‘The Audacity’ Finale: Rob Corddry Unpacks Tom Ruffage’s Death

[This story contains major spoilers from The Audacity season one finale.]

Rob Corddry is aware that prestige television has almost become a place for storytelling about bad people. “They discovered people love watching bad people, and it’s been slim pickings ever since The Sopranos,” he says. But even as some people recoil from the kinds of characters that have dominated the screen for two decades, Corddry has leaned in. “I guess I just like it because I feel superior to them.” 

Following the bleak events of The Audacity’s season one finale, which at several points seemingly turns Jonathan Glatzer’s dark comedy into a semi-horror show, that’s a feeling that’s harder to hold. After eight episodes of watching Corddry’s Deputy Under Secretary of Veterans Affairs Tom Ruffage try to partner with a tech company that would ethically use a trove of veterans’ data to get them therapeutic assistance, he realizes he’s been played by Zach Galifianakis’ ruthless and curmudgeonly billionaire investor Carl Bardolph. 

After taking tech company Hypergnosis out from under egomaniac CEO Duncan (Billy Magnussen), Carl installs chief ethics officer Anushka Bhattacharya-Pfister (Meaghan Rath) as its new head. She and her vision for ethical data use help Carl convince Tom to upload every file they have on U.S. veterans. Using her husband and maladjusted genius Martin Phister’s (Simon Helberg) new AI bot, they create a predictive therapy tool. But like almost everything in Jonathan Glatzer’s Silicon Valley take, even the best laid plans are undercut. In the finale, Carl reveals to Tom that his ultimate goal is selling off the veterans’ information — the very thing Tom had been trying to prevent when he turned down Duncan’s initial offer. 

The outcome is too much for Tom to handle, and in an ambiguous sequence that first seems to allude to the possible death of Duncan’s daughter, Jamison (Ava Marie Telek), viewers discover Tom has died by suicide after stepping in front of a train. That shocking death, alongside a final scene in which Duncan and Carl literally race off into the sunset, repositions the show’s drama: The Audacity isn’t about how regular people stop Silicon Valley’s tech bros in a war over our data. It’s a show about how they’ve already won. 

The Hollywood Reporter spoke to Corddry below about being a good guy in a show full of bad ones, how his father’s death and the show’s various illustrations of war affected his portrayal of a veteran, the implications of Tom’s death, whether big tech has completely won, and the message behind the AMC series’ title. 

***

I’m curious about the relationship you had with veterans and to war before taking this role. You were a correspondent on The Daily Show during the war in Iraq — 

I did my four tours. 

And came back last year for a bit about it. What other connection did you have? What about Tom were you given in the script, and what did you have to imagine?  

My dad, who just recently passed away, was a veteran of the Vietnam War and was there for a little over a year, nothing more than a private. He was drafted, but he spoke of it a lot when we were kids. I knew it was something important to him, formative. I almost romanticized it. Cut to 1989 and 1990 when I’m graduating high school, and all of a sudden we’re in [the Gulf] war, and I realize, whoa, this is the first time since Vietnam. I don’t have any experience with this, but if this thing drags on, they could reinstate the draft, and I’m going to have to go because my dad went. That was my very limited experience with the military, except that my grandmother married an admiral, so we were always at the Naval Academy when I was young.

I had two months between casting and shooting to put this character together in my head and step into his shoes. The way I do that, when I have the luxury of time, is to write an exhaustive character bio based on what I’m getting from the script and on things that are close to me that the script doesn’t fill in. I really had to do a lot of military research. I had to essentially know the basics of what he knows, and that goes for what really happened in the Gulf War, which was horrifying compared to the story we got in the news — that it was just 40 easy days and we were out. There were atrocities largely committed by us. 

So I placed Tom’s biography right at the center of that, as having been in the armored division that had to run over these half-buried soldiers who were still alive, killing them, essentially. He felt responsible for probably about 2,000 deaths, I’d realized. So then everything clicked. When I knew how much death he felt he was responsible for, that’s when the whole character sort of came into place for me, because he has a real emptiness about him, a real hole that has never been filled.

Tom’s relationship to the military industrial complex is different from other veterans, and viewers see this at several points. That includes when he and his former assistant Jeffrey (Andrew Bushnell) split over working for the defense industry. So if Tom doesn’t trust the defense industry, why does he trust Silicon Valley to deliver on his project? 

He doesn’t trust anybody, but maybe his assistant, Jeffrey. He definitely doesn’t trust Silicon Valley. He has a little experience going up there and trying to get money in the past, but it was never such large stakes as he feels this time. This is also getting up to his retirement. This is his last chance. It’s loaded. He’s only going there because that’s where the money is. He can’t get it anywhere else, and he knows that. I imagine they were in meeting after meeting, banging their heads on their desks, trying to figure out where else they could go to get this money. But really, they needed money and tech to process data, so there’s one place. Very reluctantly, he went. He doesn’t trust them, but he is guilty of being hopeful, and he has nothing to base that on.

