WeCrashed, the Apple TV+ show about overhyped co-working startup WeWork, starts to bring the walls down around founder Adam Neumann this week. As his wife, Rebekah, demands more and more of the pie for herself, Adam keeps screwing up important meetings and losing his standing among his investors and cheerleaders.
The wheels are about to come off — and the only one who can’t see it is Adam. Now, if only any of this were remotely as compelling as the directors and writers deemed it, it would be a lot more exciting to tune into the fifth episode of a show about how supposedly terrible investment banking is that nevertheless revels in all the resulting excess.
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WeCrashed recap: ‘Fortitude’
In this week’s episode, titled “Fortitude,” Adam (Jared Leto, who gives another terrible performance) and Rebekah (Anne Hathaway) decide to go on vacation, leaving Miguel (Kyle Marvin) in charge and Bruce Dunlevie (Anthony Edwards) furious and confused.
While Adam meditates and goofs off, Rebekah starts brainstorming. What if the company expands? What if they revolutionize everything? WeBike. WeEarn. WEtc. This turns out to be a fortuitous little session, because Rebekah wants to pull her kids out of school anyway. So why not a school? WeGrow is born.
Bruce hears all this when Adam does a televised interview without having consulted anyone about the decision to keep expanding, so he flies out to their beach house for a chat.
The board is turning on Adam. They want to go public, to be sturdy, to just sit back and start earning money on the open market. Adam doesn’t want that. He wants to keep pulling insane stunts. Bruce brings in Cameron Lautner (O-T Fagbenle) to give him a dressing down and rein him in a little. Adam knows a threat when he sees one, and when Cameron asks for an office, the writing’s on the wall.
The worm is turning on WeWork
Adam goes on the offensive, inundating Cameron with decades’ worth of paperwork, but he’s prepared. Cameron has a team of accountants under him to go through every single financial decision the company’s ever made.
At the end, the picture (which we know by now) is of a company run with complete irresponsibility, with money going to every whim Adam ever had. Adam retaliates again: He goes to SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son (Eui-sung Kim) and asks him to buy out Benchmark’s controlling interest in the company.
Masa considers this until Adam gets drunk and misses a meeting with a Saudi investor. He also misses a meeting to celebrate the start of Rebekah’s school. Then it all comes out: The board wants Adam out and Masa is pulling funding. It’s over.
I’ll be over there making our dream come true
There’s a colossal difference in the caliber of performances being given on this show. There’s obviously a yawning precipice that separates the supporting cast from the leads. (The supporting actors — Anthony Edwards, Kyle Marvin, Eui-sung Kim — are perfectly good in their parts, playing, let’s say, normal people thrown into extraordinary circumstances.)
But there’s an equally huge difference in the work being done by Hathaway and Leto.
Jared Leto: Bad actor
Leto is one of those actors who’s become famous for his “method” approach, despite the fact that Jared Leto is not a method actor, he’s a third-hand copy of one. Here’s Isaac Butler, author of The Method: How The 20th Century Learned to Act:
What people started calling The Method in the 1950s when it got a capital “M” is a process that’s about the self. It’s about delving into the self and finding an emotional and psychological bridge between yourself and the character you’re playing. So it’s going deep inside in order to find a way out, as opposed to starting with this external lived reality to find your way in. That series of techniques was codified by Lee Strasberg, who in the twentieth century was the most famous acting teacher in the United States.
Leto stays in character on set and behaves like he thinks his character would off set. All of these are surface decisions. Looking into his dead eyes you don’t learn anything about Adam Neumann; you just see Jared Leto trying as hard as any human has ever tried to not be who he is: a wealthy actor who can get away with behaving however he wants.
Leto doesn’t go deep into characters. He wears them like a serial killer wears the skin of his victims. But there is no detaching Leto from anyone he plays. He does not possess the depth required to disappear into character because he does not have any interest in disappearing into character. He wants people to know that Jared Leto is acting now.
Anne Hathaway: A little better
Anne Hathaway is no more believable as Rebekah Neumann (the voice comes and goes every episode) but she did make choices about who this person is. She’s a sham, top to bottom, and Hathaway does do an excellent job conveying this.
I have no questions about her choices, even if I don’t think they all work. Leto picked an accent and he gives in to the rockstar mentality of Neumann, which was already his mentality anyway, because he’s in a rock band.
But Leto doesn’t project anything. He’s a shell. An empty vessel. Adam Neumann was an over-confident charlatan, but he wasn’t a Jared Leto performance. This version of Adam Neumann is a man terrified of moving his face for fear that the prosthetics might all come off.
Watch WeCrashed on Apple TV+
New episodes of WeCrashed arrive each Friday on Apple TV+.
Rated: TV-MA
Watch on: Apple TV+
Scout Tafoya is a film and TV critic, director and creator of the long-running video essay series The Unloved for RogerEbert.com. He has written for The Village Voice, Film Comment, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Nylon Magazine. He is the author of Cinemaphagy: On the Psychedelic Classical Form of Tobe Hooper, the director of 25 feature films, and the director and editor of more than 300 video essays, which can be found at Patreon.com/honorszombie.
