“I don’t know if I can stay the whole weekend, I’m supposed to see a Bugatti in Holland,” says Venis, the richest man in the world, before explaining to his fellow billionaire pals that he’s “bifurcated” between spending what little time he has with his baby and—more importantly—launching a series of features from his social media empire, Traam. Features that enable the mass use of deep fakes and the wide spreading of disinformation that have, oops, just sparked a global crisis.
This happens 14 minutes into Mountainhead, the new film written and directed by the Succession creator Jesse Armstrong, but really you’re thrust into the tension within the first minute. Four tech bro friends have reunited for a weekend hang. Venis, aka Ven, the millennial wonderkid, played by Cory Michael Smith, is the CEO of Traam, which has four billion users across its platforms.
Then there’s Randall (Steve Carell), an extraordinarily intelligent venture capitalist, the AI start-up star Jeff (Ramy Youssef) and Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), the founder of a meditation app, who is called “Soups” by his pals due to the fact that he’s the only one in the quartet not quite yet a billionaire. To still be a mediocre multimillionaire, they joke, is the equivalent of working in a soup kitchen. It’s Soups’s newly constructed 21,000 square foot mansion on a snowy mountain in Utah —“Mount Techmore”—that they have each flown to. On their private jets, naturally.
Amid the banter about sleep scores and net worth, they’re glued to their phones as economies crash and violence unfolds over the world. Ven laughs it off and thinks of all the additional users such attention will generate for Traam. “He can be in charge of crafting and creating technology, but he doesn’t see himself as responsible for how humans use it,” Smith says. “He’s like, ‘I can’t change human behavior. I’m not responsible for shitty people using my tools.’”
Much like Succession, Mountainhead is both a hilarious and shocking take on the one percent, how they operate and the deeply troubling, ever-increasing impact they have on, well, everything. At one point in the film, they’re on hold to the American president.
The movie is already generating buzz due to the fact it was announced, cast, filmed, and edited in just a few months. Smith, 38, was the second actor to be hired after Carell. “I filmed an audition of a couple of scenes when the script wasn’t even finished,” he says. “Jesse called me the next day and offered me the part.”
As a die-hard Succession fan, Smith felt like he had won the lottery. “I can say this for myself and many of my actor friends—we all watched that show and thought that every actor was the luckiest in the world. It’s so delicious. I told Jesse when he rang me that it was a joy to make the audition tape because it’s so cool to live in his words. Then he invited me on and I was like, oh my God. And working with these other actors that I completely fell in love with. It’s been the dreamiest job and it all happened so fast I haven’t had time to process it properly.”
Smith hired an actor friend to spend a week with him, running through his lines for up to six hours a day. A week later he went to Los Angeles to do a reading with Carell and Schwartzman. Youssef was then brought on and they all headed to Utah. “There was something really liberating about not being able to overthink this [because it was so quick],” Smith says.
Smith was born and raised in Ohio. “It was a working-class, blue-collar family,” he says. His father was a manual laborer who worked for a natural gas company, where Smith’s older brother now works. His mother worked as a nurse, among other things.
When he was ten, a music teacher at school advised his parents that he should audition for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe at a community theater. He got the part, and the acting bug, spending the next few years doing bits of theater while taking private piano lessons and playing the trumpet in the school band. “At no point did my parents ever discourage me from anything. They were so supportive,” he says.
He studied drama and piano at college, landing an agent while there, and, after graduating, moved to New York. For years he was a jobbing actor while working part-time as a waiter, a barista, a Taskrabbit handyman and, the job he loved the most, a nanny.
Things changed in 2012 when he landed the lead role in an off-Broadway production of Cock (a part played in London by Ben Whishaw, Andrew Scott, and, later, Jonathan Bailey, about a gay man falling in love with a woman). “It was my first starring role in anything. That got me new agents and managers and that really shifted things professionally, but I was still broke and struggling,” Smith says.
Not for long. In 2013 he starred opposite Emilia Clarke in a Broadway production of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and, between 2014 and 2019, starred in the American TV series Gotham. The acclaimed director Todd Haynes cast him in small but memorable roles in his films Carol (2015) and May December (2023), and earlier this year he did an excellent turn as Chevy Chase in Saturday Night, a film about the premiere of Saturday Night Live.
It is Mountainhead, though, that will bring Smith to the attention of British audiences. He laughs at the notion of becoming more recognized. “I hope a lot of people see this and love it. We loved making it.”
Armstrong brought many of his Succession team with him on Mountainhead —Lucy Prebble and Frank Rich both serve as executive producers—and it follows much of the same style; it’s shot from varying camera angles and the dialogue is thick, fast and jargon-heavy.
“These guys are unapologetic,” Smith says. “They’re speaking quickly because they’re thinking quickly. You’re in their world, they’re not going to dumb down how they talk about it, so what you’re thrust into is an understanding of their friendship dynamic and power dynamic. If you’re a little lost, that’s great because so much of this is beyond us. It kind of reinforces the power that these guys have over us, because we’re not reading everything that we sign away to them, we just hit ‘accept’ and then are sort of wrapped around their fingers. But my head was spinning the first time I read the script, for sure.”
Smith insists he didn’t base Ven on anyone in particular, but as part of his research he listened to hours of business podcasts featuring tech billionaires, such as All-In, which is hosted by four venture capitalists. “Billionaires just love to talk,” he says. “You can really listen to how all these guys exist and talk to each other. They’re an interesting group. You can tell a lot of them grew up maybe having some social troubles in school, like not fitting in, and now suddenly they’re the richest people in the world and they have knowledge that affords them power that they never had before.”
Traam is based in Colorado rather than Silicon Valley, “so I wanted there to be some outdoorsy athleisurewear to Ven’s wardrobe”, he says. “Moncler seemed appropriate. I also wanted to keep his look simple. I liked the idea of a black uniform. I thought, these guys have money, so everything should be expensive, but they’re not trying to be hip. They probably haven’t moved past skinny jeans. These little details show they have money and access and power but don’t necessarily know what they’re doing with it.”
Smith has been speaking with me over Zoom from his hotel room in Alaska, where he is filming his next project (“I can’t say anything except that I’m playing a bush pilot”). In October he’ll appear with Elle Fanning in a Joachim Trier drama called Sentimental Value, and he has just wrapped another project called Famous, with Nicholas Braun and Zac Efron.
“This business is so funny,” he says before we sign off. “My goal has always been to try to work with the best people and I’ve been very lucky that some of my favorite film-makers have invited me onto projects in tiny roles. Now I’m so grateful that some of my favorite film-makers are offering me lead roles. I feel like I’ve earned my place.”
Mountainhead is streaming on HBO Max
Scarlett Russell is a writer based in London
