level, not to have to think about running a show, which is a big endeavor. I think the form fits the subject matter. And directing? And directing… Yes, I wanted to direct something. I think this was a good thing for me to direct because we wanted to make it really quickly. It's on TV six months from when it started being written and I was really keen for it to appear in the same bubble of culture or time as the audience are watching it in. 16 I like collaborating with directors, but it takes some time and it takes some adjustment to come to the same vision. And not having that I think was an advantage. Events are indeed moving fast: Since I spoke with Jesse earlier this week, Elon Musk has announced he's leaving the Trump administration. Mountainhead does retain ambiguity on links to real-world events; Armstrong even shelved an early idea of having the tech bros watch news on ATN, Logan Roy's TV channel in Succession. Did you think the moment might pass? Because I feel like the tech titans moment… This is our age. I think you could have taken your time with it. Yes, I take your point, and I hope that people will be able to watch it in a few years and it'll still feel interesting. And no, they're not going away. It's just a gut feeling. It's a creative feeling. And it may have been total miasma, and it may have been also, partly, a challenge to myself. I was scared of directing. [It was] a reason to run at it rather than read everything, watch everything I could about directing. And worry about it. Yeah. Did you love it, the directing? The control must be great. [Laughs] What you say happens. You don't give your script to someone else. I did like it. The four leads are exceptionally talented, but also really decent and nice people, and very collaborative. So that made it a pretty easy shoot. I surrounded myself with a lot of people I'd worked with on Succession, so it was relatively comfortable. And people like Steve Carell, on set, do they make suggestions? Do they say, 'This line doesn't really work, I'd really like to change this'? They didn't say that particular form of criticism much. There's room to improvise, there's room for people to dodge around bits which they feel are less expressive of the characters that they've come to. I think they trusted me about the characters I've created for them. I was scared that first morning of rehearsal, presenting myself as the director to people like Steve Carell and Jason Schwartzman, and Ramy and Cory — who are not as storied as actors yet, but I think they will be, because they're both extraordinary. 17 So yeah, it was a moment of some anxiety: Am I really going to pretend to be the director here? But I did. Cory Michael Smith has been a stage and screen actor and has worked several times with critically acclaimed director Todd Haynes. In Mountainhead, he plays Venis, the 'richest man in the world' character. Ramy Youssef is best known for the comedy-drama Ramy, which he co-created (and in which, fun fact, his mother is played by Hiam Abbass, who was fictional patriarch Logan Roy's long-suffering wife in Succession). Jason Schwartzman has been in a number of Wes Anderson films and played Ringo Starr in the biopic spoof Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. And of Steve Carell's long career I will pick out just this, because it portrayed my industry: I thought his depiction of Mitch Kessler in ' The Morning Show ' was brilliant. But your work has spoken for itself, Jesse. They're there because they've seen what you've done and they trust you. Succession must have been life-changing. Yeah, it was. I think at least three of the actors said yes to the project before there was a script. So yeah, it has changed the sort of things I can pitch and the sort of things people are willing to do. Is it too soon to ask what you'll do next? It's too soon for me to answer. [Laughs] But I'll go back to a screenplay and this fiction that I've been meddling with, and I just hope I won't get any other voices in my head. I can't believe that the idea of a Succession Season 5 is completely out of the question. Not only because it would definitely do well, but also because of the way that you left it. That scene at the end, with Kendall looking at the water, what's he thinking? He's going to do something next, right? I honestly don't think about those characters anymore. I think about the people a lot, and I really am very, very fond of them, but the characters to me are characters in that show. And it ended for me when it ended. And I think maybe to support my claim that I'm really interested in the power, not the money, that show in a way was quite a lot about mortality and about an older man facing the end. And Fox is still very important to the political climate in the US, but it wanes every day and so does print journalism. 