Apple TV+'s WeCrashed is the latest pop-culture portrayal that can't help but turn a sociopath CEO into a Greek god

Paste Magazine

In Oliver Stone's Wall Street, Gordon Gekko's energy, confidence and power were irresistible. "That may be the archetypical example of a thriving capitalist depicted in film or television whose charisma accidentally outweighs whatever moral the artist is trying to communicate, but it’s far from the only one," says Shane Ryan. "Examples abound in the world of organized crime, but you don’t need to leave the board room or the balance sheet; from blockbusters like The Wolf of Wall Street to Apple TV+’s underrated Physical, it’s a genre unto itself. The sociopath CEO is our version of the Greek gods, to be worshiped despite—and somewhat because of—their flaws. The fundamental problem (if you agree that it’s a problem) is that even when the directors have their heads screwed on straight ethically, and are determined to make their protagonists pay for their immorality, every good storyteller understands it’s the dramatic elements that are most likely to draw our attention. Comeuppance can be satisfying, but we know all too well that unrepentant capitalists in real life often face very little or no accountability, and depictions of a downfall ring appropriately hollow. Instead, creators lean into the exciting part of the story—the heady rise, the sheer bravado of the hero, the obstacle-laden, thrilling ride on the waves of profit. Apple TV+’s WeCrashed, the story of WeWork founder Adam Neumann (Jared Leto) and his wife Rebekah (Anne Hathaway), falls all too neatly into this history...There is, frankly, no other way to turn that story into a season of television without going down the 'attractive antihero' route. That’s exactly what Apple TV+ does, and they do it fairly well."

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• WeCrashed fails to offer a critique of the tech industry -- it's Silicon Valley putting forth a narrative about itself through television: "WeCrashed never lets us — or failed actress Rebekah — forget she is a cousin of Gwyneth’s," says Inkoo Kang. "But the show never leans fully into camp or cattiness, frustratingly stuck instead somewhere between dishy and humanizing (not unlike Leto’s House of Gucci). The New York-set miniseries spans roughly a decade, with the couple meeting-cute at a party Adam throws trying to gin up cash for he and his pushover business partner Miguel McKelvey’s (Kyle Marvin) first iteration of WeWork. As previewed in the pilot, Adam will become in just a few years the company’s most toxic asset. It’s easy enough to see how they get there. 'Fear is a choice,' Rebekah tells her husband, as his ousting looms closer. By that point, they’ve spent years mutually supporting each other’s divorces from reality. Leto is almost always a capable actor, but the Israeli cadences he sports in the role mostly calls to mind the global tour of accents he currently seems to be on."
• WeCrashed panders to viewers, but doesn't offer them any insight: "What WeCrashed doesn’t do is bring us much in the way of insight into the structures, systems or mindset that allow this kind of extraordinary untethering from reality in a field that is supposedly full of the brightest and best number crunchers there are. It’s a wonderful and deeply enjoyable tale of rags to riches to (relative) rags, but it panders to the viewer’s schadenfreude instead of offering anything meatier, or any wider perspective or criticism," says Lucy Mangan. "In fact, (Mike) Judge’s Silicon Valley offers more in the way of analysis of the part greed and ambition play in skewing decision making, compromising people and principles and shaping every bend in the road between a vision and its eventual realization."
• WeCrashed is the latest adaptation that uses famous actors to get us to feel something for bad bosses: "It’s a familiar formula, and WeCrashed debuts in the middle of a docuseries glut, specifically one stuffed with shows about the rise and fall of scammers and bad companies," says Audra Schroeder. "But of all the shows about narcissistic founders, WeCrashed at least pulls back the curtain on how fake numbers like $47 billion are. There are some technical issues, like that Neumann is 42, Israeli, and six-foot-five and Leto is not. (Leto does his best with the Israeli accent, though at first, he’s definitely serving Tommy Wiseau.) Co-founder Miguel McKelvey (Kyle Marvin) is a more sympathetic and instructive character, showing how easy it was to get swept up in Adam’s orbit, and how hard it was to disengage."
