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If you’ve spent any time working in the world of startups or even just perused the banal posts made by mid-tier marketing execs on LinkedIn, you’ve probably heard the phrase, “ship fast and iterate.” When we break down the tech bro lingo, what that advice is urging founders to do is develop a product that fills a hole in the market, and as soon as it’s good enough, go live. Running a startup is less of a game of who’s creating the greatest tool; it’s more a game of who’s creating the tool that is good enough and most profitable. Companies make those gains when they unleash their product into the world – a little bit buggy, but usable – and tweak on the fly after receiving feedback from their users. Essentially, perfection is elusive; you could tinker forever, so just send it and learn as you go. It’s a solid business model, and when executed, it can lead to massive profit margins. But when “good enough” is the barometer for AI, the consequences scale fast.
‘Mountainhead’ is a film that explores the consequences of unchecked power, both in technology and its creators. But don’t let that sentence distress you the way doomscrolling does – this is a Jesse Armstrong production after all, and he’s too clever a writer to create something that finger-wags. Full to the brim of what made ‘Succession’ such a hit, but with a new twist – this time it’s AI and apps and not media empires. It’s Musk, not Murdoch. Think fast pacing, snappy, quotable dialogue, and the most out-of-touch, delightful to watch characters you’ve seen since Kendall Roy left our screens. It’s not ‘Succession’, it’s a beast of its own. And beast really is the operative word here.
Cory Michael Smith plays Venis, the founder of the social media platform Traam. He’s on his way to Mountainhead, the newly built supermansion of wellness super app creator, Hugo “Souper” Van Yalk (Jason Schwartzman), for a weekend of poker with his friends and fellow tech billionaires, Randall (Steve Carell) and Jeff (Ramy Youssef). The new Traam update has unleashed AI that is inciting global chaos, and the foursome spend the weekend oscillating between roasting one another and planning transcontinental coups. It is quick, engrossing, and wholly disgusting. In short, it’s everything you hate somehow turned into everything you love.
In conversation with Schön!, Cory Michael Smith talks about what separates ‘Mountainhead’ from ‘Succession’, what it was like stepping into the mind of an untouchable (and for most, unrelatable) tech billionaire, and his fascination with the empathy disconnect seen across all tax brackets.

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tank top. Levi’s
boots. Clarks
necklace. John Hardy
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double layer shirt. Egonlab
trousers. Officine Generale
shoes. Prada
I’m Kendall. So nice to meet you.
I’m Cory.
I loved the movie. I watched it last night, literally kicking my feet and giggling at parts. I’m such a huge fan of Jesse Armstrong, and I’m also one of the biggest ‘Succession’ fans that I know, personally, and so I was just so excited to get back into that world. I’ve seen you quoted as saying Armstrong’s dialogue is “delicious,” and I couldn’t think of a better word for it myself. That was delicious.
I’m interested… Do you feel like it’s connected to ‘Succession’? Or can you feel the differences?
I think I can feel the differences. The relationships are different. The dynamics between the characters are vastly different than ‘Succession’. I think the biggest similarity is just the writing and the dialogue. Like it’s just so funny in ways that shouldn’t be funny.
One hundred percent. First of all, one of the most shocking things is that Jesse is one of the kindest, most gentlemanly people you can imagine. He has this searing, dry comedic wit. You meet somebody who is so unassuming, and then he opens his closet and has all of this crazy weaponry, and you’re like, “All right, this is really incongruent but this is what you have.” He’s so fast, so smart, and so interested in the nasty ways people will use and abuse power. He has a very specific fingerprint. I was such a huge fan of ‘Succession’, and being able to do this feels like, “Oh, my God, I get to live in a Jesse Armstrong world.”
It does feel different in the dynamics of the relationships. [Mountainhead] is another exploration of power. This is certainly masculine power. In ‘Succession’, we got to see Shiv and some others operating in a predominantly masculine world. But this is men. One of the nice differences here is that ‘Succession’ is an exploration of nepotism and very different kinds of power — people that haven’t necessarily earned their place, but they’re fighting desperately to keep it, maintain it, and grow it. These guys, the egos, are on a different scale because they’re all self-made men. They’ve all generated the most profitable businesses in history. They’ve convinced themselves that they’re geniuses. They have a saviour complex. It’s a different dynamic, and one that I personally really enjoyed exploring because it’s terrifying in a different way.