18 So the vital interest in that world for me has gone. Ouch. While the old model of print has gone, there is a continuing market for magazines — or at least some magazines — across genres. The industry is also still ripe for fiction: Later this year, streaming service Peacock will debut a spinoff of The Office called The Paper, a mockumentary-style comedy about the staff of a declining midwestern newspaper called The Truth Teller. When the Murdochs were fighting in Nevada and some of the stuff that came out in the papers, I did feel it would be quite easy to write another season from the material that was coming out and also seeing Shari Redstone and how she's negotiating [at] CBS and that Paramount world. There are interesting things to write about, but it just doesn't have any vitality left for me. Personally, what did you think when you read that it was when Elisabeth Murdoch and her adviser saw the key scene — there might be people still out there who haven't seen Succession, so I'm not going to say exactly what — but the key denouement of Succession and then thought 'We better sort out our own succession.' That is life imitating art. 19 In a sweeping recounting of the Murdoch legal drama, the New York Times reported in February that Elisabeth Murdoch's representative to the family trust drafted a ' Succession memo' after seeing how poorly Logan Roy's children handled their situation. Rupert Murdoch's ultimate successor is still being decided in a Nevada court. You never know if these stories are true, there's lots of odd briefing that goes on in a big dynastic family like that, so I never put too much credence on what people say. Honestly, I just felt humanly sad if that was the case, in that it's hard to think about your parents' death. So if that's true, I feel sad to the degree it's a human reaction, and surprised it's a corporate reaction. They really had bought [the] Murdoch myth if they hadn't realized that at some point he will pass away. Can we talk about your observations on the changing nature of TV? Since you hit the big time in this world, quite a lot has changed for the streamers in that they're not growing as strongly as they were and YouTube is hoovering up more advertising. 20 Can you imagine making a show for YouTube? Google's video division now accounts for more TV viewing than any other network or streaming service, and YouTube (not including its own live-TV offering that bundles traditional channels) accounted for over 12% of TV viewing in April, more than all of Walt Disney Co.'s TV networks and streaming services combined, according to Nielsen. Last year, YouTube sold almost as much advertising as Disney, Paramount, Fox and NBCUniversal combined. Well I have a deal at HBO, so no. [Laughs] Not right now. Not right now. I don't know, anything's possible in the future. Personally, I grew up with the rhythm of a weekly release. I like the sense of a show growing that you get with that. I guess YouTube could do that too. I do worry – and this might seem ironic or even disingenuous coming from someone who's done such a lot in the US recently – but I do worry about British drama and drama that's particularly about British themes. At the moment it seems like there's space for [that]. Shows like Suspect, 21 the Jeff Pope piece on Jean Charles de Menezes, which was brilliant. And Adolescence, 22 which is also brilliant. But I worry about that, and I love what the BBC does for the British broadcasting environment, and I hope it thrives. A four-part series on Disney+, Suspect tells the story of Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes, who was shot dead by police in London in 2005 after he was mistakenly identified as a terrorist. Adolescence, which follows the aftermath of a 13-year-old being arrested for murdering a schoolmate, has been a global hit for Netflix despite its very British setting. The show explores universal themes having to do with children and social media. 'Why can't we look at phones and social media as [we do cigarettes and alcohol]? Why can't it be a public-health issue?' co-creator Jack Thorne said in an interview with Bloomberg. 'If a government takes a stand, it might have a real impact.' It can't compete, can it, with the budget of Netflix. Not on its own, not on the current license fee, no. 23 Armstrong is referring to the UK's system of funding television through an annual payment by households. Can it do interesting stuff? I'm always very aware of what Armando [Iannucci] did with the small budget he was given on The Thick of It. You don't necessarily need a huge budget to do interesting work. 24 Armando Iannucci's scathing, expletive-ridden, laser-like take on British politics is cult comedy. And his distinct brand of satire has also proven popular in the US; Iannucci went on to create HBO's Veep. The Thick of It, which you worked on. I guess that the world has really changed since then, right? The success of the