Mountainhead Actor Cory Michael Smith on How His Character is Like The Riddler

It’s been exactly two years since we said goodbye to Succession. Now, series creator Jesse Armstrong is back to fill that Waystar Royco-sized hole in your heart. Mountainhead, a new movie starring Steve Carell, Ramy Youssef, Jason Schwartzman, and Cory Michael Smith, hits HBO and Max this weekend.

The film tells the story of four ultra-rich tech titans who huddle up for a luxe mountain weekend as the world reels from the AI-induced consequences of one of their creations. Smith portrays Venis, the Elon Musk-esque richest man in the world and head of the catastrophe-causing social platform in question. He says the immature mogul bears a striking similarity to one of his previous characters.

Speaking with IGN Smith, who also played The Riddler in the series Gotham, agreed when co-star Youssef asked him point-blank: “Are you The Riddler of this group?”

“I think there are some similarities,” Smith says. “I really appreciate how insular both of those characters are. They're really sort of stranded away from people and alone and backed in a corner, and all their behavior is sort of born from that. They're incredibly narcissistic people."

But that’s where the similarities end. As opposed to The Riddler, Mountainhead’s Venis doesn’t come across as overtly malevolent. And that may be even scarier. “It's like it doesn't feel evil," Smith continues. “It just feels like a kid who's out of control.”

Smith’s co-stars tried to bring some of that innocence to their own characters, who are hell-bent on upending the global order for the sake of their own bank accounts.

“In a lot of ways it was just this 14-year-old version of me,” Youssef says of his character, Jeff. “(He doesn’t) know when to stop joking about something that was annoying. The whole thing kind of does feel like a bunch of high schoolers. They're still underdogs in their own mind and they never developed emotionally. They're actually incredibly adept at pushing technology, but they don't understand people.”

Armstrong wrote, produced, shot, and edited Mountainhead in just a few months. And that urgency feels particularly relevant in a time when AI is threatening to burrow its way into every aspect of daily life. The speed in which the movie was made proved to be beneficial to the actors on set.

“Everybody felt very present the whole time,” Carell says. “Excited, happy, energized, and prepared. It was like a perfect experience. I was surprised how quickly and how efficiently something can be made. Jesse Armstrong just knows what he's doing. Everybody trusted one another. And I think my biggest takeaway was sometimes it's best not to overthink or second guess."

Schwartzman says shooting on location helped the cast immerse themselves completely in the story. “What Jesse did was (set up) the house like a (real) house. You could go anywhere you wanted, you could open a pantry, (and) there was food in it. Everything worked. You could (go to the bowling alley in the basement and) bowl (with) fruit. He made it available to us. It almost was not like a movie. It was like we were in this house and they were filming us.”

Carell, for his part, agrees. “We forgot we weren't billionaires.”

Mountainhead premieres May 31 at 8pm ET/PT on HBO and streaming on Max.