In The Audacity, from creator Jonathan Glatzer, egotistical tech CEO Duncan Park (Billy Magnussen) struggles to maintain control of his company as he finds an unexpected – and unwilling – partner in his therapist Dr. JoAnne Felder (Sarah Goldberg), who has found her own creative ways to get ahead in a cutthroat world where shortcuts are far too often taken and always come with unpredictable consequences.
Awards Buzz spoke with creator Jonathan Glatzer about the expectations audiences familiar with his previous work should have going into this show:
“I might very well be the last person in the world that could give that unbiased advice, especially since I am incredibly fortunate to have worked on Better Call Saul and Succession and Bad Sisters and worked with incredible individuals associated with those shows. If we can be mentioned in the same breath as those shows, I’d be truly chuffed, as the British say. It’s funny because, yeah, someone asked me this not long ago and I was like, well, if you think about it, I guess I got hired on those shows based on my work, on my spec scripts and other stuff. So I think that it’s reasonable to say that that my own approach to character and tone is in some way a match with what Jesse Armstrong or Peter Gould and Vince Gilligan did, though once you’re in the trenches, everything just goes blah. You’re just going off of instinct.”
Magnussen expounded on whether this character feels similar to Byron Gogol from Made for Love:
“I think they’re very different people. I think the genesis of Byron was definitely from a different place and he is also a tech titan in that world, where Duncan is not, I don’t want to say that he’s not a tech man, but he is below the tech titans. He’s ambitious. He actually has more hope than Byron probably had in the beginning of starting, so it comes from a place of actual genuine belief that he wanted to create something beautiful in this world.”
Goldberg connected the dots between JoAnne and the characters she played on Industry and Barry:
“It’s a bit of both, really. It feels, in an exciting way, like something very new for me, and I was looking for some challenging material and something that felt like a bit of a stretch. There’s a little bit of crossover with Industry, mainly in terms of speaking very quickly about things that I previously didn’t understand, whether it’s tech or money, and then I suppose with Sally, there’s a little bit of crossover. I’m always attracted to these characters that are in a moment where they’re on the precipice of a moral conundrum and what path they take. I think there’s some crossover there with JoAnne. She’s about to walk down a dark path and there’s some crossover with Sally there, I suppose. But yeah, it feels new. It feels like a new world.”
New episodes of The Audacity premiere Sunday nights at 9pm on AMC through the season finale on May 31st.