streamers has inflated prices for everyone. Well, we didn't need any helicopters in this. It was written as a sort of play. It was a pitch to HBO [that] I could do this for almost nothing, and I would, but we could do it with a bit more scope and scale if we can find an amazing place. You have to pay a crew and you have to employ people and they have to be able to live, but you can make smaller-scale pieces. And I want there to be both. I want there to be Wolf Hall and The Thick of It. I'm saying I hope that lots of money continues to go into British drama and sometimes makers might have to be inventive as well. You're right that public service broadcasters can't afford to make tons and tons of those kinds of shows in the way that Netflix, Disney and YouTube can. When you get used to the more comfortable budgets, it's probably very hard to imagine doing something on a shoestring. You've had the Utah mountaintop now. I don't know. I hope I could go and make another season of Peep Show, 25 which had a perfectly decent budget, but unbelievably smaller level of magnitude. That doesn't scare me. Armstrong co-created this British comedy series, which ran for nine seasons from 2003 and was about two young men sharing an apartment. It did indeed happen on a much smaller scale than a mountaintop — the show was filmed in just a few rooms. As a creative person, how do you clear your head? How do you block your time out and really immerse yourself in something? I like going to my office — it's important for me to have a regime of going there, even when I'm in a more fallow period and I might be reading more than writing. I might be staring out of the window even more than writing, but importantly not looking at my phone or the internet, because I don't take it or have it there. So from a purely creative point of view, the most important thing for me is to go out of the house without my phone and without Wi-Fi. Leave your phone at home? 26 There was a note of horror in my voice here, but of course — unless you have the willpower to leave the phone in a drawer or avoid reaching for it — he's right. One study published in Nature in 2023 found that the mere presence of a smartphone, even if you're not interacting with it, affects attention. TLDR: When a smartphone is around, we work more slowly. Yeah. Wow. That's a lesson we can all take away. Do you have a notebook where you save ideas or do you not need to, because it's there in your head when you need it? I do have a running notebook of ideas, but it's only briefly on paper and then gets transcribed digitally quite fast. And will you be going back to one of your old — well not old, but yet unused works next? Yes! I'm quite close to the end of the screenplay and I'm quite well into the prose I'm writing. So yeah, I hope that both of those will come to fruition. We look forward to that. Jesse Armstrong, thank you so much. Oh, thank you so much. It's lovely to chat. Mishal Husain is Editor at Large for Bloomberg Weekend. She joined Bloomberg from the BBC, where she presented its leading news program Today on BBC Radio 4 for over a decade. More On Bloomberg Terms of Service Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information Trademarks Privacy Policy Careers Made in NYC Advertise Ad Choices Help ©2025 Bloomberg L.P. All Rights Reserved.
CNET
4 hours ago
- Entertainment
- CNET
What to Stream on TV This Weekend: 'And Just Like That...,' 'The Better Sister' and More
If you're looking for some hot new titles on streaming this weekend, Max is the place to be. The streamer (which will revert back to being called HBO Max this summer) has brought back And Just Like That..., the continuation of Sex and the City, this week for some breezy summer fun. It will also debut a new film, Mountainhead, from Succession's showrunner Jesse Armstrong, on Saturday. Of course, there's plenty to watch on other streamers this weekend too. On Prime Video, you can tune into the new thriller The Better Sister starring Jessica Biel and Elizabeth Banks. Hulu's new show, Adults, penned by former writers from The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon, is now out as well. If your kids are looking for something fun, you can also check out Dog Man, the animated movie based on the book series, which arrives exclusively on Peacock. Here's all the info you need to tune in this weekend. Read more: Best Live TV Streaming Services of 2025 Best new TV shows and movies to stream this weekend Netflix Netflix Cold Case: The Tylenol Murders (May 26) If you were alive in the early 1980s, you may remember the frenzy around the alleged dangers of taking Tylenol after the deaths of several people who ingested capsules of the over-the-counter drug that were laced with cyanide. The deaths sparked a major criminal investigation and chaos for consumers. Netflix's Cold Case: The Tylenol Murders returns viewers to that