By almost any metric, the actor Billy Magnussen has a great face: a wide forehead that tapers to a strong jaw, eyes the icy blue of a glacial core sample, smooth skin. “He could be a poster child for eugenics,” Alissa Nutting, a showrunner who worked with him a few years ago, joked. That great face somehow lends itself to baddies, bullies, numskulls and monsters of ego — the kinds of men so rarely served their just deserts.
In movies and TV series including “Game Night,” “Black Mirror,” “Maniac,” “No Time to Die” and “Franchise,” Magnussen has given life to a host of dumb hunks and smart meanies. Rarely has an actor so handsome shown the ugliness of masculine ambition and entitlement so comprehensively. Rarely has he felt so conflicted about it.
“I don’t want to be known as the punchable guy,” Magnussen said during a late winter stroll through Central Park. “I don’t want to walk around with that banner over my head.” Asked about his roster of himbos and jerks (which he plays so well!), Magnussen responded with surprising and palpable hurt.
“People just see your performance,” he said. “But they don’t understand the hours and the [expletive] sacrifices you had over the years.” Though Magnussen has, in person, a super-size smile and puppyish energy, he is someone who holds that pain close.
Lately, Magnussen, 40, has specialized in a particular kind of punching bag: tech bros, men of high I.Q. and cratering emotional intelligence who tend to treat their fellow humans like NPCs. He has played this type in two episodes of the Netflix anthology “Black Mirror” and the HBO tech satire “Made for Love.” While his role in the Aaron Sorkin film “The Social Reckoning,” the follow-up to “The Social Network,” is not yet confirmed, it seems likely he’ll be playing another.
And in his first significant series lead, he plays Duncan, a would-be tech visionary, in “The Audacity,” a Silicon Valley satire premiering Sunday on AMC.
Created by Jonathan Glatzer (a writer and producer on “Succession” and “Better Call Saul”), the series finds Duncan twitchy and adrift in performance fleece after a failed acquisition. (His company is a data scraper called Hypergnosis. Its tagline: Where Gno Means Yes.) Here’s how a therapist describes him: “Vile, arrogant, incurable.”
And yet, in Magnussen’s hands and face, Duncan is perversely sympathetic. Duncan is just so bad at being an alpha male, so awkward in his gym-buffed body. He moves fast and breaks things, often himself. Magnussen excels at playing both that violence and the wounds it leaves.
Duncan feels misunderstood. So, often, does Magnussen, who is both grateful for and aggrieved by the career his looks and his talent have brought him. “I’m not scared of playing the villain,” he said. “My face is the villain. I didn’t get to choose it.”
The child of two athletes, Magnussen was a teen jock until an injury forced him into theater class. That class was a respite and a revelation. A life of play? Magnussen wanted in.
After studying at the University of North Carolina School for the Arts, he landed a part on the daytime soap “As the World Turns,” then booked a role as a sinewy, sweet-natured lunk in the Christopher Durang comedy “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” which later transferred to Broadway. That led to a 2013 Tony nomination and better screen roles — one oblivious prince in “Into the Woods,” another in the live-action version of “Aladdin,” juicy supporting parts in the movie “Game Night” and the limited series “Maniac.”
These are, broadly considered, hunk roles. Magnussen didn’t play them that way.
“I was like, oh, this is just a character trying to live his life the best way he can,” he said. “Probably these hunks are so insecure and they’re trying to make their life better, and of course they’re covering up for something.”
Magnussen isn’t one to coast on his looks or quads. Onscreen, he often smiles too big or stares too hard, stretching his features like rubber. In the recent live-action version of “Lilo & Stitch,” he played an alien trapped in a human’s body, and that’s the sense he gives even in his non-alien roles. “He doesn’t act like a handsome dude,” said Zach Galifianakis, a co-star in “Lilo & Stitch” and “The Audacity.” “He does not ever lean into that handsomeness.”
A few years ago, Magnussen stepped away from Hollywood — not from acting but from the politicking that surrounds it. “I remember just going for coffee in L.A. and feeling so judged just for existing,” he said.
He relocated to Georgia, near where he grew up. He is happiest outside and in motion. (No sooner had I met him at a hotel restaurant than he lobbied for an icy walk instead.) And he would prefer to experience the world directly rather than through a screen.
Despite his limited relationship with tech and social media, he has become a go-to actor to play tech bros. Nutting, who cast him on “Made for Love,” understands why. New technologies, she said, usually present as clean-cut and appealing, only to reveal something insidious underneath. Magnussen can do just that.
“He’s able to transform on a dime from that mask of propriety and progress and perfection into something that can feel very violent and malevolent,” she said.
Glatzer met with at least two dozen actors before auditioning Magnussen for Duncan. Magnussen, he said, was able to play both Duncan’s arrogance and his insecurity, which made him easy to cast. Glatzer saw Duncan as a kind of man-child. Magnussen could play the childish part with sweetness, even whimsy.
“That was the key to making him somebody who we rooted for despite ourselves,” Glatzer said.
But if Magnussen was able to make the character sympathetic, he could also play darker hues. “He’s got a smile that’s quick and infectious and a little bit leering as well,” Glatzer said. “You can see that fairly thin membrane between being a nice guy and it going a little past that.”
A lot of actors claim not to judge the characters they play, but Magnussen seemed to agree with Duncan’s therapist, describing the character as a “sociopathic narcissist.” Magnussen is aware of the negative impacts that tech and the (mostly) men who disseminate and monetize it have on most people’s lives. And he is interested in exploring these men. “They’re trying to make the world perfect for you and me while they’re being imperfect themselves,” he said.
That imperfection is what he works from and it’s how he humanizes inhumane characters. “It’s their insecurities, their fears, their soft spots,” he said. “No one’s a villain in their own life.”
Sarah Goldberg, who stars opposite him as JoAnne, Duncan’s ethically compromised therapist, noted Magnussen’s actorly audacity. “I don’t think I’ve ever been on set with someone who can be so wildly different take to take,” she said of Magnussen’s style. “He really, really goes for it and he throws everything at it without ego.”
Glatzer observed that while many handsome actors operate from a place of vanity, Magnussen does the opposite. “I mean, he works it; he’s a very beautiful specimen, but that is not his first step,” Glatzer said. “It is a willingness to come in and try something new that might make him look a little bit like an ass.” When Glatzer encouraged Magnussen to perm his hair for the role, Magnussen pushed to make the perm gnarlier.
“The Audacity” has already been renewed for a second season, which means that Magnussen will soon return to Duncan’s insecurities and aggrievements. That’s a comfortable, if exhausting, space for an actor in touch with his own aggrievements. And he is grateful for the renewal.
But Magnussen, who was eager to share his joy in his colleagues, in the life that acting affords him, in the opportunity to be a series lead on a show he admires, also believes that he and his pretty face can do more.
“I would love to be the hero,” he said. “I think life is beautiful and lovely, and it gets tiring playing the bad guy.”
Alexis Soloski has written for The Times since 2006. As a culture reporter, she covers television, theater, movies, podcasts and new media.
The post Billy Magnussen Has Mixed Feelings on Playing ‘Punchable’ Guys So Well appeared first on New York Times.
