Simon Helberg on the absurdity of ‘The Audacity’

0:00From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment. Our whole universe was in a hot, dense state that nearly 14 million years ago expansion started way back. The earth began to cool the outro. Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. I've known my guest Simon Helberg. My knowledge goes back to when I first met him, when he was doing Studio 60 Live from the Sunset Strip. I say this, he's used to rendering intoxicatingly large amounts of dialogue and keeping his breath between that show and the Big Bang Theory, which you all know him for. And I think even some of the stuff he's done on Poker Face is about having to get through large passages of dialogue without asphyxiating in real time.

0:40It's a low bar. Just don't die on camera. Well, don't die here, by the way, because his newest project, which is on AMC, first I'll tell the name of it. It's called The Audacity. It takes place in Silicon Valley. It is about this handful of people who are determining the fate of humanity. And who live their lives as if they're still in high school. Yeah, yeah. It's the people who are deciding ultimately how we communicate and connect and express ourselves through technology. And these are people who are notoriously famous for not being able to communicate or connect or express themselves. So it's a little bit of a cautionary tale, I think.

1:22It's funny because it's described as a drama, but there are so many people that we know from comedy in the show. Yeah. But I think what's interesting, too, is that it's played at such an operatic pace that it's sort of a tragicomic, isn't it? It is, yeah. I think the darkness that is imbued in all of it, I think, is just a way to make it palatable, too, so that we can hopefully hold out a little bit of hope for, I don't know, correcting the course here as we kind of approach the edge of the cliff. And, you know, there is something absurd, I think, at the edge of any tragedy. It becomes kind of a comfort to laugh at the predicament we're in.

2:06I think we're in a predicament. I think we are, but it's interesting you use the word absurd because I was going to use it because that's what Glasser seems to be attracted to as kind of a, as a storyteller. Yeah. These absurd sort of planes. And I wonder what your first conversation with him was like. Yeah, well, I mean, you know, his shows are among my favorites. And I think, you know, obviously a lot of people love Succession and Better Call Saul and Bloodline. And he's just one of a rare breed and a real sharp, biting, satirical mind. And so talking to him about what he wanted to do in this world and to really show the humanity of these people, not to, I don't think, to necessarily vindicate them or anything.

2:54I think actually to, I think it's really helpful to see what is driving people to make these kinds of choices so that maybe we can look at ourselves and get out of it at some point. your character is the hardest to read of any of the characters and and we were talking about him a little bit and one of the things you said that he was you would describe him as i mean he has a wife and a family and he has the practice of not ever looking anybody in the eye when he's talking to them right it's a very common trait i've seen amongst a certain level of intellect doesn't seem to hamper anyone's success, you know?

3:35If you look around, not just the people in Silicon Valley, but, you know, when I was doing Big Bang and meeting a lot of really, really smart people. In fact, I think the smarter you get, the smaller the capacity sometimes for emotion gets because it's not really efficient, you know? You can't, it just gets in the way of efficiency, I think. And so I actually, I watched a lot of Love on the Spectrum to get ready for this. Oh my God. Because I just, and I think it's an amazing show, and I think it maybe is a little problematic too. A little problematic? Okay. But, you know, it's research. No, but I think that just in order to kind of get behind the character, to understand, again, like, okay, well, how could somebody hold themselves up?

4:21You know, my character's name is Martin Pfister. He's a genius. He was a wunderkind prodigy who made all his money early in tech. and he's now kind of like an outlier in Silicon Valley. He holds himself up. Yeah, he's been kind of cruising for a while. There are actually two characters who are like that who represent these poles of behavior, but also these poles of success. Right. The show is kind of like a look at the Titan adjacents of Silicon Valley. You know, they're not quite, they're clawing their way to the top. So he's not a billionaire. He's probably got just a measly couple hundred million.

4:53I don't know. But he holds himself up in his garage and spends all his time with this AI companion that he's developing. But he's doing it to help alienated teens. That's his mission. Meanwhile, of course, he's got an alienated... He's raising an alienated teen. Yeah, a teenage daughter who he never talks to or sees. But I think that the justification for that is, well, you know what? It's more efficient to solve loneliness for the future generations of fathers and daughters than it is for me to solve the loneliness of my own daughter. By the way, we should say that this treatment, my guess, is an old friend who's finally consented to this show.

