Ellison’s character would love that. The geek love she and SBF share in the series is complicated and cringe-inducing. She writes Harry Potter fanfic and considers herself polyamorous; he’s a virgin wowed by her brainy sophistication. They egg each other on, bound together by their hunger for risk and their desire to win, whatever the game and whatever the cost. Throughout it all, they remain convinced that they are the good guys.
The Altruists drops November 19, in the midst of a Hollywood tech billionaire reckoning that includes the Sam Altman biopic Artificial, Musk, the Elizabeth Holmes doc You Can See Everything, and Aaron Sorkin’s follow-up to The Social Network, The Social Reckoning. Boyle says he hasn’t seen any of those films yet, though he was originally set to play SBF in another movie that fell through. “I was sort of heartbroken,” he tells me, “because I’d spent a couple of months prepping, I had turned down other projects, and then it was taken away from me. I was like, I’m never gonna be able to do that voice that I worked so hard on!”
Yet when his agent called with news of the Netflix project, Boyle was hesitant. “My heart was already broken by [SBF] once,” he says. But the scripts for The Altruist—written by Graham Moore, the screenwriter of The Imitation Game—changed his mind. “It’s so funny and more about the relationship between him and Caroline,” the actor says now, “about their love story and them goading each other to do all this.”
During his initial meeting with Moore, Boyle stayed in character as Bankman-Fried. “I
was complaining about getting off of a Zoom with Mark Zuckerberg, because that’s the tone of the show. It can be quite irreverent at some points, and then other scenes are kind of heartbreaking.” It won him the part. “Thankfully,” he says, “all my prep didn’t go to waste!”
Vanity Fair: It’s funny that you were so eager to live in Sam Bankman-Fried’s head. He is such an anxious figure.
Boyle: There’s a lot of anxiety in him. You can even tell in his speech patterns: He corrects himself and goes back and forth, like his internal metronome is going so quickly at all times. He’s like a hummingbird, like his heart’s beating so quick. But thankfully I didn’t take any of that home with me.
