I’ve been staring at Jared Leto’s nose for an hour, swiping back and forth between a paparazzi photo and a publicity shot of him as Israeli entrepreneur Andrew Neumann in new Apple+ series WeCrashed.
I’m calling it: he is wearing a prosthetic. The brown contact lenses are one thing, but putting on a bigger nose to portray a Jew is a brave creative choice in our identity-sensitive times, even for the famously authentic actor.
I’m not sure which is more offensive though, the nose, or the worst Israeli accent ever committed to screen, or why the time spent on the former wasn’t better spent fixing the later. No amount of literal Jewface is enough to crack over his terrible figurative one.
Anne Hathaway, as Rebekah Neumann, is herself no stranger to offensiveness, for those of you lucky to have grown back your brains after watching the Dirty Rotten Scoundrels remake.
Anne may have instead gone with the brave creative choice to still look and act exactly like Anne Hathaway, but different acting styles aside, their pairing in this eight-part dramatisation of the rise and fall of what was once one of the world’s most valuable startups, WeWork — well, it works.
Charisma is charisma, and regardless of any deficiencies of the actors or their real-life counterparts, it’s apparently something they all have in spades, and whether it’s keeping an audience glued to a TV show, or helping build a multi-billion-dollar empire, it seems like a pretty useful quality to possess.
Of course, if you are going to start a business once rightly or not valued at $47 billion, getting $1 million help from your parents doesn’t hurt either.
But privilege aside, one of the most refreshing parts of this series is that it doesn’t just swoosh past all the dirty nitty gritty hard work that still must’ve occurred. This isn’t the story of everything magically falling into place, and then we can laugh or be shocked by the realities of immense wealth, it’s about moulding the world, cajoling it, and when that fails, beating it over the head, so that the world submits to your vision.
We do still get to laugh at the Neumanns’ excesses though. Adapted from a podcast by one of the writers of the American Office, the opening scenes, a flash forward to their lives just before the crash of the title, give a good indication of the fun that lies ahead watching those whose every whim is catered for.
Second assistants giving the third assistants grief, all electronics painted in white, being woken by bong-carrying maids. What’s becomes apparent though, and doesn’t change from when they first got together 12 years earlier, is the Neumanns’ support for each other.
Meeting when one is a snobby yoga teacher, the other blurring the line between conman and salesman, it’s their almost psychopathic belief in one another that’s revealed as the real secret of their success. Unfortunately, it’s also that which transforms them both from minor proto-monsters into the mammoth Godzilla kind. I eagerly await each new episode to observe their stomping about.