5:30Thank God for that, Simon Halpert. Consent is a very loose word. We're talking about a new show on AMC, The Audacity. I guess I find this, for me, brings me back to something I think you're really good at, which is these characters trying to figure out how self-aware they want to be. And I actually just think between what you just did on Poker Face and here, you'll see, well, these guys are thinking, well, do I really want to be, how much of myself do I want to give away? Because if I'm too self-aware, then I'm giving people too much access to me. Yeah. And both these guys who are so, the FBI agent on poker, is so determined to be the right person.

6:07Yeah. You can feel how uncomfortable he, he chose these clothes because you're supposed to dress like this. Right. He's not comfortable in any of them. Right. Yeah, and this is an interesting character because I feel like it's, in some ways there's a difference with like that, for example, in Poker Face, I think that the Luca character was very much excited to play this role of an FBI agent and, you know, maybe even got his wardrobe inspired from, you know, Keanu Reeves and Point Break or something like that. But in this show, I think that all of Martin's every piece of clothing, every part of his life, every sort of self-care, self-maintenance, everything has been deferred until he ultimately, you know, paints his masterpiece.

6:45And it feels like a lot of these guys, these really like uber successful technocrat types do, again, you'll see that sort of uniform. They wear like a black T-shirt and black pants. Their whole closet is like lined up like, you know. And slip on sneakers. Right, because there's not really, it just, it takes away your energy and it takes away your time to have to make those kinds of decisions. So I think that deferring that until he emerges from the garage, you know, with his masterpiece, it's like a very quixotic swinging at windmills kind of thing. He's on this mission, I think, to like, to be a dragon slayer.

7:25I kept seeing people in the, when I was reading about all those Silicon Valley, all the people who made their way there, I saw the word dragon slayer come up a bunch because I think that there's an idea of being heroic and really like saving our species. We should take a little bit of a break here, Robert. My guest is a friend who finally came to the show. We don't use the word consent because he has a troll. We'll just say, in quotes, against my will. Oh, there you go. Yeah. He's one of the stars of The Audacity on AMC. We know him from many things, of course, including Big Bang Theory, which is probably showing somewhere even as we speak during this conversation.

8:02This show is The Treatment. This is not anywhere you speak, except for right here on KCRW. There's more to come. Stay with us.

8:11There's the story you hear, and then there's the story behind it. Who's telling it? What are their motivations? What's at stake? I'm Brian Reed, and on my show from KCRW, Question Everything, We tell stories about power and influence and the ways that people are manipulating the truth. And we do that by talking to the people living with the consequences. My feed was flooded without my consent. I was targeted by Instagram. Listen to Question Everything wherever you get your podcasts.

8:41Welcome back. I'm Elvis Mitchell. Simon Helleberg is here. His new show on AMC is The Audacity. But one of the things I want to get back to is that I like the way you can sort of play two things in this, because there was certainly a tragic cast to Howard, who was like the Naplu Ultra of wanting to be seen all the time. There could have been a whole show about the way he prepared before he left his house. Yeah. Yeah, I definitely think he had a briefcase with many different kinds of currency and, you know, hair gel and different scents. Yeah, for sure. And how he chose this belt for the day. Right.

9:19All these things. And these guys, in some way, to me, are kind of like gradations on a scale. And the shift from, again, about the way you choose to place self-awareness in these guys. Yeah. And for Martin, it's really interesting because it's almost a toy for him as much as everything is around him. These are things that we can almost feel him picking these things up in his hand and deciding, what do I want to do with this today? Yeah. Yeah, I have a lot of fidget spinners around me when I'm doing it. Because these guys always do have those things. It's like their world is just beanbags and fidget spinners, and they're driving us off a cliff currently.

9:59Yeah, it's interesting. I think part of that is also just, I hope there's an evolution, and I think there's an evolution in all the work I do, and I guess the characters I'm drawn to. But it is always a tricky balance between being how self-aware you're going to be or how much of a performer, you know, I'm a performer, Simon, but is the character a performer? Like Howard was a magician and did impressions and you're on a sitcom, you're making jokes, the audience is laughing, but you're like, you know, you start to get into this like warped headspace of, is this, am I making a joke as the character?

