Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a sensitive, smiling and unstable Travis Kalanick in Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber, the new Showtime television show based on the book of the same name by Mike Isaac. The first season chronicles the rise and fall of Uber, the global hail giant that Kalanick founded and grew into a $68 billion company before falling into a cascade of scandals and being ousted by his own board of directors. The pilot episode, set to an impressive score, suggests a brilliant thriller about a brilliant underdog who could transform not just the taxi industry, but the world. In the series, Gordon-Levitt’s Kalanick meditates with Arianna Huffington (Uma Thurman) in a candlelit garden and clashes with Benchmark power broker Bill Gurley (Kyle Chandler). He celebrates. He brags. He makes a lot of shouts of defiance.

Gordon-Levitt is the latest acclaimed actor to portray an infamous businessman in a Hollywood drama. He will soon be joined by Amanda Seyfried as disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes in the Hulu miniseries. The stalland Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway as WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann and his partner, Rebekah, in Apple’s limited series We crashed. Before this recent flurry of real-life tech drama, there was Damian Lewis as billionaire hedge fund manager Bobby Axelrod in Billions, a character partly inspired by SAC Capital founder Steve Cohen; Ryan Gosling in The big court as Deutsche Bank salesman Jared Vennett, based on Deutsche trader Greg Lippmann, who profited from the housing market crash; Justin Timberlake as serial entrepreneur Sean Parker in The social network; and, of course, Leonardo DiCaprio as profane and corrupt stockbroker Jordan Belfort in Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-nominated biopic the wolf of Wall Street.

There’s a wider debate to be had about whether these productions irresponsibly glorify white-collar crime, but I have a narrower objection: the actors who play the main bad actors in these stories are still hot. , even when their real counterparts are not. . It sends exactly the wrong message on an even more fundamental level than turning corporate intrigue into fast-paced entertainment. When we rebrand Kalanick as Gordon-Levitt, Belfort as DiCaprio, and Lewis as Cohen, we prove that bad behavior pays off in more ways than one. The subtext is clear: if your actions are sufficiently extreme and absurd, they are also excellent material. You can sell life rights! Write a book! Go on the speaking circuit telling your story! As long as you don’t end up in jail – or, in fact, even if you do – a good script and a hot actor can not only help whitewash your reputation, but also make you cooler and sexier. Becoming famous through an attractive Hollywood face is a special reward.

Why give them the satisfaction of being played by a hot actor in a dramatization of their fall?

The most glaring case study remains the real wolf of Wall Street, Belfort, a man who was not bad at its peak but also didn’t exactly have the face of a generation’s beloved idol. After defrauding investors of millions of dollars at the Stratton Oakmont store in the 1990s, Belfort pleaded guilty to securities fraud and money laundering. He landed in federal prison in California, where he served 22 months of a four-year sentence and began working on his best-selling memoir. the wolf of Wall Street snatched an advance of over a million dollars from Random House, plus another million in film rights. Martin Scorsese’s antique and gleefully profane film version was well received by critics and garnered five Oscar nominations, including Best Actor for DiCaprio.

Belfort seized that Scorsese’s interpretation makes it sound like he tried to “rip people off” when he wanted to “make money for them” and “help build America”. That didn’t stop him from capitalizing on the film’s success and integrating Hollywood representation into his new identity as an investment and sales guru and woman killer. Belfort’s social media feeds are littered with clips and memes from the movie, and he’s happy to talk about his time with DiCaprio. “Obviously he killed him; he was spot on,” Belfort said of DiCaprio to his 3.6 million TikTok followers in a post last year, looking decidedly anti-Leo at such close range. DiCaprio’s Wolf of Wall Street is also part of Belfort’s sales training program. AT sales master class he held in New York a few years ago, for example, Belfort taught audience members pitching techniques by showing clips of the wolf of Wall Street then pausing to narrate DiCaprio’s lines himself, a bizarre display of life imitating art imitating life.

super pumped careens in a perhaps even more absurd direction by casting Gordon-Levitt as Travis Kalanick, a very normal-looking man who actually looks a lot more like co-star Kyle Chandler than any other actor in the movie. series. Gordon-Levitt, the former teenage pin-up girl who then stole maniacal pixie dream hearts in (500 days of summer, uses his natural charisma and sly smile to dubious effect as Kalanick, who the series portrays as an increasingly erratic but still empathetic figure. It’s a perfect exposition of how a pretty face with magnetic screen presence can soften the slimy, sly qualities that many of these people exude in real life.

In a recent maintenance with Last show host Stephen Colbert, Gordon-Levitt got a lot of flak for Kalanick and Uber, hinting at how the business systematically circumvented rules and law enforcement with software called “greyball”. But, Gordon-Levitt warned, “I’m not a journalist, it’s true, so it’s not my job to say what happened, it’s my job to say what I felt. . And I think he was a really exciting guy to be around. With super pumpedGordon-Levitt helps turn Kalanick into this flawed, exciting guy for global audiences, his kind, boyish face is the perfect advertisement.

The examples go on and on: it’s almost unpleasant to ask you to Google Steve Cohen and Damian Lewis side by side. And if social media has taught us anything, it’s that everyone is a bit vain and image-conscious. Scammers, petty criminals and powerful businessmen bent on fame and glory are certainly no exception. So why give them the satisfaction of being played by a hot actor in a dramatization of their downfall? Why not let them worry that if storylines and lawbreaking go wrong, it’s not just their actions that come under attack on the big screen, but also their very image? What if business leaders who have done bad things didn’t expect to bask in DiCaprio’s golden glow or Gordon-Levitt’s corny cuteness when their stories are filmed, but instead feared being shown to the public? like unattractive or just average, which are the vast majority of them? I’m not saying it would deter the next WeWork, but come on: why not turn a small perk of gross malfeasance into an equally small deterrent? People will continue to make movies and TV shows about the Jordan Belforts and Travis Kalanicks of the world because we love burglaries and scandals. Crime will always pay, in a way. It just doesn’t need to come with a makeover.