Jesse Armstrong doesn’t believe in evil—he thinks. “I think everyone behaves like they do for reasons which you could eventually get to the bottom of
Jesse Armstrong doesn’t believe in evil—he thinks. “I think everyone behaves like they do for reasons which you could eventually get to the bottom of,” the prolific writer and producer says. For four deliciously diabolical seasons, Armstrong tested his theory by exploring the machinations and inner psyches of the at least evil-adjacent Roy family on Succession. His recent HBO film Mountainhead, which premiered May 31, explores it once again, this time with tech-bro autocrats.
Steve Carell, Ramy Youssef, Cory Michael Smith, and Jason Schwartzman play Randall, Jeff, Venis (pronounced like “Venice,” not “Venus”), and Hugo—all massively successful tech entrepreneurs, all worth more than a billion dollars. (Except mere hundred-thousandaire Hugo, whom the others call “Souper,” brief for “Soup Kitchen.”) While they gather for a boys weekend, the world outside Hugo’s palatial estate is quite literally falling apart. Governments are collapsing, stocks are crashing, and scores and scores of people are dying—all because of unregulated AI technology that Venis is directly responsible for unleashing into the world.
Believe it or not, Mountainhead is Armstrong’s major directorial debut. Although he took home four Emmys for writing and creating Succession, Armstrong never directed an episode of the series—though he did consider it. “It’s impossible time-wise to do the writing I needed to do and also direct one,” Armstrong says. He also had a slight dose of imposter syndrome. “Mark Mylod had been such a close collaborator and a valued one, and he often did the finales,” he says. To propose himself as a director “felt kind of presumptuous and rude; I worried I wouldn’t do as good a job as he would.”
For Mountainhead, he put his fears aside. “I know the tone, I know what I want to get. It’s not doing Game of Thrones. You have some helicopters, but not even that many helicopters,” he says. Maybe he’d have had more if the film hadn’t been made so quickly. Armstrong pitched the film to HBO president Casey Bloys in December; he wrote the script in January, and they shot on location in March, editing as they went along before wrapping in early April. But Armstrong sees the truncated timeline as a blessing in disguise. “I was anxious about directing for the first time. Not having too much time to reconsider or worry actually felt like kind of an advantage,” he says. “I wasn’t going to read so many interviews with great directors. I wasn’t going to get paralyzed.”
On the surface, Randall, Jeff, Venis, and Souper seem similar—exorbitantly wealthy (mostly) white, (seemingly) straight men who’ve miraculously made it to the top of their fields. But Armstrong knows that not all tech entrepreneurs are built alike—even if they employ the same jargon and wear the same fleeces. “Everybody’s different,” he says. “On a dumb writing level, you’ve got the dad, the favorite son, the usurper who’s going to take his position, and the guy who’s just clinging on by fingernails. You’ve got these archetypes.”
Of course, it’s more complicated than that. And though each character brings real-world parallels to mind, none is a perfect fit for any one notorious tech bro. Carell’s venture capitalist, Randall, evokes both Peter Thiel, the billionaire who once expressed interest in a practice involving the transfusion of blood from a younger person as a means of improving health and potentially reversing aging, and Bryan Johnson, the biohacker whose commitment to slowing down the aging process has led him to compare his nighttime erections with those of his teenage son.
Youseff’s Jeff brings to mind Sam Bankman-Fried—the adolescent gun crypto king serving a 25-year sentence after being convicted on seven counts related to fraud and money laundering—and Open AI founder Sam Altman, though he’s also positioned as the most moral billionaire. Cory Michael Smith’s Venis, the richest and most amoral of all, is an amalgam of Meta’s geek turned hypebeast Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk. Souper? Well, he’s just Souper.
“Because I wasn’t making a biographical or documentary representation of this world, I could just take a bit of, like, ‘Oh, that was weird when Sam Bankman-Fried said that,’” Armstrong says. “It was weird when Sam Altman said that, and Marc Andreessen seems to have a real big hang-up about this.” Some tech personalities gave him more material than others. “Obviously, Elon is so big in all of our minds at the moment. There’s a lot of him scattered around the different people. And Zuck as well. You could take different parts of their characters and sequestrate them away and create these amalgams that seem to work.”
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