Jesse Armstrong on Making ‘Mountainhead’ After ‘Succession’

How does one follow up on a series that defined a decade of prestige television?

For “Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong, the answer was to move so fast that there was no time for overthinking.

At the world premiere of “Mountainhead” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City on Thursday night, Armstrong explained why he didn’t wait too long to succeed his own “Succession.”

“It’s a little bit scary after a ‘Succession’ type of thing that’s well-regarded,” Armstrong told Variety Thursday night. “I knew it was going to be a big thing for me to do the next thing. Maybe it’d be a good idea to run at it fast rather than stewing on it for five years on my second album.” 

Armstrong’s tight production timeline isn’t for the faint of heart. After pitching the story idea for “Mountainhead” about six months ago, he received the green light from HBO boss Casey Bloys in December 2024. Armstrong wrote the movie over the winter, cast it in three weeks, and wrapped principal photography in April. The streaming original debuts on May 31.

“There was a very strong reason to do this film fast,” Armstrong said. “The world moves fast, especially the tech world. I wanted it to come out in the same kind of space as it was written.”

The unfolding circumstances in “Mountainhead” tap directly into the unease surrounding today’s Big Tech headlines. The film follows four ultra-wealthy friends holed up in a Utah mansion as a hyper-realistic deepfake update of their own making triggers a global political crisis. The ensemble cast includes Steve Carrell, Jason Schwartzman, Ramy Youssef, and Cory Michael Smith.

“It was interesting to pretend to be one of these people for a little while,” Schwartzman said. “All I want is for people who live in this kind of world to think that [this story] was actually kind of right. Or as right on as it could be to a certain point. And hopefully that can be its own mirror.”

Smith said he hopes the movie “provokes some questions” about the implications of billionaires achieving a new level of power and authority. 

“We’re living in a time where people with money are exercising a little bit of oligarchical power, and simultaneously, we’re creating AI that’s impacting all of our lives,” Smith said. “People that are creating it have said publicly that they don’t really know the full capacity and capability of this thing that they’re building, which is alarming.”

Much of the film hinges on the character interplay between these four affluent, very quirky men. Youssef said he initially studied videos of real-life tech moguls but found them “kind of boring,” so he turned inward and modeled his character after his teenage self. 

“I started to think about myself when I was like 14, where I never knew when a joke should end and I was kind of out of control because I was insecure,” Youssef said. “I thought, ‘Okay, that’s a nice character for Jeff.’ This guy who’s a billionaire, but he’s basically a 14-year-old dipshit. He knows how to code, but he didn’t know how to grow in any real meaningful way.”

The idea of deepfake catastrophe videos sparking real-world violence is just one of many ways Armstrong sees AI’s evolution leading to potential harm. Rather than offering concrete answers, he deliberately left the aftermath of these tech moguls’ actions unresolved. 

“The thing is we just don’t know, and that’s part of the film,” Armstrong said. “It’s about being at that moment of not knowing, and what a scary and sometimes funny place that can be.”

See more photos from the “Mountainhead” premiere below.