When The Audacity star Sarah Goldberg first met with series creator Jonathan Glatzer, he summed up the show in an unexpected fashion: The real-life tech titans whom The Audacity skewers are so focused on creating immortality that they can’t face the fact that everyone — including them — has, at some point in their lives, pooped their pants.
That juxtaposition — a “denial of our base humanity,” as Goldberg described it in a Zoom call with Mashable — attracted her to The Audacity‘s warped take on Silicon Valley.
In The Audacity‘s ensemble of tech founders, Goldberg’s Dr. JoAnne Felder is the odd person out. She’s a therapist to the Valley’s “billionaire man-children,” a renter in a sea of obscenely wealthy homeowners who don’t care if their Napa house burns down, because they have several other homes to run back to.
Due to her outsider status, you might think JoAnne would serve as The Audacity‘s voice of reason. But by the end of the show’s first episode, it’s clear she’s willing to bend the rules for personal gain just as much as her clients. One of them, Hypergnosis CEO Duncan Park (Billy Magnussen), learns she uses confidential client information to conduct insider trading.
“In this completely morally bankrupt world that JoAnne finds herself in, she feels like her tiny little transgressions are harmless, or even justified,” Goldberg said.
Sarah Goldberg and Billy Magnussen in “The Audacity.”
Credit: Ed Araquel / AMC
Coming into The Audacity, Goldberg wanted a “big departure” from her Emmy–nominated role as Barry‘s struggling actor Sally Reed. When she first read for Sally, she felt she knew that character right away. For JoAnne, Goldberg was more drawn to her rhythm, an element that usually pulls her towards roles.
In her professional life, JoAnne’s rhythm is slow and intentional. Goldberg describes her using silence “as a tool,” wielding it to create space so her clients can open up… and give her valuable information information in the process.
“I didn’t feel huge pressure to do major research and become this really qualified therapist, because that ship has sailed for JoAnne,” Goldberg laughed. “It’s sunk!”
Rhythm-wise, JoAnne’s personal life is another story. As she weathers blackmail from Duncan, the possibility of losing her home, and her thorny relationship with son Orson (Everett Blunck), she grows more erratic. She drives off the road, snaps at every inconvenience (many self-inflicted), and browses the web for guns during session with clients. She’s a picture of volatility, her blunt bob swaying with each panicked snap.
“It’s a real cheat, but honestly, the hair really helped me. I found myself gesticulating a lot, and there’s this staccato quality to her that was born out of the hair,” Goldberg said. “[Key Hair Stylist] Sanna [Seppanen] told me, ‘I’m gonna give you hair so great, you don’t have to act.’ She was not wrong.”
While JoAnne differs wildly from Sally Reed, Barry fans may catch glimpses of her in JoAnne’s increasingly nervous, occasionally explosive interactions with others. Like with Sally’s decline, JoAnne is also a woman fraying at the edges.
“I love a frayer. I’m attracted to fraying people,” Goldberg said.
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She’s also attracted to the dichotomy between The Audacity‘s characters’ external and internal lives.
“So many people in this world are similar to Barry in some ways,” she said. “They’re living two lives, one with a very thick veneer to perform who they need to be 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. Why, when someone calls you, does your voice go high? Why do you speak 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 external behaviors and what’s going on underneath.”
Sarah Goldberg in “The Audacity.”
Credit: David Moir / AMC
Goldberg is a self-described “technophobe.” She has no apps and no social media, and she wasn’t incredibly familiar with Silicon Valley prior to filming The Audacity. However, even before working on the show, she had been reading up on the rise of AI, especially how it pertains to the entertainment industry.
“I’m hoping that this doomsday feeling that was setting in is overblown. I don’t know that it is,” she said. “My hope I always hold on to is that television and film didn’t kill theater, and I think that we’re always going to crave a kind of connection and nuance that’s not going to be available through AI.”
The Audacity tackles AI through a storyline that JoAnne hasn’t figured into much yet, one where Martin Phister (Simon Helberg) is essentially raising and nurturing an AI child. As the show goes on, he sees potential for it as a therapeutic tool that can do good, like when it listens to Deputy Under Secretary of Veterans’ Affairs Tom Ruffage (Rob Corddry) about his wartime experiences.
“The AI aspect of the show is being developed with such purity and passion and focus. Seeing what happens if it falls into the wrong hands is where it all gets so frustrating,” said Goldberg.
That frustration carries over to real life for Goldberg as well.
“I feel very resistant to it,” she said. “My instincts as an animal are like, ‘Where are we heading?’ and it makes me quite uncomfortable. At the same time, I’m trying to keep a little bit of realism. We can’t avoid the march of change, right? These things are happening, so how do we move forward productively?”
That’s the question Glatzer, Goldberg, and The Audacity keep coming back to. What is the road map forward for humankind as it keeps dehumanizing itself? JoAnne, with her proximity to the reality-warping world of Silicon Valley, proves a perfect, if troubling case study.
Goldberg believes that JoAnne was once an idealist hoping to help her clients, but upon moving to Silicon Valley, she grew more “jaded and corrupted.” Still, even in her early days as a therapist, she wasn’t totally incorruptible.
“There was something in her that drew her to this world,” Goldberg noted.
JoAnne’s descent into corruption highlights Glatzer and The Audacity‘s central thesis about the future of humanity.
“What does it take to lose your humanity, and can you get it back?” asked Goldberg.
“There was an easier version of this show where [Glatzer] steps back, points the finger, and goes, ‘Here’s this small group of sociopaths who are making so much money doing terrible things,'” Goldberg said. “Actually, he chose the harder task of asking bigger questions about our moral compass as a species. What’s innate in all of us? What creates this bad decision-making, and once you develop the tech that commodifies it, where does it go? He really gets down to the fact that these people didn’t invent human behavior. They’re exploiting and commodifying it, but the seeds are in all of us to, say, invade each other’s privacy. He holds a mirror up to that in a way that I think is really brave.”
New episodes of The Audacity are available to stream Sundays on AMC+, and air at 9 p.m. ET on AMC.