• Unlike Hulu's The Dropout, WeCrashed barely cares about WeWork employees: "WeCrashed seems content to follow Adam and Rebekah along their merry way to the peak of the business world and back down again, with minimal input from those who get truly screwed as a result," says Caroline Framke. "In this respect, it’s hard not to compare WeCrashed to another recent eight-episode limited series about a charismatic startup CEO rising with alarming speed before falling to pieces in front of the entire world. As Hulu’s The Dropout details how Elizabeth Holmes (played by Amanda Seyfried) became both a billionaire and one of the tech world’s most notorious cautionary tales, it takes pains in each episode to show the damage she caused to people in the process. Her employees aren’t incidental characters, but key components of the show; her peers aren’t side notes to her success, but entire people with lives that suffer crushing blows thanks to their boss’ hubris. WeCrashed makes overtures towards including WeWork employees whose faith in Adam went unrewarded, such as early manager Lesley (Antoinette Crowe-Legacy), acolyte Jacob (Theo Stockman), and wide-eyed recruit Chloe (Cricket Brown). But they rarely get much more depth than those descriptors until it’s too late. There’s a version of the show that could, and maybe should, have found a cannier balance between the Adam and Rebekah saga and the downward spiral of those orbiting them — and for a glorious minute, there is."
• WeCrashed focuses too much on the love story of Adam and Rebekah: "WeCrashed plays the pair’s inanities completely straight without winking or nudging, leaving us in the audience to blink or howl or shake our heads in disbelief when, for example, they talk themselves into throwing out the mandatory S-1 paperwork prepared by their lawyers and replacing it with what Cameron scathingly refers to as a children’s book,'" says Angie Han. "Obnoxious as both Rebekah and Adam come across, it’s easy to see what drew them to each other. In their own way, they’re a perfect match. WeCrashed, which is based on the podcast by Wondery, is rather less successful at demonstrating what drew everyone else to the company, or what kept them around as more and more red flags started to pop up."
• If you're looking to be entertained — to watch Leto and Hathaway wholly channel the startups' misguided maverick and muse — then WeCrashed delivers: " The Apple TV+ series features stellar cinematography, supercuts, and special effects that help speed up and animate the drawn-out saga. And the score is so sprightly that it almost makes you believe all the bullshit. Almost," says Nicole Gallucci, adding: "With the help of facial prosthetics, distressingly dark contact lenses, and an Israeli accent, Leto gives a lively portrayal of a stubborn disruptor who's hell bent on outdoing himself. And his work is only elevated by Hathaway. Throughout the series, Hathaway brilliantly captures Rebekah's gnawing insecurities and a desperate desire to achieve something of her own."
• Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway make WeCrashed more fun to watch than it perhaps should be: "While its sparing criticism for the system that created them can be infuriating at times, lively performances and a playful tone make WeCrashed eminently fun to watch — probably more fun than it should be," says Dylan Roth, adding: "WeCrashed is best enjoyed as a crime drama, a character-driven series in which compelling characters start off as underdogs and transform into villains that you’re desperate to see get caught. Like a softer, tamer Wolf of Wall Street, WeCrashed is hard to look away from, a glimpse at the awful people who wield power over our lives but also an undeniable affirmation of the charisma that helps them get away with it."
• Watching WeCrashed is punishing: " There is little here that is enjoyable to watch and even less that is entertaining, and spending eight hours with the versions of these people portrayed by Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway is a punishment," says Roxana Hadadi, adding: "The commitment of Leto and Hathaway’s performances does not make these characters any less torturous to be around, and WeCrashed’s focus on Rebekah’s desire for credit as a building source of tension between the couple is the series’ greatest miscalculation. So what if it was Rebekah’s woo-woo principles that helped Adam raise billions of dollars from investors? Why should we worry about whether she gets her due credit when, as Don Draper famously said, that’s what the money is for? She normalized nonsensical ideas for a real-estate company that helped create a workplace in which women were sexually harassed and employees were drastically underpaid, and the series’ final moments do at least acknowledge her hypocrisy."
