succession

• Jesse Armstrong, 2018-2023

quotes

• "what are we if not storytellers."
• "hello this is greg from greg's phone."
• "bring me ideas, original IP."
• "I never studied Watergate but I believe I'm correct in saying they all got fucked."
• "I'm spiritually, morally and ethically behind whoever wins"
• "It had the quality of being good rather than the attributes of being shitty."
• "I don't give a fuck so what is that? Nietzsche?"
• "He can do whatever he wants, he's fucking human Saudi Arabia."
• "A small person could fit there, an attack child."
• "I no longer speak 1%"
• "Objective, independent, but from our point of view."
• "That would take care of the subsequent therapy."
• "She, uh, thinks she's on the 'attractive edge of a co-dependent black hole,' whatever the fuck that means."
• "All killer no filler."
• "If it is to be said, so it be, so it is."
• "You need to be a killer, but nowadays, maybe not, I don't know."
• "Good to know we don't have an unbalanced love portfolio"
• "I'll outsource it to my therapist"
• "Laws are people, and people are politics. I can handle the people."
• "Great UI shitty content meets shitty UI great content."
• "Regulate and strangle."
• "Here lies the future of the Republic and my portfolio."
• "easy, Castro."
• "I feel like I'm taking a shit at the Guggenheim y'all."
• "the man dying of thirst is suddenly a mineral water critic?"
• "we probably invented the fucking words."
• "I might not love you but I still love you"
• "Everything, everywhere, is always moving, forever. Get used to it."

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notes

• from the best show on TV is stuck (sophie gilbert, 2021)
  • Jesse Armstrong, Succession’s creator, supposedly has a particular goal for the show: to tell a story about how humanity can be corrupted by the confluence of power and family.