Carl and Tom are total opposites in a show where basically five kinds of people exist: the ambitious, the psychopaths, sociopaths or narcissists, the desperate, the naive and gullible, and everyone else. Tom is not in the gullible category for me, but he does work with someone who — as we see in that Fight Club scene — doesn’t necessarily see people as people. So what makes a guy like Tom work with someone like Carl?

I wouldn’t call him gullible because of his lack of trust, but his hopefulness and concern for these veterans whose lives he is on the verge of helping immensely. He’s on the verge of changing the whole system and getting these people heard exactly when they need to be heard through this predictive algorithm they’re working with. This is heavy stuff. Tom knows he has to see it through. So rather than being gullible, he’s willing because of the responsibility he feels. He might not like it, but there is a point where he starts getting paid a little bit, and that maybe changes the man, too.

I think Tom didn’t live long enough to be corrupted, and part of me is glad about that because I wouldn’t like to see this character corrupted. As Zach’s character says, everybody goes Dr. Evil here. We’ve been brought up to trust these people until just recently. We thought they were geniuses. We thought they were saving our lives, and they were just stealing them. They’re playing with our dopamine receptors, and they have a database on you and me that would rival anything in our own heads. We don’t understand ourselves as well as they understand us, and they just market to it. They broke bad.

A lot about the tone and dynamics of The Audacity has had a “this is war” feeling, but your character actually participates in a war reenactment. Can you talk about filming that? What was that like? There were explosions, so I imagine there were stunt folks to help.

That was me. (Laughs.) It wasn’t one of those, like, “I do my own stunts” [things]. There was a stunt guy to do it, and he looked just like me. He was the one who was thrown into the table in an earlier episode. But this was just a straightforward run. “Hey, Rob, run straight. You’ve got to run straight because if you change direction at all, you might get blown up.” For me, I like to keep a positive attitude on set. Sometimes it’s hard when there are things that you’re struggling against, but that day I said to myself, “Because I don’t have PTSD, I don’t know exactly and can’t play exactly how Tom is feeling, so I’m going to jump into this. I’m going to do it full on and feel what’s happening in my body, how exhausted I get, how stressful it is, and let that affect me.”

I was by the end of that shoot exhausted, and we still had stuff to shoot inside. So it was good because that happens right after the battle, and he’s a little shellshocked — my version of shellshocked. I was almost unable to keep my eyes open, so that worked. It’s as method-y as I get. 

Within the historical reenactment industry, battles are among the things that can get a little questionable. It can feel like people — enough of whom have never seen war — are cosplaying on land that hasn’t really seen that kind of constant, concentrated violence basically since the 1800s. Veterans do participate, but Tom’s reaction seems to imply that it’s — 

Repulsive to him. 

Yeah. Which makes it interesting that this is where Tom and Carl’s relationship pivots. Their first meeting is Carl really aggressively dismissing Tom, Tom forging ahead anyway, and in revealing his military relationship, Carl comes to respect him. But this moment is the opposite. Tom is very honest about his relationship to war, puts his foot down and establishes a boundary as a veteran who feels maybe he’s being treated like a toy. What made Tom decide that was the final straw?

Well, first of all, I know that in that meeting where I’m pitching, Tom goes from nuisance in the corner to, in Carl’s eyes, a guy who’s 10 feet tall because he keeps mentioning he did not fight, his daddy fought. So I think I have an in here. I got a guy who has respect and a reverence for veterans, and, to an odd degree, he understands it. So at first it’s a mystery, but I’m going to jump on this because this guy gets it. At that battle — when Tom doesn’t even have a chance to laugh at it as he would want to, because the explosions start going off and he gets a little out of his head there — it’s seeing part two of what this guy does with his money, and what this guy’s obsession with the military really is. It’s just about toys, about moving things from one place to another. It has zero resemblance to what Tom understands as the military or as war as a veteran. 

It is a completely different thing, and when he sees that Carl sees this battle that he fought in — that he has tried so hard to leave behind and drinks himself to sleep every night trying to leave behind — as a plaything in this rich guy’s house, he loses it. Also, out of exhaustion, but I think the key to that scene is that he tries to reel it in. Tom tries to reel it in twice. He says he’s sorry, and I’m sure you mean well, Carl. He’s not saying that because he wants to keep the business rolling. He really just does feel sorry. He’s sorry that he exploded. He sees in Carl that he hurt basically this bearded little boy in front of him, and he almost sympathizes with him as you would a child. 

