Cory Michael Smith Isn’t Afraid of the Truth

After fours seasons of Succession, Jesse Armstrong is no stranger to blurring the line separating fact from fiction. The celebrated series about the internal power struggles of a dysfunctional family sitting atop a media empire often felt eerily true-to-life during its run, with viewers and pundits eagerly dissecting every episode and comparing the Roy family to the Murdochs, the all-too-real clan that has foisted Fox News on the world. For his latest project, Mountainhead, which Armstrong wrote and directed in his feature debut, he tackles another facet of the contemporary mediasphere, gathering together four tech titans in a remote and monstrous mountain chalet while the world descends into chaos around them. That the chaos is caused by the latest technological update offered by one of the men, Venis (pronounced like the city), on his fictional social media platform Traam, is at first of little import as the quartet settle in for a bros-only poker night.

As the impetuous, demanding, and deluded Venis, the 38-year-old actor Cory Michael Smith is the relative newcomer of the group, starring alongside comedic legends Ramy Youssef, Jason Schwartzman, and Steve Carell, the latter as the mentor to his three former prodigies. Written over the winter and filmed earlier this spring, Mountainhead feels bracingly timely in its tale of a new artificial intelligence capable of producing deepfakes so realistic that they lead to ethnic warfare, economic meltdowns, and coups d’état. Even with the drastically compressed production timeline, Smith says they often felt as if they were racing against real-world developments. “The news cycle was confusing while shooting this,” he says. “I think there was a real concern that there would be some significant evolution of AI between shooting this and releasing this that would nullify something in the film, so speed felt really essential.”

Smith and the rest of the film’s cast and crew have been careful to explain that none of the characters are strictly based on actual people, although the foursome embody a very recognizable type in tech, so far removed from the rest of society thanks to their obscene wealth and influence that they can no longer relate to the people using their tools. As is typical in an Armstrong production, this dichotomy is at times humorous, as when they scrawl their net worths in red lipstick on their bare chests on a snowy summit, and at other times terrifying, as when they casually contemplate and chart out the steps for a global takeover. “I understood it really clearly, his motivations were really clear to me, so I was able to operate from his point of view fairly easily from the get-go,” Smith explains about getting into his noxious character. “I think he’s fertile ground for comedy, because I think a lot of his actions are absurd. But he’s the richest man in the world and he [thinks he] doesn’t really have to care about much. He’s excused from being a normal person and having concerns about other people.”

That single-mindedness was in a way a boon for Smith as he worked to embody Venis, offering a transparency that can be rare, and the actor says he came to understand his character even while disagreeing vehemently with him. “I think one other piece for him that was really clarifying for me is this very libertarian sense of, I am concerned with the things I am in control of. I am not responsible for anyone else. I’m not responsible for human behavior. I’m not responsible for regulating it. I didn’t create humans. I don’t really care for humans,” he offers. “I think it’s really easy for him to look at the world that way. In some ways, he can seem really childish and petulant, but he does have a sort of philosophical clarity about the world and how he sees himself fitting into it, and that clarity really simplifies things as an actor. I always knew how he would feel about something, and I think that’s one of the most disturbing parts of him because he doesn’t really care, outside of the bounds of what he cares about.”

Venis is the richest person in the world and the owner of a beleaguered and notably unregulated social media platform, but Smith says that any further similarities to Elon Musk are coincidental and the film purposely pushes against the obvious comparisons. “At the end of the day, studying any of the real-life characters that I think people will try to compare Venis to or trying to emulate them intentionally would have distracted me from the task at hand, which is to take this character who, in Jesse’s script, is really full and clear, and maybe would have muddied crafting a really unique individual in Venis,” he explains.

Still, as they filmed in March and April of this year, Smith says there were some correlations that were too close for comfort. “One of the odd things for me while shooting this was that this film is very much exploring the power that these tech titans have over government officials and we were filming this at a time when Elon and DOGE were overriding the legislative body which, until now, has always been responsible for funding all of these departments,” he continues. “It was really interesting for me to just watch in real time the power dynamic of the richest man in the world getting a legislative body to kowtow to him while my character is basically saying like, What could the president possibly have to say to me? That was a crazy thing that on paper feels absurd, and then you’re watching it in real time on the news on a daily basis.”

While Smith may be the least well-known of the central four in Mountainhead, he has put together an impressive list of performances over the years, with this new film the latest in an eclectic career. He first came to attention for his work on stage, starring as Fred opposite Emilia Clarke’s Holly Golightly in a Broadway adaptation of Breakfast at Tiffany’s in 2013 and in the American premieres of the critically acclaimed plays Cock and The Whale, which earned several Oscars for a 2022 film adaptation. In his pursuit of working with “the best,” he has sometimes taken what he admits are “smaller roles” in projects that have felt meaningful, like opposite Frances McDormand in the HBO series Olive Kitteridge or in three Todd Haynes films. “I do know that I can facilitate something important in the greater narrative arc by my smaller contribution and feel really great about it,” he says. Last fall, he had a standout turn as Chevy Chase in Saturday Night, a fictionalization of the ninety minutes leading up to the first episode of Saturday Night Live, and with Mountainhead, he is expanding his reach significantly. “At this point, I’m excited about the continued challenge of these bigger, more consequential roles in the films of people that I really respect and admire who are masters of their craft,” he adds.

And Armstrong is clearly one of them. Even with its sharp satire and broad comedy, Mountainhead can feel at times like essentially an existential horror, a potential future perhaps not that far off in his prescient vision. For Smith, that’s exactly what makes the film so essential as a reflection of our current times. “That’s why it felt so necessary to get it out, because like the entire series of Veep wouldn’t have worked a decade later,” he says. “The world grows more and more absurd.”

Mountainhead is now streaming on Max.