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• from jeremy strong doesn't get the joke (michael schulman, 2021)
  • When Jeremy Strong was a teenager, in suburban Massachusetts, he had three posters thumbtacked to his bedroom wall: Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot, Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon, and Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man.
    • He read interviews that his heroes gave and, later, managed to get crew jobs on their movies. By his early twenties, he had worked for all three men, and had adopted elements of their full-immersion acting methods.
    • By his mid-thirties, after fifteen years of hustling in the industry, he’d had minor roles in a string of A-list films: Lincoln, Zero Dark Thirty, Selma, and The Big Short.
    • Day-Lewis became an important mentor. Strong said, “At the end of the summer, he wrote me a note that I have still, that contains many of what have become my most deeply held precepts and beliefs about this work, and which I have treasured and will treasure until I die.” (Strong wouldn’t disclose what was in it.) Nearly a decade later, he was cast opposite Day-Lewis in “Lincoln,” as John Nicolay, the President’s personal secretary. Nicolay was “utterly devoted to Lincoln,” Strong said. “Those were easy shoes to fill.” When Strong won his Emmy, last fall, he wore a floppy taupe bow tied loosely around his neck—nearly identical to the black bow that Day-Lewis wore to accept his Oscar for “My Left Foot.”
  • In 2016, Kathryn Bigelow, the Oscar-winning director of “The Hurt Locker,” cast him in a big role, as a National Guardsman in her film “Detroit.”
    • Around the same time, Strong had lunch with Adam McKay, who had directed him as a financial analyst in The Big Short. McKay said that he was executive-producing a new HBO show called Succession, which he described to Strong as a "King Lear" for the media-industrial complex.
    • But, after one day, Bigelow fired him. “I was just not the character that she had in her mind,” Strong said. “It was a devastating experience.” (Bigelow says that the character wasn’t working in the story; after Strong pleaded with her, she came up with another part for him, as an attorney.)
  • Then he flew to Denmark to get married, staying at a castle called Dragsholm Slot. That’s when he got the call that the Succession people had cast Kieran Culkin as Roman.
    • But the show’s creator, Jesse Armstrong, agreed to audition him for the role of Kendall Roy, the moody middle son and Logan’s heir apparent. “I’ve always felt like an outsider with a fire in my belly,” Strong told me. “And so the disappointment and the feeling of being thwarted—it only sharpened my need and hunger. I went in with a vengeance.”
    • He tore through books about corporate gamesmanship, including Michael Wolff’s biography of Rupert Murdoch, and cherry-picked details he liked; apparently, Murdoch’s son James ties his shoes extremely tightly, which told Strong something about his “inner tensile strength.”
    • At the audition, Strong, his shoes tied tight, read a scene between Kendall and the C.E.O. of a startup that he’s trying to acquire. Armstrong was skeptical. He asked Strong to "loosen the language," and the scene transformed. “It was about, like, Beastie Boys-ing it up,” Strong recalled. “I was missing the patois of bro-speak.” By the end of the day, he had the part.
  • his mild appearance belies a relentless, sometimes preening intensity. He speaks with a slow, deliberate cadence, especially when talking about acting, which he does with a monk-like solemnity. “To me, the stakes are life and death,” he told me, about playing Kendall. “I take him as seriously as I take my own life.” He does not find the character funny, which is probably why he’s so funny in the role.
    • asked Strong about the rap that Kendall performs in Season 2, at a gala for his father—a top contender for Kendall’s most cringeworthy moment—he gave an unsmiling answer about Raskolnikov, referencing Kendall’s “monstrous pain.”
  • Kieran Culkin told me, “After the first season, he said something to me like, ‘I’m worried that people might think that the show is a comedy.’ And I said, ‘I think the show is a comedy.’ He thought I was kidding.”
    • When I told Strong that I, too, thought of the show as a dark comedy, he looked at me with incomprehension and asked, “In the sense that, like, Chekhov is comedy?” No, I said, in the sense that it’s funny. “That’s exactly why we cast Jeremy in that role,” McKay told me.
  • While shooting the 1968 protest scenes, Strong asked a stunt coördinator to rough him up; he also requested to be sprayed with real tear gas. “I don’t like saying no to Jeremy,” Sorkin told me. “But there were two hundred people in that scene and another seventy on the crew, so I declined to spray them with poison gas.”
    • Between takes of the trial scenes, in which the Yippies mock Judge Julius Hoffman, played by Frank Langella, Strong would read aloud from Langella’s memoir in silly voices, and he put a remote-controlled fart machine below the judge’s chair. “Every once in a while, I’d say, ‘Great. Let’s do it again, and this time, Jeremy, maybe don’t play the kazoo in the middle of Frank Langella’s monologue,’ ” Sorkin said.
    • At night, he performed a one-man play by Conor McPherson in a tiny midtown bar, playing an alcoholic Irishman.
  • During our conversations, Strong cited bits of wisdom from Carl Jung, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Karl Ove Knausgaard (he is a “My Struggle” superfan), Robert Duvall, Meryl Streep, Harold Pinter (“The more acute the experience, the less articulate its expression”), the Danish filmmaker Tobias Lindholm, T. S. Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, and old proverbs (“When fishermen cannot go to sea, they mend their nets”). When I noted that he was a sponge for quotations, he turned grave and said, "I'm not a religious person, but I think I’ve concocted my own book of hymns."
