‘The Audacity’s Sarah Goldberg searches for the humanity in Silicon Valley

When? audacity Star Sarah Goldberg meets the series for the first time Creator Jonathan Glatzer sums up the show in an unexpected way: Real-life tech giants audacity The Scousers are so focused on creating immortality that they can’t face the fact that everyone – including them – has peed their pants at some point in their lives.

As Goldberg described it in a Zoom call with Mashable, that comparison — “the denial of our base humanity” — appealed to her. audacityDistorted perspective on Silicon Valley.

In audacityAmong the group of tech founders, Goldberg’s Dr. Joanne Felder is a unique personality. He’s a therapist to the valley’s “billionaire man-children”, a tenant in a sea of ​​extremely wealthy homeowners who don’t care if their Napa house burns down, because they have plenty of other houses to run back to.

Because of her outsider status, you might think that Joan would work audacityThe voice of reason. But by the end of the show’s first episode, it’s clear that he’s just as willing to bend the rules for personal gain as his clients. One of them, Hypergnosis CEO Duncan Park (Billy Magnussen), discovers that she uses confidential client information to conduct insider trading.

Goldberg said, “In this completely morally bankrupt world that Joan finds herself in, she thinks her little crimes are harmless, or even justified.”

coming in audacityGoldberg wanted a “big departure” from her Emmy-nominated role BarryStruggling actor Sally Reed. When she read for Sally for the first time, she felt she knew the character immediately. For Joan, Goldberg was more attracted to her rhythm, an element that usually draws her to roles.

In her professional life, Joan’s rhythm is slow and deliberate. Goldberg describes using silence “as a tool” to create space for her clients to open up… and give her valuable information in the process.

“I didn’t feel any great pressure to do major research and become a really qualified physician, because that ship has already sailed for Joanne,” Goldberg said, laughing. “It’s sunk!”

Lyrically, Joan’s personal life is a different story. As she faces Duncan’s blackmail, the possibility of losing her home, and her prickly relationship with son Orson (Everett Blunk), she becomes more erratic. She drives off-road, endures every inconvenience (many times self-inflicted), and browses the web for guns while interacting with customers. He’s a picture of instability, his blunt bob shaking with every nervous snap.

Goldberg said, “It’s a real cheat, but honestly, the hair really helped me. I found myself doing a lot of the gestures, and they had this staccato quality that was born out of the hair.” “[Key Hair Stylist] sanna [Seppanen] Told me, ‘I’ll give you such great hair that you won’t have to act.’ She wasn’t wrong.”

While Joan is completely different from Sally Reed, Barry Fans can see glimpses of Joan’s increasingly nervous, sometimes explosive interactions with others. Like Sally’s downfall, Joan is also a vulnerable woman.

“I like fluffy people. I’m attracted to fluffy people,” Goldberg said.

Mashable Top Stories

He is also attracted by the conflict between audacity‘The external and internal lives of the characters.

“Many people in this world are alike Barry In some ways,” she said. “They’re living two lives, with one very thick life to get the performance they need in their business or job.”

Goldberg continued: “I’m always interested in that duality. I’m interested in how we do it day to day. When someone calls you, why does your voice get higher? Why do you talk one way when you’re ordering your coffee, and then when you’re in the doctor’s office, it’s different? I’m always fascinated by our outward behavior and what’s going on underneath.”

Goldberg is a self-described “technophobe”. She has no apps and no social media, and was incredibly unfamiliar with Silicon Valley before filming audacity. However, even before working on the show, she was reading about the rise of AI, especially how it relates to the entertainment industry.

She said, “I’m hoping that this doomsday feeling has gone too far. I don’t know if that’s the case.” “My hope is that I’ve always maintained that television and film haven’t killed theater, and I think we’re always going to want a kind of connection and nuance that is not going to be available through AI.”

audacity Deals with AI through a story that Joanne doesn’t understand much about yet, a story where Martin Pfister (Simon Helberg) is essentially conceiving and raising an AI child. As the show progresses, he sees potential in it as a therapeutic tool that can do good, such as when it hears from Deputy Under Secretary of Veterans Affairs Tom Roughage (Rob Corddry) about his wartime experiences.

Goldberg said, “The AI ​​aspect of the show is being developed with such purity and passion and focus. It becomes very frustrating to see what would happen if it fell into the wrong hands.”

That frustration applies to Goldberg’s real life, too.

“I feel very resistant to it,” she said. “My instinct as an animal is like, ‘Where are we going?’ And it makes me quite uncomfortable. At the same time, I’m trying to maintain a bit of realism. We can’t put off the march of change, right? These things are happening, so how do we move forward productively?”

Glatzer, Goldberg and that’s the question audacity Keep coming back. What is the roadmap ahead for mankind as it continues to dehumanize itself? Joan, due to her proximity to the reality-contrary world of Silicon Valley, proves to be ideal for studying a disturbing case.

Goldberg believes that Joanne was once an idealist who hoped to help her clients, but after moving to Silicon Valley, she became more “sad and corrupt”. Yet, even in her early days as a physician, she was not entirely unshakable.

“There was something about him that attracted him to this world,” Goldberg said.

Joan’s descent into corruption exposes Glatzer and audacityThe central thesis about the future of humanity.

“What does it take to lose your humanity, and can you get it back?” Goldberg asked.

“There was an easier version of this show [Glatzer] “They step back, point the finger and say, ‘Here’s this small group of sociopaths who are making a lot of money doing terrible things,'” Goldberg said. “In fact, they chose the difficult task of asking big questions about our moral compass as a species. What is innate in all of us? What causes this poor decision-making, and once you develop the technology that makes it consumable, where does it go? What he really gets at is the fact that these people did not invent human behavior. They are exploiting it and consuming it, but the seeds of invading each other’s privacy are present in all of us. He holds the mirror up in a way that I think is really brave.”

new episodes of audacity Sundays are available to stream on AMC+, and will air at 9pm ET on AMC.