time of panic. The show's three episodes are available now. Netflix Dept. Q (May 29) Dept. Q is a British crime drama adapted from the novels of the same name by Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen. The series, starring Matthew Goode, focuses on Carl Morck, an Edinburgh detective who's assigned to a new cold case while dealing with his own demons after a shooting incident left his former partner paralyzed. The new series came out on May 29. Max Max And Just Like That..., season 3 (May 29) Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, Seema and Lisa are back -- this is the new core group leading Max's third season of the sequel series to Sex and the City. The show returns to find Carrie and Aidan (John Corbett) still together, but very much apart now that he's living in Virginia to keep an eye on his kids. We'll still see Corbett on the show, but we're even more excited for confirmed guest stars Rosie O'Donnell and Patti LuPone. And Just Like That… premiered on May 29 and will air one episode weekly through Aug. 14. Max Mountainhead (May 31) With Succession over, that show's creator, Jesse Armstrong, has helmed a new project that once again takes aim at the rich and powerful: Mountainhead. The film stars Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Cory Michael Smith and Ramy Youssef as a group of friends -- who all happen to be billionaire tech bros -- as they get together for a ski weekend while the world is in the midst of financial and political crises. The dark satire premieres May 31 on Max. Prime Video Prime Video Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy, season 2 (May 27) Prime Video's animated series Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy returned this week with a drop of eight new episodes, which star Keke Palmer and Stephanie Hsu as intergalactic surgeons. Dr. Sleech and Dr. Klak, who are also besties, specialize in treating alien ailments all over the universe, and this season finds them in a pickle when a journalist starts to look into Dr. Sleech's past. The show also features the voice talents of Kieran Culkin, Maya Rudolph, Lennon Parham and Natasha Lyonne. Prime Video The Better Sister (May 29) In Prime Video's The Better Sister, Jessica Biel and Elizabeth Banks star as sisters who couldn't be more opposite. Biel stars as Chloe, a media executive with a seemingly perfect life and family, while Banks plays her drug-addled, estranged sister Nicky. The sisters are reunited after Chloe's husband is murdered, and together they start to unravel the truth about his death. Hulu Huly Adults (May 29) Adults is a new comedy from Tonight Show writers Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw about five friends, Samir (Malik Elassal), Billie (Lucy Freyer), Paul Baker (Jack Innanen), Issa (Amita Rao) and Anton (Owen Thiele) who are living together as they begin their journey in the real world, navigating work, romance and everything else. The show will also feature guest appearances from D'Arcy Carden, Julia Fox and Charlie Cox this season. The entire eight-episode season became available May 29 on Hulu. Peacock
Sky News
5 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Sky News
Mountainhead: Succession writer Jesse Armstrong's new film takes aim at tech billionaires
Succession writer Jesse Armstrong says he hopes his new film about toxic tech billionaires can be a receptacle for anyone who is "feeling wonky about the world". Now making his film directorial debut with Mountainhead, starring Steve Carell and Jason Schwartzman, Armstrong has shifted his focus from cut-throat media moguls to a group of billionaire friends meeting up to compare bank balances against the backdrop of a rolling international crisis they appear to have stoked. Speaking to Sky News about the project, he said: "For a little while I poured some of my anxieties and feelings into it… and I hope it can be a receptacle for other people if they're feeling wonky about the world, maybe this can be somewhere they put some of their anxieties for a while." Few television writers achieve widespread recognition beyond their work, but Armstrong - the man behind Succession, one of the most critically acclaimed TV shows of the past decade - has become a household name and is today one of the world's hottest properties in high-end drama. "If there was more self-reflection and self-knowledge, there probably wouldn't be such amenable targets for comedy and satire," he admits. Long before he gifted viewers with the likes of manipulative Logan Roy and sycophantically ambitious Tom Wambsgans, back in the beginning, there was selfish slacker Jez and the perennially insecure Mark on his breakthrough hit Peep Show. "I love comedy, you know, it's my way in," he explains. "I think I like it because… the mixture that you get of tragedy and absurdity strikes me as a sort of a true portrayal of the