10:32What is the reality here? Do people speak this way? And the answer is like, you know, yes and no, it's a heightened, you know it's heightened and and some but a lot of the times he yeah he's the funny guy in the group but you could just you you done again before that studio 60 which is also height yeah and had a ton of again that's one of things i think is sort of fun to watch about what you've done up to here because martin speaks in ponce almost i mean they're basically they're epigrams yeah and and he basically waits to see how they're going to land these statements that he makes right well i think like you know earlier in the work i did i i always i've seen some of the big bangs you know as it comes on tv and i'm like sometimes sometimes i just i god i just it's like i it's like a car wreck i really will peek one part of my head in the room to see am i going to be okay in this scene is that going to be cringy and i cringe a fair amount of the time and sometimes i'm like oh that was great but i think that there's just an air of like being shot out of a cannon that i had in those days also we're shooting again in front of an audience and it's like so there's this energy that you're just like there's just this pace and this like frenetic um explosive energy and i feel like maybe i shouldn't have been shot out of a cannon every time i was walking onto a scene maybe you're supposed to you're supposed to walk into a scene with the life that's happening to you in that moment and take a kind of uh take the truth of that moment with you on stage and not sort of propel yourself into a into a scene but i think that part of that's just style and part of that's growth and part of its character and so martin is a much more nuanced character in some ways you're playing screwball comedy stuff and then big bang theory it's and it's these characters constantly talking about themselves and with screwball comedy characters did but also these characters come with a little bit of a cringe factor built into them it's and that's and that's got to be tough to play just because you also sort of cringe because watching the way martin looks at people yeah and that he will like including his wife look give her a full five seconds before he says anything yeah you know i was reading about sam bankman freed um as i was getting ready to do this too not just watching reality tv and there's a whole part in that book that's so just like actually it's not a whole part it's a sort of a throwaway but that that he was basically being trained to have social skills.

12:55You know, it was just that he didn't know how to read people. And so he actually had, you know, there are like coaches that to learn how to discern is this person interested, happy, sad, angry, because he was getting people that worked with him were, you know, calling him a sociopath and things that he very well might be. But it's also, there's also just a lack of an ability to read social cues. In the book, they mentioned at one point that, oh yeah he grew up in a house they didn't celebrate birthdays which i i was like such a little throwaway but i was like whoa you know and you hear about the people although they don't say hello or goodbye it's just a waste of time they don't say i love you because you know i love you we don't celebrate birthdays because obviously it's your birthday you know it's just like whoa that's it that's heavy and i think that that was a big insight for me and that that just speaks volumes.

13:46We're learning about social cues and apparent criminality with my guest Simon Herald-Burke whose newest series on AMC is the audacity, it's the treatment. I guess though, create a character that makes us invested enough that we sort of feel how much of this can we watch a little bit? I mean that's a real sort of understanding of having a real empathy for character and I can understand how when you see Big Ben you get old because you're feeling that same thing that the character is experiencing. Yeah, it for sure is that, especially in the early seasons. I mean, he was a real slimeball in so many ways.

14:22And I enjoyed, it's not just that it's fun to play that and like chew the scenery or something. I think it's actually a challenge. I've always been acutely aware of being my character's lawyer, you know, defend this character. Because that could only be the sitcom archetype, the sort of sleazy guy who's hitting on everybody and that kind of thing. And we've seen that play so many times. But again, for me, that element of self-awareness that makes you kind of go, oh, this guy kind of knows a little bit, which makes it more interesting to watch. I hope so. I think that's the first rule of order is to really figure out what is making this character tick, how they think.

15:06it's not just like a pretentious actory thing to say. I think it actually is, it's the beautiful part of the job. And it's not to make every bad guy good either. I remember hearing this interview with Dustin Hoffman talking about straight time. He talked about how like, the one thing he couldn't figure out about that character was how the bank robber could justify in a bank robbery shooting and having the gun go off and like go through the front window and hitting, let's say, like a mother with a baby carriage walking by. I mean, that could happen. And he was talking to the actual, to the real life guy, and he said, well, you know what?

15:45If you care about your baby, don't walk her in front of a bank. And he was like, oh my God. And it's not to say that as an actor, you want to actually promote that idea, but it's a fascinating psychological nugget. And I think in order to portray people, you do actually have to understand, again, like for me, you know, this guy neglects his daughter, but he's doing it again for fathers and daughters for the rest of time. And I think that is what the people today are trying to do, effective altruism and all these things that ultimately might be completely corrupt. But I think that they're trying to figure out, okay, at least they started out from the place of how do we prepare for when a meteor hits the earth in 10 ,000 years?