Was choosing Duncan always the endgame, or, in that moment, was Carl angry and, in response, made the pivot do you think? 

Here’s the thing. Carl goes out searching, looking for what he thought Tom was. He realizes now Tom’s not a warrior. I’m a broken toy, and he’s going to hunt down a real warrior to live vicariously through. That’s why I think he gets there. I don’t think he’s doing it out of spite for Tom. He’s doing it to keep the toy.

Around the time the show was being promoted and launched, in a podcast conversation, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen admits he has zero introspection. In fact, he sees it in his professional and personal life as a problem, and also suggests that introspection is a relatively modern convention. There are obvious parallels between Andreessen’s language and some of the show’s characters. In light of Tom’s outcome, how do you think he represents the human carnage of people who operate like high-speed trains, never think beyond an impulse, and barely stop to look back? 

I only thought this after the fact, after filming was done. I started seeing clips from the show and episodes when I realized that Tom was sort of — he wasn’t just a fish out of water as I had thought before. He was also the audience wandering into Silicon Valley, and being toyed with. Being shocked. He has to drink in order to stop the introspection. Then there is that moment in the last episode when he realizes he can’t anymore. He looks at the bar he was just heading to, but he realizes it’s his fault that Carl is going to market to all these veterans. He’s going to target them instead of helping them. And it’s his fault. I gave him the data as Duncan so gleefully tells me. I hadn’t even thought of it. How could somebody do that? Tom looks at the bar, and it’s not going to do it anymore. (Stops himself, putting a hand over his mouth) I almost said I can’t stop the train.

And not even said as a joke. It’s difficult because that bar scene could come across as if Tom had just won. Being manipulated is obviously not Tom’s fault, and his turning away from drinking could mean he’s here another day to fight people like Carl and Duncan. For a moment, it feels like he lost the battle but not the war. What did you and the episode’s writers want Tom to say in his final moments, where he literally has no dialogue?

That’s an interesting read of it, and [Tom’s reaction] was a discussion. There wasn’t even much in the script about what Tom does after Duncan leaves. It just says he walks away, but there was some discussion about — we shot it a couple of different ways. Does he walk a little bit to the bar? Does he just cry and try to stop himself from crying? Does he gather himself together and get the strength to get out of there? There was never a thought, it was never a question that Tom should say something because that was it. He had nothing left to say. And thank God Jeffrey didn’t come up at that point. He dodged Jeffrey to get to the bar, but he was on the path on the way out. Of course, that happens off camera.

Earlier in the season, Duncan revealed his partner, the brains of the operation, had died by suicide from hanging. Duncan told people he had to keep going in service, but really, it was his own ambition. The season then ends in the death of Tom — who’s tried to make the world a better place by betting big — with a sequence of his badge swinging from the train station railing. Meanwhile, Duncan forges ahead with Carl as his new partner. 

It’s clear that talented, good people keep getting strung up and railroaded by these VC guys, but did the team discuss those two plot lines as a continuous commentary? And what do the fates of these men say about how and through whom the show defines audacity — a word that has two different interpretations and uses? 

I love hearing you say that. I was an English and Theater major, and your analysis is something I’ve had to beat out of myself in years of acting, because it’s not good for performing. (Laughs.) Interviewers other than yourself have asked me, “Who’s the most audacious character in the show?” and I was like, “Well, which definition are you referring to?” So I can only agree with you. I think that’s a brilliant take on it, but no, there was no discussion about that. Especially in relation to the title. It was just right. It was the “Untitled Jonathan Glazer Project” for a very long time. We had a lot of long talks about Tom prior to shooting. One of the things I kept saying was — I was deep into the lingo of the soldiers — Tom just sees Silicon Valley as the suck, because that’s what they call battle, “the suck.” And Jonathan was like, “Oh, that’d be a great title, The Suck.” I thought, “Oh, wow, did I just name the show?” (Laughs.) But I don’t think it could be called anything else. 

It is so audacious. It’s audacious in the fact that they kill the viewer — they kill the person you’re living vicariously through, and one of maybe two characters somewhat redeemable. It’s Tom, and I’d say maybe Paul Adelstein’s character [Dr. Gary Felder], who still has a heart in there. They’re all basically audacious, and this whole season represents it. There’s no escape. There’s no escape for any of us, and they’ve caused a horrible, horrible harm that is costing real lives. They’re smarter than we are when it comes to this stuff, and we don’t read our user agreements. But I will fill out an opt-out form because my time is not too precious to waste on this. They’re making me jump through hoops now, and I’ll jump through them because they know that their days are numbered. What they’ve been doing is audacious — and then there’s the audacity of the government to allow them to police themselves. But that, I think, will change in our lifetimes. 

***

All episodes of The Audacity season one are now streaming.