THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER13, 2021 53
Like “Succession” at its best, the scene
is full of passive-aggressive parries.
“Great,” Kendall says, before ushering
the kids into a Suburban. “You just
planted fire ants in my brain.”
On the sidewalk, Jesse Armstrong
hovered behind a monitor. “You’re see-
ing Kendall right at the end of the sea-
son, and it’s been a long and painful
process,” he explained. In the Season 2
cliff hanger, Kendall denounces his fa-
ther at a press conference, and he be-
gins Season 3 on a messianic high. Be-
fore the season started shooting, Strong
was vacationing in Bora Bora and rode
a Fliteboard, a motorized surfboard that
provides a precarious sense of flight.
He brought that sensation to Kendall,
he told me: “He thinks he’s flying, but
he’s about to fall any second.” By the
eighth episode, when he’s off to Italy,
his legal revolt against his father has
sputtered. Armstrong told me, “That
high Kendall had, the possibility of
change, has dwindled, too. So he’s not
in a great place.”
Strong walked through the scene
with Gold, without emoting. Then he
disappeared. He often refuses to re-
hearse—“I want every scene to feel like
I’m encountering a bear in the woods”—
despite the wishes of his fellow-actors.
“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.
When I asked Brian Cox, who plays
Logan, the patriarch, to describe Strong’s
process, he struck a note of fatherly con-
cern. “The result that Jeremy gets is al-
ways 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 clas-
sically trained British stage actor, has a
“turn it on, turn it off ” approach to act-
ing, 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-de-
prived, Olivier said, “My dear boy, why
don’t you try acting?” Cox told me, “Ac-
tors are funny creatures. I’ve worked
with intense actors before. It’s a partic-
ularly American disease, I think, this
inability to separate yourself off while
you’re doing the job.”
If Strong approaches his role as if it
were Hamlet, Culkin plays Roman like
an insult comic. “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 mish-
mash 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 “diffi-
cult,” sent me a text message saying, “I
don’t particularly think ease or even ac-
cord are virtues in creative work, and
sometimes there must even be room for
necessary roughness, within the bound-
aries dictated by the work.”
At the Woolworth Building, Strongreappeared in Kendall’s fleece and power
sunglasses. He consulted with Arm-
strong: shades or no shades? Armstrong
suggested that he whip them off mid-
scene, but Strong thought that would
feel phony. “If we’re holding a mirror
up to nature, then let’s not contrive
things,” he said later. For Strong, such
minutiae are important enough to slam
the breaks on a shoot. “Whatever gets
you through the night,” Armstrong told
me. Between takes, a writer named Will
Tracy recalled an earlier scene, which
called for Kendall to meet a reporter
over a Waldorf salad: “Jeremy said, ‘A
Waldorf salad’s way too old-school.
That’s something my dad would eat. It
should be a fennel salad with a light
vinaigrette.’” They changed the salad.
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 Nao-
mi’s relationship. Strong hadn’t asked
about repurposing it on camera. “Bet-
ter to ask forgiveness than to ask per-
mission,” he told me afterward. Ad-lib-
bing is permitted on “Succession,” but
Strong’s improvisations often strike his
co-stars as prepared speeches. Culkin
recalled a scene from Season 1, with“I just realized—I’m indifferent to landscape.”