How did Sam Bankman-Fried (Anthony Boyle) and Caroline Ellison’s (Julia Garner) meet-cute end in an explosive $8 billion scandal? The new trailer for The Altruists, which you can watch above, is here to shed some light.
In the eight-episode limited series, landing on Netflix Nov. 19, two hyper-smart, ambitious young idealists try to remake the global financial system in the blink of an eye. Instead, they wind up accused of stealing billions of dollars and becoming Gen Z’s Bonnie and Clyde.
“I genuinely believe that both Sam and Caroline were deeply committed altruists from day one, who set out to do as much good for as many people as they could in their lives,” says creator, co-showrunner, and writer Graham Moore (The Imitation Game, The Outfit). “Over the course of the years that our show depicts, Sam and Caroline, with the very best of intentions, talked each other and themselves into committing a number of terrible crimes.”
The upcoming drama follows the rise-and-fall of FTX, a global cryptocurrency exchange, and the star-crossed lovers who wanted to make the world a better place — but catastrophically toppled their empire. Ellison ended up spending over a year in prison, while Bankman-Fried is continuing to serve out his 25-year sentence.
It started out with a “little white lie,” that turned into a “slightly bigger lie,” then a “slightly bigger one” after that and so forth, Moore says. Co-showrunner and co-writer Jacqueline Hoyt (The Underground Railroad, Dietland, The Leftovers) adds that “Through their relationship, they almost dared and cajoled each other into building up this enormous company that was going to change the world. They were going to challenge the system. But through their relationship, they ended up breaking the system, and tearing an $8 billion hole in FTX.”
The first time that Moore got to see Garner and Boyle embody Caroline and Sam together, he found himself getting emotional. The actors had never properly met each other — they’d only spoken on the telephone.
“I remember being a little nervous on the day that we were going to have our first rehearsal,” he says. “She’d been doing all this accent work and I knew he was doing all this accent and voice work.” Thirty seconds in, Moore started crying. “I was so overwhelmed because you could feel it — it just clicked.”
Garner only had two recordings of Ellison to study as she built out her character, whereas there was a plethora of video, audio, and TikToks for Boyle to sift through. Moore was quick to remind the actors that he didn’t want them to do impressions of the tech founders, and was much more interested in them creating three-dimensional characters.
“That’s something [Garner and Boyle] both got really excited about,” Moore says. “Using the information they had, every bit of video they could find to put these people together, but also imagining what these people are like when there are no cameras on them.”
See how the final versions of those characters came together when The Altruists premieres on Nov. 19.
