52 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER13, 2021
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. “Because he’s not play-
ing it like a comedy. He’s playing it like
he’s Hamlet.”
A
ctors try to find the real in the
make-believe, but anyone who has
worked with Strong will tell you that
he goes to unusual lengths. Last year,
he played the Yippie activist Jerry Rubin
in Aaron Sorkin’s film “The Trial of the
Chicago 7.” 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 an-
other seventy on the crew, so I declined
to spray them with poison gas.” Be-
tween takes of the trial scenes, in which
the Yippies mock Judge Julius Hoff-
man, played by Frank Langella, Strong
would read aloud from Langella’s mem-
oir 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 mono-
logue,’” Sorkin said.
Strong has always worked this way.
In his twenties, he was an assistant to
the playwright Wendy Wasserstein, typ-
ing up her manuscripts. At night, he
performed a one-man play by Conor
McPherson in a tiny midtown bar, play-
ing an alcoholic Irishman. Wasserstein
discovered that Strong was spending a
lot of time with her Irish doorman,
studying his accent. Before Wasserstein
died, in 2006—Strong was one of the
few people who knew that she had lym-
phoma—she thought of writing a play
based on him, titled “Enter Doorman.”
This fall, Strong was shooting James
Gray’s film “Armageddon Time,” play-
ing a plumber based on the director’s
father. Strong let his hair return to its
natural gray—it’s darkened for “Suc-
cession”—and sent me videos of him-
self shadowing a real handyman for re-
search, repeating back terms like “flare
nuts” in a honking Queens accent. Cos-
tumes and props are like talismans for
him. In 2012, he played a possible vic-
tim of childhood sexual abuse in Amy
Herzog’s “The Great God Pan,” at Play-
wrights Horizons. “There was a shirt
he wore that was really important for
him, and for compositional reasons we
wanted to try it in a different color,”
Herzog told me. “I remember him say-
ing that the shirt he was wearing had
functioned as his armor, and this new
shirt wasn’t like armor.” They let him
keep the shirt.
Strong’s dedication strikes some col-
laborators as impressive, others as self-
indulgent. “All I know is, he crosses the
Rubicon,” Robert Downey, Jr., told me.
In 2014, Strong played Downey, Jr.,’s
mentally disabled brother in “The Judge.”
(To prepare, he spent time with an au-
tistic person, as Hoffman had for “Rain
Man.”) When Downey, Jr., shot a fu-
neral scene, Strong paced around the
set weeping loudly, even though he wasn’t
called that day. He asked for personal-
ized props that weren’t in the script, in-
cluding a family photo album. “It was
almost swatting him away like he was
an annoying gnat—I had bigger things
to deal with,” a member of the design
team recalled.
“I think you have to go through what-
ever the ordeal is that the character has
to go through,” Strong told me. This ex-
treme approach—Robert De Niro shav-
ing down his teeth for “Cape Fear,” Leo-
nardo DiCaprio eating raw bison liver
for “The Revenant”—is often described
as Method acting, a much abused term
that, in its classic sense, involves sum-
moning emotions from personal experi-
ence and projecting them onto a char-
acter. Strong does not consider himself
a Method actor. Far from mining his
own life, he practices what he calls “iden-
tity diffusion.” “If I have any method at
all, it is simply this: to clear away any-
thing—anything—that is not the char-
acter and the circumstances of the scene,”
he explained. “And usually that means
clearing away almost everything around
and inside you, so that you can be a more
complete vessel for the work at hand.”
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 sur-
render to it nothing happens.” During
our conversations, Strong cited bits of
wisdom from Carl Jung, F. Scott Fitz-
gerald, Karl Ove Knausgaard (he is a“My Struggle” superfan), Robert Du-
vall, 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 reli-
gious person, but I think I’ve concocted
my own book of hymns.”
We first sat down in April, at a restau-
rant in Williamsburg. Strong, an avowed
foodie, seemed to know everyone who
worked there. He was midway through
shooting Season 3, and he wore Kendall’s
brown corduroy jacket everywhere;
Strong often borrows items from the
wardrobe department, to help “elide the
line” between fiction and life. He also
wore a chain of good-luck charms that
looked like dog tags, including one in
the shape of the BT Tower, in London,
which he used to gaze at from the win-
dow of the Royal Academy of Dramatic
Art, where he took classes as an eighteen-
year-old. “It was like a prayer I had, not
knowing if I would have the courage to
be an actor,” he told me, over trout al-
mondine. He went on, “I can’t work in
a way that feels like I’m making a tele-
vision show. I need, for whatever reason,
to believe that it’s real and commit my-
self to that sense of belief.”
Later, he told me that his recount-
ing of his “Succession” audition had
been colored by Kendall. “The narra-
tive was: I’m determined, I’m a fighter,
I’m full of doubt,” he said. “And those
things are all true of Kendall. I think
they’re maybe true of me, but they’re
not, maybe, what I would have talked
about if I weren’t in the middle of work-
ing.” I began to wonder if I’d been in-
terviewing an actor playing Kendall
Roy or a character impersonating Jer-
emy Strong.O
ne 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.