Jonathan Glatzer has always been fascinated by the personalities that come out of Silicon Valley — and not just the ones you’d expect.
Sure, the tech billionaires that now dominate our lives and our headlines come with plenty of drama to mine. But for Glatzer, he tells Variety For the Love of the Craft, that he was interested in those “below that echelon of the known… those who want to get to that very, very tippy top, and there’s just not enough room for them, so the wannabes, the also-rans, were the ones that really made me curious.”
So when AMC Global Media chief content officer Dan McDermott approached Glatzer about doing something in the tech space, the writer had the idea for “The Audacity” in mind. Glatzer immediately brainstormed the character of Duncan Park, the insecure CEO played by Billy Magnussen in the series.
But AMC and AMC+’s “The Audacity” isn’t just about looking at the tech world through the lens of an infantile tycoon. Glatzer says his main entry point for the show is through Orson (Everett Blunck), the 15-year-old who moves from Baltimore to Silicon Valley to live with his mother JoAnne (Sarah Goldberg), a psychiatrist to business titans like Duncan.
“Orson was somebody who was really based on me,” Glatzer says. “I grew up with a therapist mother and a psychiatrist stepfather. Both of them had offices in the house hauntingly similar to the set that we built for them. Every 50 minutes, somebody new was coming in and people leaving, and it was people frequently that I knew from our little town in New Jersey.”
