JoAnne\u2019s scheme ultimately pales in comparison to the surveillance and insidiously thorough data mining that Duncan\u2019s company pulls off. But Duncan, her most annoying client, is using this intel to blackmail his shrink. In the TV Insider exclusive clip above, he tells JoAnne to give him the name of a client who might invest in his failing company, Hypergnosis, or else. JoAnne names Carl. Find out what happens next when The Audacity<\/em> Episode 2 airs this Sunday, April 19, at 9\/8c on AMC<\/a>. The episode is streaming now on AMC+<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Below, Goldberg talks about The Audacity<\/em>,\u00a0Barry<\/em>, and\u00a0Industry<\/em>, as well as why she thinks AI won\u2019t win, no matter how convinced the characters of The Audacity<\/em> are that it is the future.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I just need to tell you with affection that these characters are such freaks.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Sarah Goldberg:<\/strong> Oh, good. [Laughs]<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Yeah, they\u2019re such freaks, and they\u2019re the kinds of people who run our lives.\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n It is terrifying. It\u2019s funny, but it\u2019s really dark. It\u2019s like, \u201cOh, those<\/em> are the people at the top.\u201d And this woman taking care of them is morally gray herself.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Not doing that well. You\u2019d hope your therapists would be.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Do you think that JoAnne was this way before she took on these high-profile clients, or did they rub off on her a little bit?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s a great question. I think that she probably started out early in her career with the best of intentions and a moral compass that was pointing in the right direction. And somewhere along the way, she\u2019s really lost her way, and she is quite jaded. And I think they have all rubbed off on her. I think there also must have been something inside her that was drawn toward all of it. She didn\u2019t land there by accident. And I think she\u2019s slowly making these dangerous contracts with herself where she\u2019s surrounded in this obscenely morally bankrupt world. And so she\u2019s going, by comparison, my tiny little transgression surely is harmless or even justified. And so I think she\u2019s walking down a slippery slope there, not walking, sliding, I suppose. And things are starting to snowball out of her control as she kind of gets more embroiled in the underbelly of that world.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Ed Araquel \/ AMC<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Do you imagine that all of her clients are this high profile, or does she have other clients that<\/strong> balance out the craziness of the really rich guys?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I hope she has some balance. [Laughs.<\/em>] Where\u2019s this sort of just everyday marriage problems or childhood trauma?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Come on, give us some good childhood trauma.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Yeah, exactly. She probably had more of a balance, but I think she\u2019s actively soliciting this type of client at this point for her own gains. And so yeah, I think she\u2019s really surrounded by these, as she calls them, \u201cbillionaire man children,\u201d for the most part.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Do you think Carl\u2019s her favorite client?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I do. Yeah, I do. I do. I think that she feels, of all of them, she could get through to him. I think that there\u2019s something in Carl, there\u2019s a shred of his humanity left, and I think that she thinks she can draw it out. Unfortunately, she\u2019s in a place where she\u2019s looking after number one, so she loses her way with him. But yeah, she\u2019s got a fondness for him because I think she thinks she could make a difference versus some of her other clients who I think she thinks are hopeless, i.e., Duncan.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Ed Araquel \/ AMC<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Even before the events of Season 1, was Duncan her least favorite client? He certainly is now.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I think probably, initially, she was maybe fascinated, and maybe she thought there was something to work with. By the time we meet them, she\u2019s exhausted by him. And when he asks her at the very top of the show about their confidentiality agreement, Jonathan [Glatzer], Billy, and I had decided that he starts every session with the same question, and he\u2019s asked her a million times about this confidentiality agreement. And I think that she sees him as someone who can\u2019t absorb. And so if there\u2019s no absorption, there\u2019s no growth, and I think she\u2019s exasperated, but she likes the paychecks, and also she\u2019s using his information for her own gains.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That\u2019s interesting that you guys decided that about the confidentiality thing. It adds a nice layer to [things they say to each other later this season].<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Yeah. She really turns. She really takes all of the things that are his Achilles heels and stores up all her little breadcrumbs there and then really uses them against him when she\u2019s cornered.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n God. And therapists are the most equipped people to do that. It\u2019s scary what they have on us.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n She knows a lot. I dread to think if my therapist turned on me, what she might say.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That would probably be one of the most traumatic events of my life if that happened.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n