• WeCrashed is effective at establishing a critical distance for viewers: "Tone is tricky in a series like this," says Chris Vognar. "If WeCrashed were to adopt the personality of the Neumanns — as Super Pumped adopted the personality of Travis Kalanick — it would make you throw your remote across the room. Instead, it creates a sense of critical distance, through performance, script and direction, that allows the viewer to see how and why so many were seduced by these two without cloaking itself in their values. Hathaway is particularly impressive in this regard. She sells the idea that Rebekah means well, that she really does think she will save the world, but Hathaway never loses sight of the character’s essential truth: She’s a toxic, manipulative mess. And yet we feel for her. That’s all Hathaway. As for Leto, this is his comfort zone: an accent, a swagger, an outsize personality. With his long, flowing hair, bare feet and glimmer in his eye, he almost makes you want to open your checkbook while you watch."
• WeCrashed distinguishes itself with Leto and Hathaway's impressive performances: "WeCrashed doesn’t exactly deploy many tricks to distract you from the fact that, structurally, it isn’t all that different from other shows about founders," says Charles Pulliam-Moore. "This is both because there’s only so much viable reinvention of the wheel when it comes to adapting real-world events into entertainment and because many unicorn companies’ stories have certain details in common, like founders overpromising in order to secure money from investors. What WeCrashed has going for it — and the show smartly leans into to differentiate itself — is the fact that two of the actual people its central characters are based on are known to be rather eccentric in ways that both Hathaway and Leto are more than down to have fun with. Tempting as it may be to interpret WeCrashed’s Neumann as Jared Leto simply being Jared Leto in the name of art, his performance is legitimately impressive when you actually compare it to any of the many clips of Neumann that can be found online. The same is true of Hathaway’s Rebekah, who moves through multiple unsatisfying and unsuccessful lives as a stock trader, yoga instructor, and actress, all while living in her much more successful cousin’s shadow."
• Jared Leto says his history of performing on stage as a musician helped him portray Adam Neumann: "I think, had I not stood on stages around the world with 30 Seconds to Mars, and had kind of a deep understanding of what it’s like to communicate to people from those stages, I probably would’ve missed an element of my idea of who he was," he says. "He was good on that stage. He was a great communicator, and he had a bit of a rock star in him. So being in the band certainly helped that element. But I just dove deep and educated myself in every way possible. I listened to the podcasts and read as much material as I could. I watched every single interview. I got raw footage of interviews and studied the nuances. I talked to anybody that would talk to me that knew him, which was many, many people. And then I had a great team of Israelis who helped with the dialect and a lot of other things that were important to understand."
• Leto says he spent six months “immersed in the character": “He was a very compelling, charming person. A great salesperson, a great marketer and he had a vision, and he brought that vision to life,” says Leto of Neumann, noting that it didn’t happen without its faults. “But it’s an incredible story about an immigrant that came to this country and built an empire out of nothing. And I really responded to that.” For Leto’s physical makeover, Oscar-winning special effects makeup artist Kazu Hiro employed use of prosthetics. “There were some things happening there,” Leto says, not wanting to reveal all of Hiro’s visual tricks. “It’s very hard to do subtle work. In this one, we have some subtle things going on.”
• Leto admits he experiences a "mourning period" after he stops playing a character: "Look, when you make a commitment, in any way, when you let go, there can be a mourning process," says Leto. "Some of the things are physical. The way you move, the way you laugh, the way you talk, the accent. It can become habit. So, I think it's normal that there's a little grace period. You don't just all of a sudden, 'Hey, I forgot about the last six months of my life.' So, there's a little bit of time." He adds: "It's no secret that I have a deep passion working immersively. I'm passionate about that. Sometimes, that's got its challenges. But, in this case, I adored the project. The work was incredible. It was so challenging. There was so much dialogue. I was just buried in speech, after speech, after speech."