As Emmy nominations approach, Vanity Fair’s HWD team is diving deep into how some of this season’s greatest scenes and characters came together. You can read more of these close looks here.
The Character: Jared, Silicon Valley
The first time Zach Woods gets a laugh on Silicon Valley, he’s over-explaining the concept of Grindr to Gavin Belson (Matt Ross), the mercurial C.E.O. of the Google-esque company Hooli. In the show’s pilot episode Woods’s Jared is Gavin Belson’s unctuous, unknowable assistant, the guy in the Brooks Brothers clothes who’s more of a corporate stooge than anyone else on the Hooli campus. In the second episode, though, he defects to join our hero, Richard (Thomas Middleditch), and his friends at Pied Piper, becoming the fledgling company’s C.F.O and general moral compass.
But the real Jared, who emerges over the course of four seasons and a lot of improvised lines from Woods, is a lot more complicated than that. His name is actually Donald, but Gavin called him Jared once, so it stuck. He doesn’t know his birthday because Child Protective Services never found his birth certificate. He knows life skills like “if you keep screaming your name, it forces the assailant to acknowledge you as human” and that “hunger is the best sauce.” He willingly sleeps in a garage because it’s a step up from the box he once slept in. And, as unforgettably described by finance bro Russ Hanneman, “this guy fucks”—though it would be “untoward” to reveal just how many women he’s slept with.
How He Came to Life
“Zach is probably, for better or for worse for him, closer to his character in real life than any of the other guys,” says Alec Berg, an executive producer of Silicon Valley. “He has a real sweetness to him and, in a good way, a kind of naïveté. I think that started to really come out in what we were writing.”
The Jared we meet in the pilot is “radically different” from the character who emerges over the course of the series, says Berg. Woods remembers that “in the pilot, they gave me this suede bomber jacket”—and we all know that Jared would never wear a suede bomber jacket. “I think he was supposed to be more like what the sales people ended up being in subsequent seasons,” Woods continues. “A little more canny. A little more soulless, maybe.”
What changed everything was really Woods himself, a veteran of the U.C.B. Theatre in New York whom Berg calls “the greatest improviser on Earth.” Woods, in true Jared fashion, won’t take too much credit—he points to Carson Mell, a friend who joined the show’s writing staff and crafted early bizarro Jared lines like, “Sorry if I scared you, I know I have somewhat ghost-like features.” But Woods also began building Jared as a wide-eyed Pinocchio figure, transformed by Richard’s Blue Fairy. “Basically, it went from being this sort of shrewd, possibly treacherous glossy business guy to, in my head, like a puppet becoming a real boy,” Woods says. “Being sort of struck dumb for his mother of love for this group of guys.”
And for finding, probably for the first time in his life, an actual home—though one where he still has to sleep in the garage. Berg remembers the first time that Woods improvised a line about Jared’s tragic backstory. In the second episode of Silicon Valley, when Richard and Jared interview Guilfoyle (Martin Starr) about his role in the future of Pied Piper, Starr dropped an improvised crack about Jared’s mom. “And Zach, without even taking the slightest beat, said, ‘I never knew my mother,’” Berg said. “Everyone was like, that was insane. How fast he was and how on top of it he was. It was like it was planned. And that I think was my first inkling of, O.K., he’s going to go to this super-dark, weird place.”
Many of Woods’s wildest ad-libs don’t make the cut for the sake of character continuity; others, like a line about soaking a tampon in grain alcohol, get passed on to other characters. But a clear picture has slowly emerged of a character with the darkest, most tragic backstory imaginable, who somehow made his way to Silicon Valley in a Brooks Brothers sweater. For Woods and the rest of the cast, the improv becomes a feedback loop with the writers. As Thomas Middleditch puts it, “All that stuff is a combo of two things: Zach coming to set with all these contributions, and the writers hearing that and going, Man, that stuff is so funny, we like where Zach is taking this character. Next time you have the script there’s stuff that feeds that. Hats off to the writers, but give credit to Zach.”
Middleditch, who knew Woods in their U.C.B. days, says that every actor on Silicon Valley “is contributing to their character. Everyone is pitching stuff, everyone is making it their own. Zach did that by an X multiplier.” He adds that “especially amongst the people that are still on the show,” real-life friendships have built the dynamics of the Pied Piper team, and there’s a particular thrill when he and Woods share scenes together that leave them room to riff. “Zach and I always say to each other, it’s kind of a fun little treat we get when it’s a scene that’s just us. We can sneak in these subtle exchanges, go on a little tangent and get back to the script.”
For example: this moment from early in the current season, when Jared doesn’t know when to stop with a moment of celebration. “That is a total example of us playing,” says Middleditch.
What never changed about Jared, though, is his stuffed-shirt aesthetic—“bland,” as described by the show’s costume designer, Christina Mongini. Almost none of the characters on Silicon Valley get regular wardrobe updates—“it feels disingenuous and strange to have them buy new clothes”—but Jared especially has a regular uniform, which can be seen hanging up in his garage bedroom. His clothes, largely from Brooks Brothers, Banana Republic, and J.Crew, signal his character as much as the obnoxious T-shirts favored by Erlich (T.J. Miller) do. “We always say he’s the den mother, he’s the grown-up in the room, and he is pressed,” Mongini says. “He’s tucked in and he can switch over to a business look easier and more readily. He bridges the two worlds there, with the guys and with that office look.”
That look makes it even funnier when Jared says things like, “I found my biological father in a militia up in the Ozarks”—but the beauty of the character is that the darkness doesn’t extend so far. Jared is the foster-care kid who, somehow, willed himself to Vassar and a fancy tech job, and who really believes in doing the right thing, to the point that his friends feel like they have to hide their bad behavior from him. (See him guilelessly promoting Pied Piper while Guilfoyle and Dinesh hide illegal Wi-Fi pineapples around Hoolicon in the latest episode.) It’s a moral code that extends even to his romantic life—this guy fucks, but will never kiss and tell—and, to some degree, to Woods in real life.
“He is very much like the mother of this group of friends and he is very caring and very empathetic,” says Middleditch, who points out that the “this-guy-fucks aura that surrounds Jared” exists for Woods, too. “Whenever I put a photo of him on my Instagram, half the comments are like ‘Zach!’ and then half the comments are like ‘He’s so sexy, I want him.’ He’s got this kind of rabid female fanbase. I live vicariously through him, as a disgruntled married guy.”
