Rising Star on Secret to Playing Chevy Chase and ‘Elon Musk’

Cory Michael Smith, 39, has perfected the art of playing real people—or, in some cases, real-ish people—on the big screen.

His repertoire includes SNL icon Chevy Chase and a brash tech bro who shared a lot in common with Elon Musk. But in his newest movie, The Sun Never Sets, Smith goes back to basics as the third person in a deeply complicated love triangle.

The rising star played Chase in 2024’s Saturday Night, about the making of Saturday Night Live’s first episode, and in 2025’s Mountainhead, his fictional tech titan Venis “Ven” Parish shared more than a few traits with the world’s richest person, Elon Musk.

In The Sun Never Sets, he plays a man named Chuck who becomes enmeshed in a messy love triangle after reuniting with his ex-girlfriend Wendy (Dakota Fanning) in Alaska. Wendy is taking a break from her long-term relationship with older boyfriend Jack (Jake Johnson). Instead of including dialogue in the script, director Joe Swanberg writes every beat and intention, but the actors improvise all their lines.

“Everything is improvised,” Smith said. “We talk about it a lot; everyone’s on the same page. There is direction to the scenes, but we are living in the moment with each other and making s–t up on the fly. I had not worked this way before, and I was genuinely pretty terrified to do it.”

Characters like Chevy Chase were also challenging at first, though for a very different reason. Smith said he was “anxious” about portraying the comedy tycoon at such a specific point in Chase’s career, adding that Chase was “trying to find a balance between being kind of arrogant, but also being at a point in his career where he hasn’t had success. So the back of his knees could buckle really easily if someone kicked him there.”

Smith never met Chase. Though he initially thought a conversation between the two would benefit his performance and show respect to Chase, he’s now glad he was “discouraged from doing that” to protect himself, Smith said.

“I wanted to introduce myself and let him know what we were doing, and give him the opportunity to participate or share whatever he wanted to. I’m glad that I didn’t, because you can watch Chevy today; he had this CNN documentary made about him, and you can sort of see how he treats people who are wanting to engage with him.”

Smith thinks if he had met and been mistreated by Chase, it would have pushed him to play the comedy icon as purely harsh and unkind, which would have been the wrong angle.

“By and large, people really felt like when he walked into a room, he was very energetic and keyed into people and wanting to make people laugh,” Smith explained. “So I’m glad that I didn’t end up wanting to make people feel too uncomfortable. I think it would have cut the legs off of that performance.”

Mountainhead, meanwhile,satirizes the reunion of four tech magnates, who are old friends, in a Utah ski mansion while the AI software Smith’s character developed threatens to destroy the outside world.The film’s writer/director Jesse Armstrong, who also created the hit series Succession, based Smith’s character on a “Venn diagram” of tech tycoons, though Musk is an obvious analog.

While researching for the role, Smith searched for qualities in hyper-rich people he could latch onto. One particular “rumor” about Musk became a guiding principle for the outsized performance.

“One of the things that I was really interested in, which I guess you could say is also a rumor about Elon, is drug use,” Smith said. “Though it’s not explicit in the script, I wanted to try to inhabit a vibe where when he’s off screen, you don’t know if he took something, you know? There’s maybe a kind of change in his timbre that you don’t know if he just medicated himself in some way.”

Though the film is a comedy and his co-stars Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, and Ramy Youssef were all comedians, Smith’s approach to the role wasn’t inherently humorous.

“I had instincts toward this character that were not around playing the comedy, and I auditioned that way for Jesse. I think he is funny, but I think he is not aware of humor,” Smith said, adding, “The danger of this character, or the psychosis of this character, is really that he cannot be playing comedy. He has to be single-minded, causing chaos to the world and also to these three men, and they are left in the wake of it.”

Smith, who got his first big break playing Batman’s nemesis The Riddler on the Fox drama Gotham, compared his career’s trajectory to a “slow, steady escalator ride,” noting, “there hasn’t been something that has jolted me so intensely that I lose the floor.”

“I have never experienced the sort of onslaught of my privacy being stripped from me,” Smith added. “And for that, I’m very grateful.”

But with a leading role in the upcoming A24 thriller October, that could all be about to change.

There’s not much he’s allowed to say about his “first time being number one” on the call sheet, but Smith did admit, “I am very psyched for this movie to come out.”

The Sun Never Sets premieres in theaters nationwide on Sept. 4.