It’s been a couple of years now since Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick left the company for good, leaving behind a controversial legacy outlined in Mike Isaac’s book Super Pumped, which has now been made into a series starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, premiering Feb. 27 on Showtime.
But what does Gordon-Levitt actually think about the man he’s playing in the series?
“Look, disruption can be a good thing — you invent something new and it’s useful for people — but it depends on at what cost,” Gordon-Levitt tells Stephen Colbert in the Late Show interview above.
“‘I think he was a really exciting guy to be around actually, and there’s good parts to that and bad parts to that. There’s probably some people who have done some pretty bad things in the world — like the president we elected in 2016 — who was pretty exciting to be around. But just because someone’s exciting to be around doesn’t mean they’re doing the right thing.”
At that point Colbert pauses the interview to play a never-before-seen clip from his 2015 interview with Kalanick, featuring a man in the crowd standing up to heckle the Uber boss about the negative effect the company has on cab drivers.
“What that guy is saying is fair,” Gordon-Levitt responds. “There are laws in place that Uber was systematically breaking that are there to protect labour. And those laws are there for a reason and they should be there.”
Uber had a lengthy legal battle in the UK which ended in 2021 when the company lost its final appeal in the UK’s supreme court, meaning drivers had to be recognised as workers rather than self-employed. In the U.S., meanwhile, drivers for Uber and Lyft have been striking in an attempt to earn the right to push for improved working conditions.
