Berkeley actor wraps up ‘jerk’ tycoon role
Ross looks back as HBO’s ‘Silicon Valley’ nears the end
Berkeley’s Matt Ross, the man who plays megalomaniac tech titan Gavin Belson on HBO’s “Silicon Valley,” is further proof that TV and film actors aren’t necessarily clones of their on-screen characters.
As he enters the Au Coquelet Cafe on a crisp fall morning, Ross does so with no discernible air of arrogance. Why, he’s not even flanked by fawning minions, spiritual gurus or stern-faced bodyguards.
How very un-Gavin like.
“I’m not a billionaire and that’s the great tragedy of my life,” Ross likes to joke. “I only play one on television.”
Not for much longer. When “Silicon Valley,” HBO’s Emmywinning satirical sendup of the Bay Area’s dot-com culture, launched its sixth and final season Oct. 27, it left the show’s die-hard devotees with only seven more episodes to bask in the outrageous antics of Richard Hendricks (Thomas Middleditch) and his nerdy pals.
It also means bidding farewell to Gavin Belson, one of TV’s funniest antagonists — a painfully delusional and ruthless man-child who delights in trampling rivals and spews inane utterances like: “I don’t want to live in a world where someone makes the
world a better place better than we do.”
“Yes, Gavin is sadly done, unless they make ‘Silicon Valley: The Movie,’ ” Ross says between sips of green tea. “But I don’t think that’s happening.”
Ross, a 49-year-old husband and father of two, is the only “Silicon Valley” cast member who actually lives in the shadow of Silicon Valley. For the past six years, he has commuted by car between his home in the Elmwood neighborhood and Culver City, where the show wrapped production at Sony Pictures Studio last month.
Over that time, Ross, along with producers-writers Mike Judge and Alec Berg, have turned a supporting character into a scene-stealing fan favorite who, though certainly outsized, is rendered with just enough details that ring true. Ask Ross about his interactions with selfieseeking viewers and he’ll tell you that they often claim Gavin reminds them “exactly” of a boss they’ve had in the tech world.
But do they ever just snarl and call him a jerk?
“No, not really,” Ross says. “I think they love that he’s a jerk. They find him amusing in his jerk-dom. … It helps that Gavin is more of a buffoon than anything. He’s not Darth Vader. He’s not a serial killer. He certainly has been a force of destruction. But I think he genuinely believes that he’s a force of good.”
It’s that startling lack of self-awareness that Ross enjoyed exploring.
“Gavin is such a peacock — such a strutting fool, who thinks of himself as a poet and as a yogi and as this evolved human being. And he’s patently not,” Ross says about the CEO of a Google-like company called Hooli. “Playing someone who is so powerful and yet so clueless and destructive is a lot of fun. You don’t have to look too far in our world today to see others like him.”
Could he be referring to the man who occupies the White House?
“I don’t think Gavin is anything like Trump. I think he’s smarter (than the president),” Ross says. “But he is another form of clown.”
The log line for the final season of “Silicon Valley” is “How big is too big?” The first episode begins with a hilarious sequence that has an ultra-jittery Richard, CEO of Pied Piper, testifying before Congress about the security of user data. (Shades of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance on Capitol Hill.) His message is that companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon have become way too powerful.
“They’re not going to change,” Richard says. “They don’t have to.”
It’s another example of how “Silicon Valley,” while not above slapstick and gross-out jokes, often reflects cold, hard reality. As if to underscore that dynamic, Ross points to a TV screen in the cafe displaying clips of Zuckerberg’s recent speech in Washington,
D.C., on free expression.
“I think our show has done a good job of discussing what’s going on in Silicon Valley,” Ross says. “(Judge and Berg) are trying to address that culture — where it is today and where it might be going. The best art prompts you to ask certain questions.”
As for where Gavin Belson is going, Ross is stingy with spoilers.
“I can tell you that he lives,” he teases. “Gavin is in the final episode, so he’s not killed off. And he has a huge life change that takes him in a different direction and changes his relationship with Richard and his merry pranksters, in a way that I think is unexpected and very funny.”
Ross, who wrote and directed the 2016 feature film “Captain Fantastic” and has directed a couple of “Silicon Valley” episodes, says that what he’ll miss the most about doing the show is the “community we built.” But he’s also looking forward to other projects, including a feature screenplay he’s busy writing.
And so he’s not exactly in mourning now the end has come.
“We’re all genuinely happy to go out on a high note,” he insists. “And not kind of being one of those shows where you say, ‘I remember when it was good.’ We’ve all seen examples of that.”