  • “All I know is, he crosses the Rubicon,” Robert Downey, Jr., told me.
  • “I think you have to go through whatever the ordeal is that the character has to go through,” Strong told me. This extreme approach—Robert De Niro shaving down his teeth for “Cape Fear,” Leonardo DiCaprio eating raw bison liver for “The Revenant”—is often described as Method acting, a much abused term that, in its classic sense, involves summoning emotions from personal experience and projecting them onto a character. Strong does not consider himself a Method actor. Far from mining his own life, he practices what he calls “identity diffusion.” “If I have any method at all, it is simply this: to clear away anything—anything—that is not the character and the circumstances of the scene,” he explained.
    • “It’s hard for me to actually describe his process, because I don’t really see it,” Kieran Culkin said. “He puts himself in a bubble.” Before I interviewed his castmates, Strong warned me, “I don’t know how popular the way I work is amongst our troupe.” Since Kendall is the black sheep of a warring family, Strong’s self-alienation may be a way of creating tension onscreen. Though the cast is generally loose and collegial, Strong, during Season 2, began going to the makeup trailer only when no other actors were there—“which I remember making everyone else roll their eyes,” a cast member told me.
    • Brian Cox, who plays Logan, the patriarch, to describe Strong’s process, he struck a note of fatherly concern. “The result that Jeremy gets is always pretty tremendous,” he said. “I just worry about what he does to himself. I worry about the crises he puts himself through in order to prepare.” Cox, a classically trained British stage actor, has a “turn it on, turn it off” approach to acting, and his relationship with Strong recalls a famous story about Laurence Olivier working with Dustin Hoffman on the 1976 film Marathon Man. On learning that Hoffman had stayed up partying for three nights before a scene in which he had to appear sleep-deprived, Olivier said, “My dear boy, why don’t you try acting?” Cox told me, “Actors are funny creatures. I’ve worked with intense actors before. It’s a particularly American disease, I think, this inability to separate yourself off while you’re doing the job.”
    • “The way Jeremy put it to me is that, like, you get in the ring, you do the scene, and at the end each actor goes to their corner,” Culkin told me. “I’m, like, This isn’t a battle. This is a dance.” It’s possible that the mishmash of approaches adds to the sense of familial unease. Or maybe not. Culkin said, of Strong’s self-isolation, “That might be something that helps him. I can tell you that it doesn’t help me.” Recently, Strong, concerned about press reports suggesting that he was “difficult,” sent me a text message saying, “I don’t particularly think ease or even accord are virtues in creative work, and sometimes there must even be room for necessary roughness, within the boundaries dictated by the work.”
    • In the Rava scene, Kendall complains about his girlfriend, Naomi. During one take, Strong threw in a new line: "She, uh, thinks she's on the 'attractive edge of a co-dependent black hole,' whatever the fuck that means." The phrase was lifted from an e-mail that Armstrong had sent him about Kendall and Naomi’s relationship.
      • Strong hadn’t asked about repurposing it on camera. “Better to ask forgiveness than to ask permission,” he told me afterward. Ad-libbing is permitted on “Succession,” but Strong’s improvisations often strike his co-stars as prepared speeches.
  • In high school, Strong also interned for the editor of “Looking for Richard,” released in 1996, in which Al Pacino ruminates on playing Richard III, and he worked in the sound department on Steven Spielberg’s historical drama Amistad, for which he held a boom mike while Anthony Hopkins gave a speech as John Quincy Adams. When I asked how he got these jobs as a teen-ager, without connections, Strong said, “I just wrote letters.”
  • Strong applied to colleges with a recommendation letter from DreamWorks, the studio that produced Amistad, and got a scholarship to Yale. He thought he would major in theatre studies, but, on the first day of Yale’s intro-to-acting class, the professor talked about Stanislavski and drew diagrams of circles of energy. “Something in me just shut down,” Strong said. "I remember feeling, I need to run from this and protect whatever inchoate instinct I might have." He majored in English instead, while starring in extracurricular productions of American Buffalo, Hughie, and The Indian Wants the Bronx. These were all plays that Pacino had done, as if Strong were checking off boxes on his theatrical résumé.
  • One of the other kids in Act/Tunes was the older sister of Chris Evans, the future Captain America. “I was probably nine, ten, going to my sister’s shows, and even then thinking, Damn, this kid is great!” Evans said, about Strong. He later went to Strong’s high school, and still speaks about him with the awe of a freshman gaping at an upperclassman: “He was a little bit of a celebrity in my mind.” In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Strong played Bottom to Evans’s Demetrius, and Evans has vivid memories of Strong playing identical twins in a Goldoni farce. “The cast would poke their heads through the curtain, just to watch him do his thing,” Evans said. “In the end, one of his characters drinks poison. I think every night the death scene grew by about thirty seconds.”