Totally. Luckily, I feel my therapist is a lot more talented at her job than JoAnne is.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n So you are experienced with therapy. I wanted to know what research for this role looked like for you.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Well, mainly that. Honestly, I\u2019ve been in therapy myself for seven or eight years, and I really found it totally changed my life. And again, I have a wonderful therapist, so it was hard to draw from her in any way to play JoAnne because they\u2019re very different people. To be honest, as we\u2019re meeting her in a stage of her career where she\u2019s self-sabotaging and sort of abandoning her education and her better judgment, I didn\u2019t do a wild amount of research. If anything, I should have researched more about the stock market because I was confused about some of that.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n You mean Industry<\/em> didn\u2019t teach you?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n No, I know [laughs<\/em>]. You think I would have retained.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I don\u2019t think anyone on Industry<\/em> understands the stock market. It\u2019s OK.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n No, Industry<\/em>, some of my lines, I honestly had to learn them phonetically, and I just thought, \u201cSay them quickly, and you\u2019ll sound like you know what you\u2019re talking about.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s about conviction. It\u2019s the full follow-through. Yeah, I feel like [JoAnne] had all of these tools, but she\u2019s kind of thrown them by the wayside in her job at this point.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Ed Araquel \/ AMC<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n This doesn\u2019t seem like a show where things are going to go well in the season\u2019s second half. Can you give a sense of how things really go off the rails?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Well, you have a whole host of characters who are all either on the precipice of abandoning their moral compass or already deep down that path. And so the comedy, the satire, the tragedy all come out of people making these terrible decisions.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Just to mention Orson [JoAnne\u2019s son] and how talented Everett Blunk<\/a> is, and how brilliant I think it was introducing the teenage characters into this world because they have a pure reflection of it and a purity that the more jaded adult characters don\u2019t have. They\u2019re the collateral damage, right? It\u2019s like this so-called future that\u2019s being built is supposedly for them, and yet the button everyone keeps hitting is self-destruct, which makes good television and hopefully isn\u2019t a full mirror of what\u2019s happening in our world right now, although the fact-fiction crossover is a little uncomfortable.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That segues well into my next question, which was that Barry<\/em> was a show that critiqued its own industry. And while Audacity<\/em> isn\u2019t about Hollywood, the threat of AI and the powers that be are obviously very prevalent in Hollywood. Was critiquing AI and the data mining of it all part of the appeal of this series for you?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Kind of. I\u2019m more interested in Jonathan\u2019s bigger questions about humanity. He chose Silicon Valley as the snow globe to tell this story, and I think it\u2019s a great choice because it\u2019s such an extreme place, and it is the home of the so-called self-professed architects of the future. But I think he\u2019s getting to something so much deeper about our core nature. And for these people, mostly men, to make the kind of money that they do off of these platforms, the behavior has to already be there. Don\u2019t get me wrong. I hold many of them accountable for a lot, but what they\u2019ve done, I feel, is they\u2019ve taken the seeds of what\u2019s already within us that\u2019s unpleasant, and they found ways to manipulate and commodify it, but they didn\u2019t invent the behavior. And I feel that Jonathan\u2019s really getting to the root of that and the big questions about what makes us human, and how are we so far away from ourselves?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Within that, obviously, I\u2019m very interested in what AI holds, and I\u2019m glad that there\u2019s a storyline that reflects that. I mean, I\u2019m optimistic in that I don\u2019t want to read an AI novel or your article or an article written by AI. I want to read your article. I don\u2019t want to watch an AI film. I want to watch a human film. So I\u2019m hoping you and I both have jobs in a few years.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Just before I got on this interview, I think I was on The New Yorker<\/em>, and I was like, \u201cOh, maybe I\u2019ll listen to this article instead of reading it,\u201d because I was multitasking. It was like an AI voice, and I just didn\u2019t want to listen to it. It just didn\u2019t. I couldn\u2019t connect to it, even though it\u2019s not a bad rendition of human. It doesn\u2019t feel human. My hope is that the desperate need we all have, a valid, desperate need to connect, I hope, will sustain. And television didn\u2019t kill theatre, right? My hope is that AI won\u2019t kill human-based art, and I promise to read and watch your interviews if you promise to watch The Audacity\u00a0<\/em>[laughs<\/em>].<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I promise I\u2019ll watch the rest of the episodes and Season 2; you\u2019re already renewed. I feel like the pendulum\u2019s going to swing. AI is so undesired, I feel like on a mass scale, despite what the internet might say, that I feel the pendulum\u2019s going to swing back into analog, and people are going to want physical media again. Maybe print magazines will make it come back. Who knows?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I will really cross all my fingers for that. Wouldn\u2019t it be wonderful?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Bill Hader<\/a> did a\u00a0Barry<\/em> screening in 2018<\/a> where he recalled one of your writers reacting to people finding your character, Sally, annoying. They said, \u201cBarry kills people.\u201d \u201cBarry kills people\u201d has gone triple platinum in my house. I use it as a response to so many things. My colleague and I, when people are being ridiculous about one person, we\u2019re like, \u201cBarry kills people.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Barry kills people. It\u2019s such a good line, and it\u2019s so true and just shows how gendered we are, unfortunately, and how things are so stacked against women. Yeah, that was always an uphill climb. And I was always like, \u201cYou know what? Do not make her likable, make her relatable, make her human.\u201d It\u2019s not about being likable, it\u2019s about her being someone that you know and something that you\u2019ve seen in yourself. And so they held their promise to me. They didn\u2019t dilute her and make her the moral compass of the show.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n And I\u2019m glad for that. Barry kills people.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n The Audacity<\/strong><\/em>, Sundays, 9\/8c, AMC, Streaming on AMC+<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n![\"Zach](\"https:\/\/www.tvinsider.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/the-audacity-103-zach-galifianakis-billy-magnussen-855x570.jpg\")
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