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tee + trousers. Levi’s
Yeah, it was wild. In your character, Venis, there are obvious echoes of Elon Musk, but with AI at the heart of the movie, I was thinking more about Sam Altman and ChatGPT. In the “startup world,” there’s so much pressure to execute. What I found so interesting about your character was his complete inability to have any culpability. He’s created a tool that is unleashing chaos in the world and seems to have no remorse, or even if he really understands that this is his fault. How did you approach playing someone with that level of emotional detachment and unchecked influence?
In regards to the comparison of real-life figures, a lot of these guys, you can pick and choose qualities or recognize them. The comparisons with Elon are easy because he’s the richest man in the world and…
Mars.
Yeah, he’s trying desperately to get off this planet. To get back to the question you posed…
How do you approach playing someone with that level of emotional detachment?
That was essential, this idea of denying culpability, which has come to the forefront in our politics and in tech recently. It’s the game plan of our president, and he learned that from Roy Cohn. That is a playbook of being in the public eye. It’s interesting to play a character that does the same thing. The M.O. I was working from as a character was, I’m trying to create a great product and great tools and great tech. I’m not responsible for human behaviour. I’m not responsible for terrible people using my genius products for terrible reasons. I’m not a cop, I’m an entrepreneur, an inventor. I create things people can use as tools for good or bad. I have no responsibility over how human beings behave.
I found that really liberating playing this guy, because if the government isn’t going to regulate something to protect people, that’s not my job. My only job is to create something and get it out there before someone else does. We’re seeing all of these AI upgrades happening right now from all these different products, and they’re being put out. Then you have other people trying to abuse these products, and some of them are journalists or reporters. They’re trying to see what the limits are. We quickly find out after a new release that there are huge problems and huge holes in this programming. That’s not happening at the company to a degree that a journalist can’t easily figure that out. Claude 4 was just released recently, and there’s reporting about how people are already using it in inappropriate ways. It’s just too easy.
I saw the launch but hadn’t seen any of the use cases.
I read somewhere yesterday, I don’t know what the outlet was, but the story was that Claude was threatening an engineer that he would release information about his affair if they tried to shut him down.
Wild.
Yeah, blackmail.
And was the engineer even having an affair, or was it just a hallucination?
They had given access to all of the emails, and apparently, there was all this illicit stuff. So it was using it as blackmail… [laughs]
What I appreciate most about ‘Mountainhead’ is that it critiques power, but it doesn’t do any of the finger wagging. It’s sharp, but subtle. There’s no moralizing or moment where they tell you, “You should get off your phone.” Was that restraint something you felt in the script and direction?
Really, the only restraint was Ramy’s character. It was fun that these guys, Jason’s character, Souper, and Ramy’s character, Jeff, are the only ones putting on the brakes to Venis and Randall. It was nice to see a long runway to take off into crazy. The only people slowing us down are these two guys. The reality is that a lot of these creators of AI are unregulated to this day. Their creativity and innovation are unbound, which is exciting, but that also means their behavior and the creation of these things are unbound and unregulated. You’re dealing with these guys who can do whatever and say whatever in this small environment where they think they can all trust each other, until they can’t.

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trousers. Jil Sander
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And they say some crazy things. The dialogue in this film was amazing. What was it like collaborating with the cast and crew on those scenes? It’s such a tight movie. It’s just the four of you.
The process was fast. There’s a lot of language. A lot of the movie is cut out; the script was significantly larger than the final film. So there was a lot of language to deal with. We just dove right in when we were filming. This cast is extraordinary. These three guys are truly the cream of the crop. We showed up, and everybody was operating at top level, which was nice. Some moments were so absurd or hilarious that we would indulge ourselves and have a good laugh or joke about it. Otherwise, it was a focused, intense shoot where everybody showed up ready to play. We had a great time doing it because some of it’s so absurd, especially once we got to the more physical comedy bits. [Starts to laugh] Which was outrageous.
Yeah, I’m really glad I can talk about it with someone because I watched it alone last night. This is not what I expected. It was crazy. [Both laugh] I know you did tons of prep going into this role, six to eight hours a day of running lines, listening to all those horrible, banal podcasts from the VCs. Was there anything in your research that you came across and thought, “this has to get in there somehow”?
The script was so full and rich. There wasn’t any information or tidbits outside of it that I was pulling in. I have friends who work in Silicon Valley. I spoke about vocabulary, turns of phrases, how people are spending their money and time out there. I wanted to get an idea outside of the script of what people are talking about, what they’re wearing. Jesse makes space for us to improv or toss things in here and there. Not that it needs it, but he welcomed us to do it.
As I’m reading and working through the script, if other thoughts come in, I write those down, and a lot of those ended up being opinions or drags at Jeff. When your brain starts digesting certain dialogue and you start thinking and speaking like another person, for me, it unlocks other things. My brain starts creating pathways in that direction. I tend to write a lot of stuff that comes into my head, other jokes, nicknames I could use. That happens and builds, so my script ends up being comments about ideas I’m trying to figure out, but also words, images, takedowns, nicknames. That grew naturally over time. Once you’re there and working, most of that stuff doesn’t even matter or get used, but it’s building out the brain space.
That’s cool. Something about Armstrong’s work is that it’s so infinitely quotable. I still see constant memes and stills from Succession. One of my favourite lines from ‘Mountainhead’, nd it’s not even the craziest line, but it made me laugh so hard because I swear I’ve heard a CEO say this before, was, “Your net worth just jumped by 2x in the last twenty-four.” The fact that it was specifically “2x” made me laugh so hard. [Both laugh]
There was a lot of jargon and language Jesse was particular about. He and his assistant, Sophie, had created a glossary of terms. He was like, “When you’re improving, if you want to throw in some of these other things.” He had a menu of annoying, irritating business talk to make it feel real.
Do you have a favourite line?
It’s crazy, when I finish a job, trying to recall any dialogue is such a difficult task. I don’t have a sticky mind like that. I’m also working on something else. I need to watch it again and recall my favourite little bits.
I think the funniest character is Jason as Souper. Every single thing that happened with him… all of his facial expressions. [Both laugh]
God. I love all of these guys. Jason is such a king of understated comedy. It’s unbelievable. He is a great, essential part of this puzzle.

