Mark Duplass has joined the cast of Victoria, Hulu’s upcoming limited series led by Li Jun Li and Diane Lane. The San Francisco-set drama is being framed as an erotic thriller, placing a con woman inside the rarefied, high-pressure ecosystem of venture capital—and then tightening the screws with a seductive killer who knows what she is trying to hide.
Duplass will play William Holbrook, a UC Berkeley professor whose gene-editing research has made him a valuable name in Silicon Valley. He is also described as an unusually effective mentor to young scientists, earning their loyalty along the way. That combination gives the character influence in more than one direction: through the commercial value of his research and through the people who look to him for guidance.
The role puts Duplass at a potentially important intersection in the show’s premise. Venture capital is the business of investing in companies with the expectation of significant future growth, often before a company has become a stable, established business. Gene editing, meanwhile, refers broadly to techniques intended to alter genetic material. Within the world of Victoria, those fields suggest that Holbrook’s academic work may carry major commercial stakes, even as his public standing as a professor creates a very different kind of authority.
A con artist enters a world built on access
Li plays Maxine Tao, characterized as a polished and calculating con woman. A chance encounter gives Maxine an opportunity to pull off what is presented as the grift of her lifetime, transporting her into venture capital’s wealthy and competitive orbit.
That setup matters because a con is not merely a lie. It is a structured deception that depends on convincing targets that the performer belongs in a particular room, understands its rules and can be trusted with its information. The venture-capital setting gives Maxine a place where reputations, introductions, intellectual property and confidence can be immensely valuable. The series’ language points to a story in which social performance is not window dressing; it is central to the danger.
Victoria follows a con woman drawn into venture capital’s elite circles, where luxury and power sit beside a threat from someone who knows her secrets.
Lane plays Lee Calloway, an experienced venture capitalist who is used to obtaining what she wants and unwilling to let another person block her path to a win. The character description establishes Lee as someone who understands this environment from the inside, rather than an outsider trying to bluff her way through it. That creates a natural contrast with Maxine: one woman is entering the system under false pretenses, while the other appears to have long mastered its rules.
The show has not detailed how William Holbrook’s work, Maxine’s deception and Lee’s ambitions will overlap. It also has not established whether Holbrook is an ally, a mark, a source of leverage or someone with his own agenda. Those are questions the series will have to answer on screen, rather than facts available from the cast announcement.
Why the professor role could carry unusual weight
Holbrook’s description is more specific than a generic Silicon Valley academic. His work in gene editing makes him sought after, suggesting that scientific expertise has become part of the contest for power surrounding him. His mentorship, on the other hand, indicates personal credibility and a network of devoted students. A thriller can make either form of influence consequential: valuable research can attract money and attention, while trust can create vulnerability, loyalty or conflict.
There is also a useful tension in the setting itself. A university professor occupies a role associated with scholarship and teaching, while Silicon Valley venture capital is tied to investment, growth and competition. Those worlds can overlap without being identical. By placing a figure with standing in both, Victoria has a character who could plausibly move between institutional research and the more transactional arena surrounding it.
Analysis: The available character details suggest the series is positioning power as something that comes from more than wealth. Maxine’s ability to manipulate appearances, Lee’s established dealmaking authority and Holbrook’s scientific reputation each represent a different route to influence. That does not confirm the show’s plot mechanics, but it does clarify why the three central roles fit the announced premise so neatly.
An erotic thriller with a limited-series frame
The erotic-thriller label signals a story where attraction, intimacy and desire are connected to suspense rather than existing separately from it. In this case, the premise explicitly combines luxury, hidden histories and a dangerous pursuer. The genre designation therefore helps explain the show’s attention to seductive environments and concealed motives, while the killer element raises the consequence of Maxine’s deception beyond a business deal gone wrong.
As a limited series, Victoria is being developed as a self-contained television project rather than a show announced with an open-ended multi-season plan. The material provided does not specify an episode count, premiere date or release schedule, so those details remain unknown.
For viewers following similarly tense, character-driven television, Hulu’s new project arrives alongside a broader appetite for mystery-forward series. Joking Joystick recently covered another renewal built around an unresolved central question in the second-season return of Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed. Victoria, however, is defined by a distinctly different arena: San Francisco money, scientific prestige and a protagonist attempting a very risky deception.
The creative team behind ‘Victoria’
Victoria comes from creator, showrunner, writer and executive producer Christy Hall, whose credits include Daddio and It Ends With Us. A showrunner is the senior creative leader responsible for guiding a television series, commonly overseeing its writing and broader production direction. Hall’s combination of creator and showrunner roles means the person who originated the project is also attached to its central creative stewardship.
Geeta Vasant Patel is directing the pilot and is also an executive producer on that episode. In television, a pilot is the first episode used to establish a show’s characters, setting and storytelling approach. The pilot director’s work can be especially influential on the initial visual language and tone, though no creative specifics about Patel’s episode have been disclosed.
Onyx Collective and Counterpart Studios are behind the series. Lilly Burns, Elise Henderson and Tony Hernandez of Counterpart Studios are listed as non-writing executive producers. Li is also a co-producer, adding a producing credit to her starring role as Maxine Tao.
Where Duplass fits in his recent screen work
Duplass most recently appeared in Kane Parsons’ horror film Backrooms. He continues to star in Apple TV’s The Morning Show, work that has brought him multiple Emmy and Golden Globe nominations. His television credits also include Togetherness, which he co-created with his brother Jay Duplass, along with regular roles in The League, The Mindy Project and The Creep Tapes.
His film credits include The Puffy Chair, Zero Dark Thirty, Safety Not Guaranteed, Bombshell, Biosphere and the Creep franchise. Along with Jay Duplass, he runs Duplass Brothers Productions, associated with Somebody Somewhere and Wild Wild Country, as well as the forthcoming See You When I See You and Their Town.
The addition of Duplass gives Victoria a performer whose credits move across comedy, horror, drama and independent film. That range is relevant to the announced role because William Holbrook is not described simply as a technical expert. He is a figure whose research commands attention and whose personal mentorship inspires devotion—two qualities that can coexist comfortably or become deeply unsettling in a thriller.
What is confirmed—and what remains under wraps
- Confirmed: Li Jun Li, Diane Lane and Mark Duplass are attached to star.
- Confirmed: The story is set in San Francisco and centers on Maxine Tao’s entry into the venture-capital world.
- Confirmed: Duplass plays UC Berkeley professor and gene-editing researcher William Holbrook.
- Confirmed: Christy Hall is creator, showrunner, writer and executive producer; Geeta Vasant Patel directs the pilot.
- Not disclosed: A release date, episode count, full cast list and the exact relationship between the three announced characters.
For now, the clearest picture of Victoria is a tightly focused one: an ambitious grifter, an uncompromising investor and a celebrated scientist operate in a world where exclusive access has real value and private knowledge can become a weapon. With a killer pursuing secrets in the background, the show’s most important currency may prove to be trust—and who has been clever enough to counterfeit it.
