The House of Cards creator Beau Willimon is tackling artificial intelligence in his new play: ‘We are going to see AI surpass humans’

It’s been more than a decade since Beau Willimon wrote a new play, but nobody could call him idle. In that time he created House of Cards, the Washington DC political thriller series that gave Kevin Spacey his most captivatingly sinister lead role. The show he left it to create — the Sean Penn sci-fi series The First — lasted only one season. Yet he went on to write the film Mary Queen of Scots, is co-writing the forthcoming Star Wars film Dawn of the Jedi and has written several episodes of the much-lauded Star Wars TV series Andor. What’s more, he’s a writer on the second series of Severance, the Apple TV+ hit.

Anyway, he says more than once as we sit facing each other in low-slung leather sofas in the offices of the Hampstead Theatre, what he wants to talk about is his new play. East Is South is about artificial intelligence; a trendy topic, he knows. But even though he started the play in 2023 when the Writers Guild of America strike forced him to down tools on his TV work, he had been circling the subject for years.

“I was that guy at the cocktail party 15 years ago, going on about the oncoming singularity [the time when AI becomes more intelligent than humans] and the superconsciousness and … everyone would have been rolling their eyes. But fast-forward to now and ChatGPT and AI generally is finding its way into every crack and crevice of daily reality at an alarmingly accelerated pace.”

East Is South is set in and around an interrogation room in an underground complex that houses a mighty new AI programme, Logos, that is still being tested. Two coders-cum-lovers (Kaya Scodelario and Luke Treadaway) are suspected of trying to leak it to the internet, where it might do heaven knows what. Cue a thriller and love story motored by talk of science and spirituality as well as distrust and fear. Willimon doesn’t pretend to be an expert on all of this — “I couldn’t code anything to save my life” — but has done his reading and spoken to “well over a dozen” scientific experts. So, does he now understand AI?

“Do I understand AI?” He chuckles. “I don’t think anyone understands AI. Even the people who are building it. It’s too vast a subject. But it’s one that touches on almost everything else.”

To read the full interview click below to visit The Times website.

 

East is South plays the Main Stage from 7 February to 15 March

 

READ FULL INTERVIEW HERE

BOOK EAST IS SOUTH HERE