.MJSchulman profiles Jeremy Strong, who plays Kendall Roy in “Succession.” Strong “does not find the character funny, which is probably why he’s so funny in the role,” Schulman writes.
When I 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 showa comedy.’ He thought I was kidding.
This fall, Strong was shooting James Gray’s film “Armageddon Time,” playing a plumber based on the director’s father. Strong let his hair return to its natural gray—it’s darkened for “Succession”—and sent me videos of himself shadowing a real handyman for research, repeating back terms like “flare nuts” in a honking Queens accent. Costumes and props are like talismans for him.
Talking about his process, he quoted the jazz pianist Keith Jarrett: “I connect every music-making experience I have, including every day here in the studio, with a great power, and if I do not surrender to it nothing happens.” During our conversations, Strong cited bits of wisdom from Carl Jung, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Karl Ove Knausgaard , Robert Duvall, Meryl Streep, Harold Pinter , the Danish filmmaker Tobias Lindholm, T. S. Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, and old proverbs .
One spring morning, Strong was outside the Woolworth Building, in lower Manhattan, filming a short scene between Kendall and his ex-wife, Rava, played by Natalie Gold. Kendall is picking up his two small children to take them to Italy when Rava drops some unnerving news: the kids have told her that their nanny screams at them and steals money from wallets. Like “Succession” at its best, the scene is full of passive-aggressive parries.
When I asked 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.
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.
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