Anthony Boyle Talks Sam Bankman-Fried and ‘The Altruists,’ a Tale of Sex and Crypto

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 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.

At a couple of points in the series, he says, “I know I’m not a normal person.” There’s an ongoing public conversation right now about a lot of these tech moguls believing they know better than the rest of us. Did you think of SBF as someone with that kind of Superman complex?

I think the opposite. I played him as someone who was profoundly insecure. There’s this thing of broken men building empires. He has this idea of: I am FTX. So if I can make FTX the biggest, the richest, if I can have the most of something…. That’s not someone who’s comfortable in his own skin. I was interested in what possessed someone to become the world’s youngest billionaire. I’m not really interested in money or crypto or finance. It was: What makes them do the things that they do?

Sam is a nerdy guy, but as soon as he gets successful, he hangs giant posters of himself everywhere. Is he burning for the world to recognize him and admire his empire?

Do you know the poem “Ozymandias” ? There’s a bit in the show where I’m looking up at this great poster of myself, and it reminded me of that line: “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” I asked Graham, “Can I quote that poem in the show?” And he said, “Originally called that episode ‘Ozymandias!’”

Talking about wanting to be recognized—when I was prepping for this, I went to a crypto guy’s birthday party in Los Angeles. He was paying a DJ a million dollars for one evening, but he built this plinth above the DJ decks for him and his friends so you had to look at him. A lot of these crypto people, who maybe didn’t have buzzing social lives—wallflowers who didn’t know how to communicate—became billionaires. And what this guy had done with it was to throw money at a very famous DJ, and then raise himself above him. It reminded me of the scene where Sam has a 100-foot poster behind him. It was like, Wow, this is that sort of man in his mum’s basement who just wants the world to see him.

In Sam’s case, his roaring egotism is somewhat awkward because he’s also obsessed with the idea of being altruistic. At one point in the show, a leader of the Effective Altruism movement sees this lavish party he’s thrown and says, “Uh, this isn’t very altruistic.”

Yes, he’s spent a lot of money on confetti cannons! That dichotomy is what’s really fascinating about him, because I think both of those two things are true. I think he really is altruistic, and I think he does have narcissistic tendencies.

I read that you corresponded with him in prison. What did you want to know?

Annoyingly for this interview, I promised him that I wouldn’t divulge anything. I asked him to open his heart up to me, and he really did. He was very forthcoming with over 100 questions in emails. He answered, I’d say, 98% of them. Even the ones that he didn’t answer were very telling for me, because you’re like a detective, trying to figure out how he answers them and in what way. And can you trust it?

As we see in the series, he insisted on doing interviews throughout the scandal. Even when his lawyers were telling him to stop.

When I was playing those scenes, it was like: I can outsmart this; I can get in front of it. I can just explain this to them. You know, he went to jail for stealing the money—but if he didn’t go to jail, a year later to the day, all of that money would have been back, and tenfold. He invested in Anthropic. He invested in the biggest AI companies. His argument was: Look, I know the markets. What you all see is a bird falling to certain death. What I can see is that the bird is swooping, and will come back up. I read last week that said Sam might have been the world’s first trillionaire had he not gone to jail, because all the AI companies are now flourishing.

The show frames Sam and Caroline as a love story. But it’s hard to tell if they are egging on each other’s delusions, or if this is kind of a game that’s fueling their relationship.

They’re obsessed with games. Even the first time they meet, they are playing a game. This isn’t in the show, but in my head, the scene that I sort of created for myself to understand him was: He’s playing World of Warcraft, and on the same screen he loses $100 million, and then he dies in World of Warcraft. He’s like, Fuck!, and feels more emotional about the game than about other people’s money.

It does feel like the real-life consequences are very abstract to him. Like he’s busy trying to outplay everyone and not thinking: This is going to cause somebody to go bankrupt and ruin their lives.

I think that’s the great tragedy of it, because people did go bankrupt, and people unfortunately died by suicide through this. Marriages broke up. Families tore apart because all of their money was in this. And that’s something that we have to remember when talking about the show. There were real-world consequences because of this crash.

There’s a whole spate of movie projects this fall that suggest tech bros are the new supervillains. But it sounds like you didn’t approach the character that way at all.

My viewpoint on it is that Sam wants to do good. But I think the best-laid plans of mice and men often . It’s easy to say I’m going to give away all these billions—and then suddenly you’re not in your mum’s basement, and you’re hanging out with Katy Perry, and you think, This feels pretty good to me. I don’t think people should have that amount of power.

You are Mr. Period Actor. Is this the first time that you’ve played a character living in the present?

I feel like it is. It’s the first time I had to act with a laptop and an iPhone, and it’s so annoying. There’s no one there that you’re looking at. You’re just looking at a green screen. And then it —like, Oh, we saw the camera in the reflection when you turned it that way. These things that I didn’t have to deal with before because I was, as you said, Mr. Period Man.

Even Say Nothing was set in the 1970s and ’80s, well before cell phones.