world… and I just like jokes, you know, that's probably the basic reason." After putting his pen down on the finale of Succession, walking away with 19 Emmys and nine Golden Globes, attention was always going to be drawn to what Armstrong did next. "I had a couple of other things that I thought I would write first and this kind of snuck up on me as an area of interest," Armstrong says. "After I'd listened to a bunch of tech podcasts and Ted talks, I sort of needed somewhere to put the tone of voice that was increasingly in my head." Tapping into the unease surrounding big tech, he wrote, shot and edited Mountainhead in less than six months. Capturing the audience mood Explaining why he worked so fast, he said he "wanted to be in the same sort of mood as my audience, if possible". While he insists there aren't "any direct map-ons" to the billionaire tech moguls, which frequently make headlines in real life, he joked he's "happy… to play a game of 'where did I steal what from who?'" with viewers. "You know… Elon Musk… I think at least people would see some Mark Zuckerberg and, I don't know, some Sam Altman, there is a bunch of those people in all the [film's] different characters… and we've stolen liberally from the world in terms of the stories we've given them." Steve Carell is tasked with delivering some of the film's most memorable lines as the satire explores the dynamic between those holding the power and those pulling the strings. Lack of self-knowledge 'good for comedy' "People who lack a certain degree of self-knowledge are good for comedy….and if there was more self-reflection and self-knowledge, there probably wouldn't be such amenable targets for comedy and satire. "You know, living in a gated community and travelling by private jet certainly doesn't help you to understand what life is like for most people." Armstrong's gift for using humour to savagely dramatic ends is arguably what makes him one of the most sought-after writers working today. Behind his ability to craft some of the sharpest and scathing dialogue on our screens, he views what he does as more than getting a laugh. "I do believe in the sort of nobility of the idea, that this is a good way to portray the world because this is how it feels a lot of the time."
USA Today
10 hours ago
- Entertainment
- USA Today
'Mountainhead' stars on the 'incredibly dangerous' mentality of their uber-rich characters
'Mountainhead' stars on the 'incredibly dangerous' mentality of their uber-rich characters Show Caption Hide Caption 'Mountainhead' teams Jason Schwartzman with 'Succession' creator "Succession" creator Jesse Armstrong's new HBO film "Mountainhead" stars Jason Schwartzman in key role. 'Mountainhead' stars Jason Schwartzman, Cory Michael Smith and Ramy Youssef felt like they hit the jackpot as recruits for the first movie directed by 'Succession' creator Jesse Armstrong. After all, the HBO drama series, which centered on the children of media mogul Logan Roy fighting to take over his empire, earned 76 Emmy nominations throughout its four seasons. 'When Jesse Armstrong reaches out, (you say yes),' says Schwartzman, 44. 'Being such a massive fan of 'Succession' and his point of view ... you would do it even if you maybe didn't have any knowledge of what it was.' Join our Watch Party! Sign up to receive USA TODAY's movie and TV recommendations right in your inbox Youssef, 34, thought 'Jesse Armstrong? I'm in. Tech bro, hell, yeah.' Smith, 38, counts 'Succession' as 'one of my favorite shows of all time. I watched that show salivating over what these other actors got to do, and this being an opportunity to work with him was just like no questions asked.' But maybe you have questions, like what is 'Mountainhead' about? The film, debuting May 31 (8 ET/PT on HBO and streaming on HBO Max), chronicles the weekend shenanigans of a (mostly) billionaire boys club gathered for poker at Hugo's (Schwartzman) modest 21,000-square-foot estate, dubbed Mountainhead. Hugo is the poorest of the four with a measly $521 million to his name. Venis (pronounced "Venice" and portrayed by Smith) is the richest with a $220 billion fortune amassed from his social media platform Traam, currently inundated with deepfakes so realistic they're inciting international incidents of violence. He's in dire need of Jeff's (Youssef) AI which can flag fake content for users. Randall (played by Steve Carell) is eager for Venis and Jeff to partner because it will increase the likelihood Randall can upload his consciousness before cancer overtakes his body. The movie filmed at breakneck speed over five weeks this spring in Park City, Utah. 'It was so accelerated,' Schwartzman says. 'Part of being in the movie that was unspoken was like, 'Are you prepared to just give it all you can and no matter what, just put it on the line?' Doing that with these gentlemen, it was really inspiring and moving.' The characters' desires and delusions about the world and themselves make for an interesting dynamic. 