Actor Jeremy Strong has a week that is his Succession Character Kendall Roy could only dream of. And only part of it has to do with what happened in the season three finale, “All the Bells Say” speculate a lot about the possible death of his character.
[Ed. note: This story contains major spoilers for Succession season 3.]
Succession Season 3, episode 9 came after another implosion for Kendall, the last one he saw swimming in a pool (and a misery of himself) and a similar supernova moment for his star. A new New York Profile by Strong, alternatively titled “On Succession“Jeremy Strong doesn’t get the joke,” and “The Straight Man” paints the actor as one who is aggressively pushing himself into the role, so much so that even his colleagues find it a bit repulsive. The profile sparked a dramatic moment that in several ways fulfilled the wish that Strong has always wanted in acting: to overcome the boundary between character and real life, as he puts it in the profile.
Among the revelations: Strong missed part of his “Wedding Week Celebrations” to film Kathryn Bigelows Detroit, hung out with playwright Wendy Wasserstein’s Irish bouncer to learn how to play an Irish alcoholic, often refuses to rehearse, and when he turned to quote Kieran Culkin describing the process, Strong told him: “You step in the ring, set the scene, and in the end every actor goes into their corner.” It’s not a strategy that Culkin particularly advocates. “I am, this is not a fight. It’s a dance, ”he says of his co-star in the New York feature.
“It’s the cost to yourself that worries me,” says Brian Cox in profile after the article describes a series of injuries Strong sustained on the non-action-packed set of the show about a family of bickering Mughals, one of whom was Cox is the cruel patriarch. “I just have the feeling that he just has to be kinder to himself and therefore has to be a little kinder to everyone else.”
Strong’s approach isn’t that different from Kendall’s early days Succession Season 3: Consistently viral on Twitter. The only difference is that Kendall Roy is increasingly isolated while Jeremy Strong has real friends who stand up for him. In the seventh episode of season three, Too Much Birthday, party-goers are promised a trip into the world of Kendall Roy with an exceedingly lavish birthday at The Shed at Hudson Yards, a venue that Critics called a meeting point of “tourist trade and capitalist worship”.
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Image: HBO
It’s a perfect location for Kendall, who rides ravishing heights only to meet devastating lows in the episode. By far the strongest of these is his quixotic search for his son’s birthday present, the only clue being rabbit paper. His small army of assistants fails him, he stumbles through a mountain of gifts, treating each and every gift with either indifference or utter contempt. A motorcycle? Who cares? A watch from his girlfriend? He already has one. In the end, he collapses under his own compulsion.
It’s a scene that plays with the classic influences that are often mentioned Succession, also by Strong himself. In profile he refers to both Dostoevsky and Chekhov. One example that crossed my mind was Leo Tolstoy’s 1866 short story “How much land does a man need?” in which a farmer named Pahom makes a deal with the devil for more and more land before he learns that a person really only needs two meters for a grave.
Tolstoy’s parable bears striking resemblances to Kendall, who competed against his father in the penultimate episode in hopes of proving himself better and smarter. And now, in the season three finale, he’s anything but dead, confesses to his homicide incident in season one and teams up with his siblings (“for the first time since their youth,” remarked director Mark Mylod in the post the show) to prevent further action by Logan Roy.
In post-show reflection on Episode 9, creator Jeremy Strong said that some people might see Kendell, Shiv, and Roman’s team as growth. “I’m on the fence about people, and people certainly change what they do,” continued Strong, “but in my opinion, the nature of people doesn’t change. In a way, that makes the drama and decisions interesting. “
The fans can discover what the future will be for Kendell Succession Season 4, which was recently approved by HBO. As for Strong, the profile’s immediate aftermath has led some big names to speak out in his defense. On InstagramHis friend Anne Hathway also advocated Strong’s choices as an actor, saying, “I really appreciate his qualities of thoughtfulness, sincerity, authenticity, sweetness, depth, kindness, generosity, as well as his strong intelligence and extraordinary sensitivity.” And Aaron Sorkin, via a letter on Twitter by Jessica Chastain, to put it bluntly, “Jeremy isn’t a weirdo.” By arguing that the profile “prompts us to roll our eyes in his acting process,” Sorkin compares Strong to Dustin Hoffman, who appears repeatedly on the profile – the New York writer Michael Schulman notes that Strong is one Rain man Poster on his wall as a teenager. Ultimately, Sorkin says: “There is no writer, producer or director in the world who does not take the chance to cast him.”
Shortly after Succession The season three finale will air on HBO, Schulman went to twitter to reveal a detail from his now controversial profile that didn’t make it into the cut for spoiler reasons. Strong told the reporter that during the big confession scene in the parking lot, he originally “sat on a stone pillar that Jeremy the production designer had made. You did nine takes and he just didn’t feel it. ”The actor eventually found himself in a“ place of desperation ”and believed, according to Schulman,“ to have reached the limits of my possibilities ”. So after nine takes, Strong decided to change things up and sit on the gravel in the parking lot and play the scene in a new way. All of the previous work was unusable, but the actor told Schulman that “the whole scene was opened up”.
Sorkin is probably right: there may not be a writer, producer, or director in the world who doesn’t want to cast Strong, for no reason other than starring on one of the hottest shows on television. But if the actor’s process seems to be inherently isolating – one non-famous member of a production said Strong was “an annoying mosquito” – then at least he has one thing Kendall Roy never had, even with all that money in the world: people who take care of him.
