‘Mountainhead’ stars Steve Carell and Jason Schwartzman break down that chaotic murder scene

This article contains spoilers about Mountainhead.

How many billionaires does it take to murder a friend?

Apparently more than three. At least according to the plot of Mountainhead, the new film written and directed by Succession creator Jesse Armstrong. The movie, now streaming on Max, follows four billionaire buddies who gather at a mountain chalet for a weekend getaway.

However, the get-together takes a turn when Steve Carell‘s Randall suggests killing Ramy Youssef‘s Jeff, whom he believes is withholding information about deals and mergers that would enable the others to take over the world and create a “post-human” existence.

Fortunately for Jeff, his so-called friends — also including Corey Michael Smith’s Venis and Jason Schwartzman’s Souper — discover that orchestrating a murder isn’t so easy.

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At first, Souper, whose real name is Hugo, tries to push Jeff over the railing at the top of a tall flight of stairs. But that tactic fails when Venis and Randall chicken out at the last second.

“My man talks like a big game,” Smith tells Entertainment Weekly alongside Schwartzman and Carell. “The failure to push was really helpful for me in discovering a character because I do think there’s a part of him… It’s the part of him that is the emotionally stunted man-boy who can’t actually follow through. He’s a little chicken s—, as my grandpa would say. 

“Everybody else talks a big game and is tough, but then has other people do the hard labor,” he continues. “But on the other hand, this is a time when his livelihood. his business, his position in his business, and his position in the stock market is in question. At the end of the day, if it’s Jeff’s life or Ven’s success, his success always went out. It might just be a longer road getting there.”

They next attempt to kill Jeff while he’s sleeping, egging each other on to smother him with a pillow. Souper climbs on top and holds a pillow to his face, while Ven straddles Jeff and tries to hold down his legs.

“It was a joy,” Smith quips of filming the scene. “Really fun and utterly exhausting. He’s a squirmer. It takes a lot of energy to hold down a body trying not to die.”

Randall, feeling the approach is inefficient, attempts (and fails) to crush Jeff to death by dropping a bowling ball on his head. “Oddly, we all looked forward to that scene,” Carell recounts.

Adds Schwartzman, speaking to Carell: “It is the first thing you said when we sat down at the first table. You’re like, ‘I can’t wait to do that.'”

Schwartzman, perhaps, was a bit less enthused. “It does go against everything that your nature is telling you to do,” he notes. “Putting a pillow over someone’s face and them thrashing and holding it. Obviously, we did it safely, but it is weird. And I love Ramy. I don’t even like to pretend to kill him three times.”

Despite some of their anticipatory glee, they had to work hard not to lean too heavily into the scene’s humor. “Chaos is the best word for it,” says Carell. “Jesse gave us the best advice, which was to not play the comedy of it. Not to play it like it’s a big comedic scene, but like it’s these guys actually trying to achieve a goal and do it with earnestness and intention.

“They’re not good at doing it,” he continues. “They don’t really know how to do it, but they should do it to the best of their abilities, which to me, that’s funny — people trying to achieve something that they’re really incapable of achieving. That’s always funny to watch, but to never comment on the fact that any of it is absurd or funny.”

The entire thing descends into chaos as Jeff wakes up and fights against them, eventually slipping out of the bed. For Youssef, it required extremely careful planning and choreography. “[Let’s give] a great big shout out to the Utah stunt team that helped with choreographing a safe way to do it,” he says. “We did a bunch of different versions of it, where we had the right language on how to handle doing it together. The more realistic it was, the more fun it was.”