You have never met anyone quite like Duncan Park. And depending on your worldview you might be thanking your lucky stars. From the outside, Park has an enviable life: he’s worth millions and his surroundings check every box from the perspective of someone who only dreams of success. What is remarkable, though, is how desperate Park is throughout the first season of AMC’s brutally funny and clever series, The Audacity, and Billy Magnussen takes that privileged desperation to operatic heights.
What Magnussen does from the beginning is not make Park entirely a buffoon. I’m sure there is a version of The Audacity that exists where that would work for about ten minutes before it would get stale and the people all around him would run down. Park has to be good at business and leveraging power from others, and, with Magnussen’s magnificent, glinting eyes you find yourself both afraid of him but entertained by him simultaneously. Perhaps you are tickled as someone attuned to the realm of tech and how advancements could actually better our would. I would put money, though, that most viewers are enraptured by how Magnussen’s Park holds a room, gets flayed in that room by his counterparts, but then gets back up. He is relentless.
Magnussen has played tech giants before (I wonder what his Byron Gogol thinks about Duncan), but we may have never seen him play a character so calculating and intelligent that he knows how to pivot when life throws a dead end in his way. His life with his wife, Lili, is strained, but they live such separate lives that they mostly intersect when they need to go out in public or tend to their daughter, Jamison. He has an unexpectedly gentle and kind relationship with his daughter, as if their scenes together are frozen in time, and we can see a softer side of Duncan. His business might be shaping the world, but Jamison is the one who has to live in it and be affected by it.
When we enter The Audacity‘s season finale, Duncan is riding high as he headlines a tech forum while his wife attends a school function in the same complex. There is a shocking revelation that comes in the last few moments that will challenge Duncan like he has never seen before as we enter season two. In that moment of realization, we notice that we have never seen Magnussen’s face that slack all season. He is staring a large screen taking in the information, but there is nothing he can do to fix it. He can’t throw money at the problem, and he can’t scream it away.
Is Duncan Park a genius or is he Silicon Valley’s sociopathic court jester? With someone this ambitious, he wouldn’t want to be boxed in or limited. Duncan Park is both.
The Audacity is streaming now on AMC+.