'They respect each other, and they have an anti-respect for each other,' Schwartzman says. 'And it's hard to kind of figure out what is what and who's feeling what, but it's almost like these four guys need each other.' The film looks at those who 'have incredible authority and power over all of our lives,' Smith says, asking, 'What are they like behind the scenes? How much do they care? Are they nihilists and do they have any consideration for the well-being of all of us in the midst of political and economic turmoil around the world? I don't know.' The tension of the film is 'incredibly different than 'Succession,'' Youssef says. 'Fans of Jesse are going to be happy, but it's a different thing.' Armstrong's voice and style are apparent, and the characters 'are powerful and deal with privilege and are rich,' Youssef says. But 'we're not looking at nepo babies. We're looking at actually self-made guys who view themselves as underdogs in a world where actually they are in more control than they should be. And that kind of cognitive dissonance is incredibly dangerous.' Youssef, born to Egyptian parents, says he crafted his role of Jeff as someone with similar origins who struck it rich. 'When you're after money, it is never enough,' he says. 'Everyone comes to that realization that what is going to really give you that feeling of wealth is going to be having a rich personal life, and this character doesn't have that. In my own personal life, it was a quick realization that you get a few things that you're hoping to get, and then once you get them, you go, 'OK, that's not really what I was after.'' Smith, who grew up in a working-class family, wanted to be a theater actor. Being rich was not the goal. 'The thing that I really wanted when I decided to go to drama school and then moved to New York was to be able to support myself doing the thing that I loved,' he says. 'And when I accomplished that, being able to do that, that was like a crazy thing for me.' The experience of working on 'Mountainhead' is its own fortune, one which Smith gets choked up reflecting on. 'Being invited onto this movie was so mind-blowing for me because 'Succession' is one of my favorite shows and getting a personal call from (Armstrong) offering me this job was just crazy, dreamy,' Smith says. 'For the four actors and Jesse and everyone else to also just be really kind, supportive, wonderful people ... making friends with these people is beyond.'
The Verge
11 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Verge
Mountainhead succeeds at showing you how truly deranged the billionaire mindset can be
The degree to which Mountainhead, HBO's new black dramedy from Succession creator Jesse Armstrong, will make you laugh depends almost entirely on how much news you consume about tech billionaires who see themselves as übermensch chosen by fate to shape the arc of history. The more time you've spent listening to Silicon Valley types wax poetic about reality being a simulation, ' universal basic compute,' and how humanity is a 'biological bootloader' for artificial intelligence, the less Mountainhead 's CEO characters come across as being amusing caricatures. But if you're part of the lucky bunch that has never bothered listening to billionaires insist that they're going to achieve immortality in preparation for colonizing Mars, Mountainhead might strike you as an incisive send-up of the uber-wealthy oligarch class. Especially in this moment where we've all been able to watch some of the world's richest tech overlords prostrate themselves before Donald Trump in hopes of amassing even more power, the movie's depiction of tech bros flirting with the idea of taking over the world seems so plausible that it almost doesn't work as satire. But each of Mountainhead 's lead performances is infused with a manic, desperate energy that makes the film feel like an articulation of the idea that, when you strip all the self-aggrandizing mythos away, billionaire founders are just people with enough money to make their anxieties and insecurities everyone else's problem. Though it's narrative territory we've seen Armstrong explore before, Mountainhead is no Succession. Compared to Armstrong's more expansive episodic work, there's a breathless urgency to his first feature that reflects the speed with which he wrote and shot it. But the film does make you appreciate how dangerous and divorced from reality today's titans of industry tend to be when left to their own devices. Set almost entirely in a palatial lodge nestled high up in the Utah mountains, Mountainhead revolves around a quartet of absurdly wealthy frenemies who come together for a weekend of rest, relaxation, and metaphorical dick measuring while the rest of the world hurtles toward a doomsday scenario. On some