Spoiler alert: The following article discusses the “Loot” Season 1 finale, “The Silver Moon Summit.”
When creators Matt Hubbard and Alan Yang came up with their Apple TV+ billionaire spoof series “Loot,” they weren’t looking to be apologists for the ultra-wealthy. In trying to craft a “juicy” role for Maya Rudolph, they were instead inspired to explore “how much of an outsize effect people with that level of money have on all of our lives.”
The quasi-workplace comedy — which follows newly divorced Molly Novak (Rudolph), who is forced to start anew with $87 billion after unearthing her tech mogul husband’s infidelity — has been dancing around the ethical concerns of billionairedom from its genesis. Throughout the series, she tries (and often, fails) to contribute to her charity foundation in a meaningful way in her attempts to course-correct for her inordinate capital. However, after a botched water machine demonstration for the fellow uber-wealthy in the finale, Molly has an epiphany and, in an impassioned speech, announces that she will be giving away her wealth and declares billionaires should simply not exist.
“We certainly questioned whether or not anyone should have that incredibly vast amount of money that’s almost incomprehensible,” Hubbard, who is also a writer and executive producer, told TheWrap. “It was important for all three of us [himself, Yang and Rudolph] to talk about that and make a stand on what we believe in.”
Read on for more details on the “Loot” Season 1 finale, including how the show crafted its “Hypnotize” needle drop and what Molly’s wealth giveaway will look like in Season 2.
TheWrap: I know you and Alan were partially inspired by MacKenzie Scott and her divorce from Jeff Bezos. Can you talk about the genesis of Molly Novak on the page? She’s balancing some juxtaposing ideas about trying to be a good person while being, to a degree, corrupted by inordinate wealth.
Matt Hubbard: Stepping back for a second, we wanted to, when we were putting together the show, find a really good, juicy role for Maya, and while we were trying to think of something for her we definitely were reading stories about billionaires, some of whom were going through divorces. And we were both thinking a lot about how much of an outsize effect people with that level of money have on all of our lives. We felt like the show would be really fun and interesting to write because it does have a lot of the conflicts that you’re talking about in your question. Molly wants to do good, but she also is in a very rarefied position where there are elements of the world that she’s just been separated from, so I think the show — if it succeeds, and if this season succeeds — it’s a story about her taking the step of trying to push herself outside of this bubble she’s surrounded herself with for 20 years and meeting some people who are making her question her beliefs and the way she’s lived her life.
I really love how Sofia always checks Molly and is so firm in her ideals — we see that in the finale when she gets out of her Uber because of the driver’s comments about homelessness. How did her character come about, especially because Michaela Jaé Rodriguez is so perfectly cast here.
When we came up with the idea of a billionaire’s wife who starts reentering the charity space, we knew it was going to be a comedy. We knew that for Maya to have something funny to play and for us to not be writing a show about how great billionaires are we needed her to be out of touch and not know things that she should know. And it became pretty clear right away that we did need that moral counterpart to Molly, the person who does know everything and doesn’t trust Molly when she meets her and really wants to be left alone to just do the important work she’s devoted her life to. So that was how the character of Sophia came about. That really, for us, was the axis that the first season really rotated on — are these two women who are very different going to be able to come to some sort of understanding of each other? Because in some ways, they find that they work well together and so we really needed to find an actress who could stand up to Maya, who had, like, a moral authority just in her core. We found out Michaela was available and it was like, ‘Oh my God, she’s perfect.’ Two things about her: she has this inner power, I guess is the right word, but she also … you sense the goodness in her core. Sofia can be tough, [but] she’s doing it for the right reason. Really getting Michaela clarified so much about Sofia and that relationship. We keep going back to that over the course of the season and wanted a big part of the finale to be about them.
Could you talk about how that water demonstration scene came together? I have never laughed so hard while also feeling genuinely sickened.
It was sickening. One thing that has been fun about this show, and I haven’t worked on a show in a long time where this has been true, is we keep a very close eye on things that are going on in the real world and pull things from it. And we were watching — I think this is OK to say — a demonstration of Elon Musk showing off the pickup truck that Tesla was going to make. I don’t even know if it’s out yet, but he took a bowling ball, I think, and had someone throw a bowling ball at the side window of the pickup truck to show how tough it was, and the bowling ball just went right through the window (laughs). It’s online if you want to check it out, and it’s just like a total disaster. This obviously has nothing to do with Elon Musk or his cars or anything like that, but that idea of the billionaire on stage just completely melting down and showing off this product that wasn’t working as well as they thought was the inspiration for the water machine.
Was Molly giving away her wealth always something you and Alan had in mind, and was it a challenge to humanize her while also being like, ‘Yeah, billionaires shouldn’t exist’?
It’s a difficult balance because there certainly is comedy in the insane amount of wealth she has. We got a lot of mileage about how David Chang is her personal chef and the house she lives in. That is, I think, fun to see, and I don’t want to abandon the premise completely, but we also wanted Molly to understand that she is not doing enough because I think that’s something Alan and I feel strongly about — that many of these billionaires are not doing enough.
We certainly questioned whether or not anyone should have that incredibly vast amount of money that’s almost incomprehensible. It was important for all three of us to talk about that and make a stand on what we believe in. But I think moving forward, you can’t just snap your fingers and give away $87 billion, especially if you want that money to be used correctly, and not just stolen from you. We’ve been fortunate enough to already receive an order for Season 2 and we will see renewed focus from Molly in the Wells Foundation, in giving away this money, but I think we’ll also discover how difficult that can be to do in the right way. And look, Molly is Molly, too. You get used to a certain way [of living]. She’s not gonna jump from a 500,000-square-foot house to a studio, right? Seeing that journey of, ‘OK, I gotta strip away some of that stuff’ — that will be hard for her. There’ll be some fun in that as well.
The show has such sprawling and incredible needle drops, like ‘Hypnotize’ in the finale. How did these ‘90s/2000s hip-hop hits inform the soundtrack?
This was something that took a little bit for us to come to, and I should probably give credit to Alan more than me on this — he’s kind of like the master of music in this show. We had an early idea of like, ‘Oh, is this kind of like yacht rock kind of vibe?’ But then we were trying it out and it wasn’t really working and our editor, Dan Haworth, just dropped in one late ’90s hip-hop song somewhere. And it was just like, ‘Oh! This is perfect.’
I think of the late ’90s as a time when wealth was … everyone wanted it and no one was thinking this might be bad. It was an innocent time and also we’re at an age where we know the songs pretty well, and they’re awesome songs. It just felt like it matched up with the vibe of the show, the bigness of Molly’s life. So we just started working through those songs and ‘Hypnotize’ is one of my favorite songs of that era. We held on to ‘Hypnotize’ ’til right at the end there.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and concision.