16:32Like, sure, I do need to right now collect, you know, all of your data information, all of this money, and I need to buy that yacht. But what I'm trying to do is save the future of humanity and put my brain online or on ice or whatever. And I think, you know, everyone gets corrupted. And I don't know if those are all necessarily good intentions, but it's certainly playable as an actor. And we're meeting these people in the beginning, maybe some of them before they've been completely corroded. But also, we're meeting him. I just want to ask you what you talked to Jonathan about with this, because we're meeting him at this point where he has, he's deciding what the next act of his life is going to be.

17:12Because he's also, at this point, had the success, more success than 99 % of the people on the planet. Exactly. But the 1 % of people who had more success than him live within walking distance. Right. So that's something that's a part of all this too, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, I think it makes him a pariah. I mean, there's also a bit of this bifurcation of the brains and the entrepreneurial swagger, I think, in Silicon Valley. You know, the two Steves, the Jobs and the Wozniak. And I think that he's definitely a Wozniakian by nature. And so I think it'll be interesting to explore where he goes. I don't want to give anything away, but by the end of season one, there's a lot that happens because it's a good show.

18:00not to brag. But so, you know, it's interesting to see how certain people nowadays, you know, get all the credit for being the genius and being the brains and being this and that. And you find out like, no, you know, just taking some government contracts and taking some of their dad's money and taking this product away from the person that actually created it. But Martin is the guy, you know, he is the guy and he can't speak or present himself, you know, at all. He has no ability. to convey any kind of charisma. But then you see Billy Magnuson, who is maybe by default, like there's something, you know, infective about him.

18:43I mean, it's kind of gross and kind of hilarious and you just want to watch it. These shows you're talking about, The Succession and all the other shows that he's been connected with, are these shows that also do these things too? that sort of veer between comedy and tragedy, or comedy and melodrama even to some extent, while also these characters who lack self-awareness in some crucial ways too. Yeah, they feel like they've been divinely appointed to take this role, I think. There's this wild delusion that exists there, And I think it creates almost like a Shakespearean drama because they're like Richard III.

19:32They are these regal faces and these people who feel like they are doing God's work and they're completely rotting from the inside. And I don't mean all of them. I don't mean every single person. But in the show, we're watching like a great play. We're watching the sort of the rise and fall of it. So we're starting with them as people, like anybody, and going through this whole journey. How many episodes will it be in this season? It's going to be eight episodes. Okay. Yeah. And it really is. It's pretty epic. AMC is really behind it. And they're trying to make, in many ways, return to their Mad Men days.

20:18And this show really has that. It's just gorgeous to look at. It was shot so beautifully. The cinematography and the art direction are stunning. And all the performances are just so wonderful. And it's really, it's deep. You know, so I think, yeah, if you're a fan of those kinds of shows, Mad Men in Succession and these shows that really look at humanity with a flair of drama and juiciness, you can quote me on that. I think we will. Please don't. There's a moment of self-awareness for my guest Simon Helper, whose new show on AMC is The Audacity. It's a pleasure to have you here. You're welcome back here anytime.

21:00Thanks for doing this. Thanks, Albus. It's been great.

21:12Simon Helberg has proved his comedy talents with such projects as Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Old School, and of course, as Howard on the Big Bang Theory. The Golden Globe nominee shows another facet as a tech titan who's detached and engaged in the Silicon Valley set series The Audacity, which now streams on AMC. Previous interviews with performers and worlds packed with eccentrics, including Hillberg, can be heard at the archive kcrw.com slash thetreatment. at kcrw.com slash the treat. You'll find The Treat, our ongoing segment on creators struck by inspiration. This week's edition features writer-director India Donaldson on a sculpture whose power moved her to pleasure.

22:05The Treatment is produced and edited by Rebecca Mooney and mixed by Katie Gilgrist. To better days, everyone, I'm Elvis Mitchell. And thanks for allowing me to give you 30 years of the treatment.

22:32What's up, LA? Want to hit LA's best live events for free? Live now in the KCRW app. It's a dedicated tab for ticket giveaways. We're releasing new giveaways every day. And now you've got one tap entry to giveaways for concerts, festivals, talks, and more. Check the win tab to browse, enter, and win. All from the KCRW app. Download it now or update in your app store.