level, social media tycoon Venis (Cory Michael Smith) knows that the new generative AI tools rolling out on his Twitter-like platform, Traam, have the potential to incite chaos by feeding people deepfaked footage designed to keep them angry and endlessly scrolling. Venis has seen the news reports about multiple outbreaks of violence targeted at immigrants and ethnic minorities. He's also heard commentators linking his creation to a widespread erosion of trust on a societal level. But with his net worth at an all-time high, it's easy for the twitchy CEO to ignore all that bad press and dismiss the disturbing imagery flooding Traam. Similar to Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, Mountainhead frames AI's ability to obfuscate the truth and manipulate people's perceptions of reality as the kind of threat that should give everyone pause. But rather than telling a story about humans racing to stop a tech-driven apocalypse, Armstrong is much more interested in exploring the ways in which artificial intelligence's potential for harm is directly connected to the worldviews of those who create it. Venis isn't the only tech mogul ready to roll his eyes as Traam's AI continues to stoke unrest and violence around the globe. Almost all of his closest friends — a small group of men who call themselves the Brewsters — feel exactly the same way. James (Steve Carell), a steely Steve Jobs type who refuses to accept the reality of his terminal cancer diagnosis, sees Traam's popularity as a sign that Venis is on the right path and setting himself up to corner the market on digitizing human consciousness within a decade. Even though Jeff (Ramy Youssef), the creator of a rival AI toolset that can reliably identify deepfakes, has gone on the podcast circuit understandably trash-talking Venis, he can't deny that Traam's dangerous slop has led to an exponential growth of his own valuation. And as the 'poorest' member of the Brewsters, multimillionaire health nut Hugo / 'Soup Kitchen' (Jason Schwartzman), is more than willing to cosign basically anything his friends do. Some of it boils down to Soup's need for an influx of cash for his next business venture — an ill-conceived wellness and meditation app. But the deeper truth that Armstrong repeatedly highlights is that groups like the Brewsters always need someone around who's willing to play a game of boar on the floor or eat a soggy biscuit to make themselves feel like they're all having a good time. The desire to have a good time is ostensibly why Soup invites the other Brewsters to come spend the weekend at Mountainhead, his drearily chic vacation home that reeks of new money and a juvenile obsession with Ayn Rand. But once the group has gotten together and sent their assistants — most of the movie's sparingly few women characters — away, it isn't long before the boys' deep-seated resentments of one another start bubbling to the surface. And when the unnamed president of the United States calls up Venis and Jeff to discuss how the Traam deepfake situation is getting worse by the minute, the group takes it as a sign that they might be looking at an opportunity to play and win a game of real IRL Risk. Given how relatively few places it physically takes its characters, Mountainhead does a solid job of not feeling like a claustrophobic play about delusional billionaires beefing on top of a mountain. Few of the Brewsters' digs at each other are truly laugh-out-loud funny, but what's impressive is how each of the characters feels like a distinct embodiment of the culture that gave birth to the modern celebrity tech founder archetype. Armstrong wants us to see these people as ghouls who are beyond high on their own supplies, but also as profoundly broken men whose fixations on biometrics and being seen as sigma men speak to a deeper sense of inescapable inadequacy. Things like James' tense relationship with his personal doctor and the odd, vaguely homoerotic game of wits Venis and Jeff start to play in Mountainhead 's third act are intriguing. But they're also part of what makes the film feel like it might have been more compelling as a miniseries with enough time and space to show us more of how the Brewsters move through the world and what besides their money would make these four men want to spend time with one another. Just when Mountainhead starts to get juicy and unhinged, it rushes to a dramatic climax that feels right-minded, but premature. It's almost as if Armstrong means to leave you unsatisfied as a way of emphasizing how people like the Brewsters seldom get what they really deserve. As a piece of eat (and ogle) the rich social commentary, Mountainhead works fine if you're craving a cheeky, surface-level indictment of tech barons who fancy themselves as gods. But if you're looking for something more dramatic and substantive, you might be better off just reading the news.