  • “Basically, in order for Jeremy to have his fantasy of meeting Al Pacino play out, he nearly bankrupted a hundred-year-old college-theatre company,” an alumnus said. “But he had one wonderful night of getting to hang out with Al Pacino.”
  • “You always had the feeling that he was operating on some level that was past the level that you were at,” another classmate recalled. “I’d never met anyone else at Yale with that careerist drive.” (Their graduating class included Ron DeSantis, the current governor of Florida.) Other peers recall a more ingenuous superstriver. One summer, Strong and five classmates went to L.A., where he had wangled an internship at the production office of Dustin Hoffman, hero No. 3. Strong didn’t have a car, so he got a colleague to loan him a prop Mercedes with a hole in the floor.
  • Strong moved to New York three weeks before 9/11. He lived in a tiny apartment in SoHo and waited tables at the restaurant downstairs. Friends remember the apartment as comically austere, with a mattress on the floor, piles of books and scripts, and a closet of incongruously high-end clothes; he had a Dries Van Noten suit and a Costume National hoodie that he wore to shreds, but few essentials.
  • At some point, Chris Evans, who had broken out with Not Another Teen Movie, got a call from Strong, who was looking for help getting representation. “I said, ‘Holy shit, Jeremy! First of all, I can’t believe that. Second of all, this is your lucky day,’ ” Evans told me. He had Strong meet his agent at C.A.A., but the guy never followed up; Hollywood is made for Chris Evanses, not Jeremy Strongs. It wasn’t until the television renaissance of the past twenty years that the line between stars and character actors blurred, elevating such idiosyncratic performers as Adam Driver and Elisabeth Moss, just as the New Hollywood of the sixties and seventies had produced Pacino and Hoffman.
  • One day, I was at an A.T.M. and got a call from Matthew McConaughey. "This guy’s committed," he said.
  • By the mid-aughts, Strong was making headway Off Broadway. He played a soldier in John Patrick Shanley’s Defiance (he joined weapons exercises at Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina), and a young Spinoza in David Ives’s “New Jerusalem” (he binged on seventeenth-century Dutch philosophy).
  • Six years later, when he was cast in Succession, he felt, he told me, “a sense of inevitability.”
  • He was finally able to appreciate the beauty of Italy, he told me over salumi, since Kendall would have been too jaded to notice: “Another day, another villa.” (Presumably, this had also dampened a trip he took earlier in the summer, with Robert Downey, Jr., and their families, to a villa owned by Sting and Trudie Styler.) On a drive down to the Amalfi Coast, where he went to decompress, he had listened to the Tom Waits song “Who Are You.” Discussing Kendall, he said, “It’s weird saying his name in the third person.”
  • Strong had sent me text messages from Italy, including a poem by Cecil Day-Lewis (“Daniel’s dad”), and thoughts on the “invisible work” of acting. Since I’d seen him in New York, he had shaved his head, twice—once as Kendall and once as himself. On his phone, he showed me photos of Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, both clean-shaven and with a Rasputin beard. Strong thought that Kendall should go through a similar “physical evolution,” he said, citing the third line of Dante’s Inferno. (“The straight road had been lost sight of.”) No one, Strong included, wanted a clichéd scene of Kendall staring into the mirror with a razor, so the transformation took place off camera. Nevertheless, when a stylist shaved his head, Strong went silent, to experience the moment as part of Kendall’s backstory. After the season wrapped, he shaved his head again, as an exorcism.
  • We walked to the beach to meet up with Strong’s wife and kids. Tisvilde is a laid-back place, full of thatched roofs that look like shaggy creatures. Strong was approached by bands of blond teen-age boys who recognized him from The Gentlemen, a Guy Ritchie gangster flick that Strong did not care to discuss on the record.
  • “They look like something in a Bosch painting,” Strong said. “They look anguished.” It seemed like a place where Dante might find a portal to the underworld.

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• from succession, the inside story (georgia pritchett, 2023)
  • The pilot for Succession was filmed in New York in November 2016, just as Donald Trump was elected president.
  • Armstrong’s original writing team for Succession consisted for the most part of British comedy writers. There was doubt felt in some quarters as to whether this group of scruffy Brits could pull off a glossy, high-end New York drama.
  • After we handed in the scripts for the first few episodes of season one, HBO hastily employed a super-rich consultant, whose job was to explain what it was like to be a billionaire to a group of people who were thrilled that someone was paying for their Pret sandwich.
    • Rich people don’t wear coats, we were told. Their shoes only ever touch carpet, as they move seamlessly from their cars to their jets to their buildings. Also, crucially, they don’t duck (when getting out of helicopters).
    • “Where on earth did you get the idea that there would be maids in maid uniforms?” I racked my brains. From Tom and Jerry episodes (or pornography) did not seem like a good answer.
  • Writers’ rooms are a strange mixture of group therapy, snacking and confession. You share ideas but also secrets and fears and humiliations in the hope that it might unlock some character or a moment in the show.
    • We wrote the first season in the belief that nobody would watch the show. And nobody did, really. Or the second season. It took a global pandemic, and the world’s population sitting at home wondering what they could do, for people to really start paying attention.