Mark Rylance says Elon Musk thinks he’s ‘saving humanity’ but he’s actually ‘dangerous’

Actor partly based his ‘Don’t Look Up’ villain on the Tesla CEO

Mark Rylance has said he believes billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk is “dangerous”.

The actor recently starred in the apocalyptic black comedy Don’t Look Up as billionaire tech CEO Peter Isherwell, a character that many perceived to be based on a mixture of Musk, Apple’s Steve Jobs, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.

In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Rylance said he “looked at all those fellas” for inspiration.

“I did read Elon Musk’s book – about half of it,” he said. “I certainly thought a lot about that mindset of men and technology being the greatest thing in the universe, that nothing else is a higher force and anything that nature throws at us, we’ll deal with it.”

He added: “They’re thinking they’re doing good – so there’s that scene where [Isherwell] gets upset when [Leonardo DiCaprio’s] character thinks he’s just a businessman. These people have very high-minded ideas about what they’re doing. They don’t think they’re bad people, quite the contrary.

“You get that impression from Elon Musk. They think they’re going to save humanity. I think they’re dangerous.”

Musk was named Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 2021 for his work in space, on electric cars, his plans to take humanity to Mars and his cryptocurrency ventures.

Mark Rylance as Peter Isherwell in ‘Don’t Look Up’ (NIKO TAVERNISE/NETFLIX)

“We don’t yet know how fully Tesla, SpaceX and the ventures Musk has yet to think up will change our lives,” a profile in the magazine stated. “At 50, he has plenty of time to write the future, his own and ours. Like it or not, we are now in Musk’s world.”

Many are wary of Musk because of how much influence he has as an individual. Just one of his tweets can manipulate entire markets and his latest venture, Starlink, could provide the entire globe with internet access.

In a recent opinion piece for The Independent titled “How do we stop Elon Musk from becoming a supervillain? It’s pretty simple”, American entrepreneur Sid Mohasseb wrote: “No one man or company should carry such an unprecedented burden of responsibility. However, instead of taxing or regulating Musk to oblivion, it’s time we provided him some real competition.

“That’s why it’s time for Elon’s rivals to receive the same subsidies that enabled Tesla and SpaceX to dominate in the first place.”