Simon Helberg on the absurdity of ‘The Audacity’
The Treatment
KCRW
4.6 • 656 Ratings
🗓️ 8 May 2026
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Actor Simon Helberg is no stranger to playing highly intelligent characters with a few social shortcomings. He’s best known for his comedic turn as the brilliant, but awkward engineer Howard Wolowitz on the CBS sitcom 'The Big Bang Theory,' which ran for 12 seasons. He’s also appeared in films including 'Old School,' 'A Serious Man,' and 'Florence Foster Jenkins,' for which he received a Golden Globe nomination.
His latest role is as Martin Phister in the AMC series 'The Audacity.' Phister is a tech genius who can’t connect with his own family. Helberg talks about getting into the psyche of someone highly intelligent and neurodivergent, why some tech titans believe they are actually saving the world, and he reveals what he thinks when he catches himself on 'The Big Bang Theory.'
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment. |
| 0:05.1 | Our whole universe was in a hot dance state that nearly 14 billion years ago, expansion started way. |
| 0:12.6 | The Earth began to cool the auto-trov. |
| 0:14.1 | Welcome to the treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. I've known my guest, Simon Helbert. |
| 0:17.1 | My knowledge of your own goes back to when I first met him when he was doing Studio 60 Live on the Sunset Strip. |
| 0:21.6 | I say that he's used to rendering intoxicatingly large amounts of dialogue and keeping his breath between that show and the Big Bang theory, which you all know him for. |
| 0:31.6 | And I think even some of the stuff he's done on Pokerface is about having to get through large passage of dialogue when I'm asphyxating in real time. It's a low bar. Just don't die on camera. Well, don't die |
| 0:45.2 | here, by the way, because his newest project, which is on AMC, first I'll tell the name of it. |
| 0:50.7 | It's called The Audacity. It takes place in Silicon Valley. It is about this handful of |
| 0:56.9 | people who are determining the fate of humanity. And who live their lives as if they're still in high |
| 1:03.2 | school. Yeah, yeah. It's the people who are deciding ultimately how we communicate and connect |
| 1:10.2 | and express ourselves through technology. And these are people who |
| 1:15.1 | are notoriously famous for not being able to communicate or connect or express themselves. So it's a |
| 1:20.8 | little bit of a cautionary tale, I think. It's funny. It's described as a drama, but there are |
| 1:26.6 | so many people that we know from comedy in the show. |
| 1:29.1 | Yeah. |
| 1:29.5 | But I think what's interesting, too, is that it's played at such an operatic pace that it's sort of tragic comic, isn't it? |
| 1:36.5 | It is, yeah. |
| 1:37.8 | I think the darkness that is imbued in all of it, I think, is just a way to make it palatable, too, so that we can |
| 1:46.6 | hopefully hold out a little bit of hope for, I don't know, correcting the course here as we |
| 1:54.4 | kind of approach the edge of the cliff. And, you know, there is something absurd, I think, |
| 2:00.0 | at the edge of any tragedy, it becomes kind of a comfort to laugh at the predicament we're in. |
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