In November 2022, everyone watched Sam Bankman-Fried’s $32 billion cryptocurrency empire collapse at a dizzying speed. Glued to the FTX news at the time was The Imitation Game‘s Oscar-winning writer Graham Moore, who tells The A.V. Club that it felt like the world’s biggest story because a “so-called white knight of the finance world was being revealed as a potential fraud.”
Bankman-Fried was, in fact, convicted of wire fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering in 2023, with his ex-girlfriend/former CEO, Caroline Ellison, as the star witness against him. This complicated relationship unravels in The Altruists, which Moore co-showruns alongside Jacqueline Hoyt (The Leftovers), who further tells The A.V. Club that “Graham was so obsessed with it, it was contagious, and I found it riveting to do true crime for the first time in this manner.”
However, Moore wasn’t immediately ready to turn this saga into a TV show because he knew everyone in Hollywood would be scrambling to do so. It wasn’t until a producer friend, The Watcher‘s Scoop Wasserstein, texted and connected him to reporters in the Bahamas who were closely covering the case that Moore became involved. “Once I got on the call, I started developing some of my own sources within the inner circle, and realized there was more to the story than what we were hearing about it.” He points to how Bankman-Fried’s life was not just about his financial crimes or crypto, but about his on-again, off-again partnership with Ellison—and that forms the crux of The Altruists‘ eight episodes.
The miniseries explores the instant fireworks between Bankman-Fried (Anthony Boyle) and Ellison (Julia Garner) when they met while working at a Wall Street firm in 2015. A couple of years later, Bankman-Fried quit, moved to California, and founded Alameda Research. By 2018, Ellison had joined him. Their goal was to pursue “effective altruism,” a philosophy that champions using money to do as much good as possible. However, in 2022, Bankman-Fried was accused of illegally diverting $8 billion from customer deposits into his own hedge fund.
The Altruists alternates between two timelines set six years apart, with Moore noting that his intention was to build suspense of how and why these crimes happened. “I genuinely believe the two of them got into this to make the world a better place,” Moore explains, “but turned each other into people who did the exact opposite of what they set out to do. I wanted to juxtapose that and to present this non-linear mystery of how these do-gooders we meet early in our story turn into the people under investigation and maybe going to jail.”
The next step was to cast the right actors to juggle the show’s complexities. The showrunners landed on Garner and Boyle, partly drawn to the actors who previously played real people in Netflix’s Inventing Anna and FX’s Say Nothing. Moore and Hoyt confirm they only ever offered Garner the co-lead. “I remember she came into my tiny Silver Lake office on a Saturday afternoon in LA and stayed for four hours,” Moore notes. “I played her two clips of Caroline, and right there, she observed Caroline’s body language and essentially started playing her. It was obvious she was perfect.” Garner, who was long considered to play Madonna in her biopic, transforms herself once again for the role. To achieve turning into Caroline, Moore says Garner insisted on using prosthetics and wigs, and worked with a vocal coach. “It was quite technical, it wasn’t just an accent thing, but a whole manner of speaking that she passionately worked on for months.”
Meanwhile, Boyle—whom Hoyt had worked with on Apple TV’s historical drama Manhunt—had been auditioning to play Bankman-Fried for a different project for a while when The Altruists came along. “Within 10 seconds, we thought he might have been the most prepared any actor has ever had the benefit of being,” Moore says. However, for Moore and Hoyt, their priority wasn’t for the show to feature an exact recreation of Bankman-Fried and Ellison, and they wanted their co-leads not to give a broad performance. “Something we said to Anthony and Julia that they latched onto was that this isn’t Saturday Night Live, so they didn’t actually need to speak exactly like Sam and Caroline, especially as they do in their interviews, because the show is interested in their personal more than the professional lives,” Moore notes.
The pair is surrounded by a wide-ranging ensemble that includes—as Hoyt puts it—”secret weapon” Madison Hu as FTX COO Constance Wang, as well as comedian Matt Rife, who stars as FTX Digital Markets CEO Ryan Salame. “I had never seen Matt’s stand-up comedy before,” Moore admits, “but he gave an amazing audition and brought a naturalism to it.” The creator also reunites with The Imitation Game‘s Alex Lawther, who plays FTX’s co-CEO Sam Trabucco. “I was there the first time Alex walked on a film set when he was 17 or so and I was about 30. I cannot tell you how deeply fulfilling it was to see him be even more proud of him now than I was during The Imitation Game.”
When asked about how The Altruists will toe the line between reality and heightened drama, Moore reiterates he and Hoyt felt a tremendous amount of ethical responsibility to tell this story fairly. “At the same time, one of our guiding rules in the storytelling was showing an audience the moments they weren’t going to get from the news; that’s what we were interested in.” Moore says. “Those moments between Sam and Caroline were not recorded or documented in any way. There isn’t proof for exactly what happened, so it’s required on our part to do some highly educated imagination along with talking to our own set of sources. It required poring over everything we could get our hands on, including thousands and thousands of pages of trial transcripts and everything that’s published.” Adds Hoyt: “It was so organic in reading the script that that’s what Graham was aiming for. Watching this central relationship, it’s almost heartbreaking to see how these people came together and then fell apart.”
The Altruists premieres November 19 on Netflix.
Saloni Gajjar is The A.V. Club‘s TV critic.
Keep scrolling for more great stories.