If one day you came to work and Christoph Waltz was creepily smiling at you and explaining that he’s your new boss in his iconic accent, you wouldn’t be remiss to simply turn around and never return to your job again. However, the employees in the new Amazon Prime Video series The Consultant don’t seem to have the same survival instinct regarding Christoph Waltz, as the new trailer for the workplace comedic / thriller shows.
The upcoming series is based off Bentley Little’s 2015 novel of the same name and takes place at an app company called CompWare. Regus Patoff, played by Waltz, is brought in to do corporate-sounding things like increasing efficiency, maximizing potential, and profiting profitability. He, as the employees at the company learn, has a very odd way of doing this, including playing mind games with them, getting far too close to their personal space, and… just being Christoph Waltz. As the trailer for The Consultant shows, things star unraveling as the workplace turns into a back-stabbing minefield where no one is safe, not just from losing their job but from dying a gruesome death.
A mix of satire, horror, and thriller, The Consultant looks to deliver something pretty off-kilter for Amazon Prime Video, which makes sense given it was created and run by Tony Basgallop. Basgallop made Servant for Apple TV+, one of the creepier streaming shows out there. Joining Christoph Waltz in the cast of The Consultant as his increasingly perturbed employees are Nat Wolff (The Stand), Brittany O’Grady (The White Lotus), Aimee Carrero (The Menu), Sloane Avery (Physical), and Michael Charles Vaccaro (For All Mankind). The trailer doesn’t give us too much insight into their characters, but what is obvious is that Waltz drives at least some of them crazy.
Amazon is doing something a bit crazy with the series as well. The streamer usually drops its series weekly, doling out one or two episodes, but it’s going with the “binge” method this time around — so all eight episodes of the show will release on February 24.