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tie. Versace
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shirt. BOSS
shoes. Dolce Gabbana
I just love looking at his face. He’s incredible.
Every time we cut to him, and he’s like, “Guys, isn’t this so cool?” [Laughs] When Jeff and I are arguing early on, it really kills me when he goes, “Intellectual salon.” That’s how I saw this.
It’s so hostile and awful. He’s so oblivious. I loved it. Everyone knows that billionaires exist, but the concept of that money is impossible to truly conceptualize. How did you go about tapping into the psyche of someone who is so fundamentally disconnected from how most of us live?
I think that kind of behaviour belongs to billionaires for sure. I’m fascinated by this time where we live in a land of podcasts. I listened to a lot of them. I don’t think it takes that much money for people to feel disconnected from the concerns of the common man. When you turn the volume up on some of that behaviour and rhetoric exponentially to get to where billionaires are, at a certain point, it gets scary and then comically scary. As someone who has been very poor and then been to a place where I don’t stress about things, that sliding scale only concerns people below a certain threshold of income. Unless you’re living on the edge or spending too much money. I find that there are a lot of people who don’t have billions who speak in a way that seems disconnected from the concerns of most. I’m fascinated by that public display.
This is a sidetrack. But I’m fascinated by that. When I listen to podcasts, or interviews in general, of people with extraordinary wealth, or government officials — we’re watching our government officials create a bill right now to fund the government — it’s fascinating to watch how people talk about what they prioritize, what we need, what people deserve.
What I’m trying to say is I pay a lot of attention to how people speak about money, or how much money makes them speak about the greater world around them. It was a crazy mind experiment to think of being the richest person in the world, to be around other people. We have tens of billions of dollars [between the characters] in this movie, and to think internally about how poor they are. Everything is relative. For Venis, it’s like he’s invincible because of that. The possibility of buying Haiti is, to him, a rational thought experiment. To feel bad that Jeff has crossed Randall’s net worth of $63 billion, but to think I have four times that. To feel bad because it’s clearly hard for Randall and Jeff to deal with that, but to internally think, “This is so boring.”
Yeah, not even coming close to you.
Yeah, this is so boring. Or, I could buy all of their companies. The scale of that, I found, for Venis, is the thing that calms him. No matter what is happening out there that he’s stressed about with his company and his board, he is calmed by the fact that no one can really mess with him.
I loved ‘Mountainhead’ so much. I’m excited for everyone to see it, too. It was such a good movie. So much fun.
Thanks, Kendall, I’m glad you enjoyed it.
I’m mostly glad it didn’t let me down. I was a little nervous going into it because I loved Succession so much, and it didn’t let me down at all.
I appreciate that. I’m glad to hear it.

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‘Mountainhead’ is out now.
photography. Stefan Kohli
fashion. Charlie Ward @ See Management
talent. Cory Michael Smith
casting. Alabama Blonde
grooming. Valissa Yoe @ See Management using Dyson Beauty
creative production. Clara La Rosa
photography assistant. Ryan Schostak
studio. Babe Studios
interview. Kendall Saretsky