54 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER13, 2021
the two of them and Sarah Snook, who
plays their sister, Shiv. The family is in
New Mexico for group therapy, and
Kendall, a recovering addict, goes on a
bender. (Strong occasionally gets tipsy
for scenes in which Kendall falls off
the wagon.)
“He kept doing this speech that he
had sort of written,” Culkin said. “All I
remember is him saying
‘rootin’-tootin’’ a lot. By the
third take, he starts that
speech again, and Snook
looks at him, as Shiv, and
goes, ‘Shut. Up. Kendall.’”
When Strong was done
with the Rava scene, which
was ultimately cut, we
walked west on Park Place.
At a corner, he ripped up
his script pages and tossed
them in a trash can. “This is my favor-
ite part of work,” he said. “It’s like a stay
of execution every time you finish a
scene and it goes O.K., and you can tear
it up and let it go.”
I
first met Strong in the summer of
2003, just after graduating from Yale,
where I was two years behind him and
had seen him act in student plays. I got
an internship at a film producer’s office,
where Strong, then a day-jobbing the-
atre actor, worked as an assistant. The
producer, an Israeli woman, would scream
expletives into her phone all day, while
the staff worked on preproduction for
an indie film called “The Ballad of Jack
and Rose.” Strong taught me how to use
the copy machine.
As it turned out, “The Ballad of Jack
and Rose” would change his life. The
film, directed by Rebecca Miller, starred
Miller’s husband, Daniel Day-Lewis, as
an aging hippie living on an abandoned
commune. Strong got himself hired as
Day-Lewis’s assistant for the shoot, on
Prince Edward Island. Day-Lewis was
already legendary for his immersion
techniques: staying in character between
takes, building his own canoe for “The
Last of the Mohicans.” He arrived in
Canada early and helped the crew con-
struct the commune houses, since his
character would have built them. (After
he botched a window installation, the
crew assigned him a dining-room table.)
During the shoot, Day-Lewis lived in
his own cottage, away from his family.
Since his character wastes away from a
heart ailment in the course of the film,
he starved himself, eating a meagre vegan
diet, and became so emaciated that
Miller was alarmed.
Strong had driven up in his father’s
car. Strapped in the passenger seat was
Day-Lewis’s prop mandolin, which
Strong recalled handling “like a knight
errant guarding a relic.”
Strong had turned down a
chance to act at the Wil-
liamstown Theatre Festival,
which, he said, felt in some
ways like “an abdication of
my path.” But he realized
that this was an opportunity
to be “the sorcerer’s appren-
tice.” He told me, “My job
was essentially a disappear-
ing act, to be unobtrusive
and on hand and play along with the
game of it. I kept a diary, and, when I
looked at it once, later, the thing that was
clear was that my antennae were com-
pletely alight and absorbent.”
He got so engrossed in his menial
tasks that some of the crew cruelly nick-
named him Cletus, after the redneck
character on “The Simpsons.” “His whole
brain was focussed on Daniel Day-
Lewis,” one person recalled. “I never re-
ally saw him unless he was standing out-
side Daniel’s trailer.” Miller remembered
that Strong bought a lot of nuts and
stashed them in Day-Lewis’s refrigera-
tor, “when Daniel was trying to starve
himself to death. He was so concerned
about him getting thinner and thinner
that he was feeding him up.” Strong re-
membered the nut story differently, but,
out of fealty to Day-Lewis, who is fiercely
private, he would not elaborate.
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.”
Strong’s association with Day-Lewis
had actually started before “Jack and
Rose,” when he still had the poster shrine
in his bedroom. When he was sixteen,
he got a job in the greenery department
of “The Crucible,” starring Day-Lewis,
which was filming near where Strong
lived. For one scene, he held a branch
outside a window. In high school, Strong
also interned for the editor of “Look-
ing 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 his-
torical drama “Amistad,” for which he
held a boom mike while Anthony Hop-
kins 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.”
Unlike the ultra-privileged Roys,
Strong grew up working class, in Bos-
ton. His father, David, worked in juve-
nile jails. His mother, Maureen, was a
hospice nurse and a spiritual seeker; she
would bring Strong and his younger
brother (who now works for Zoom) to
ashrams, or to an African Methodist
Episcopal Church in Cambridge, where
they were among the only white congre-
gants. Until Strong was ten, the family
lived in a rough neighborhood in Jamaica
Plain. “My parents felt tremendous eco-
nomic pressure, just trying to survive and
tread water,” he said. “Often, it was some-
where I just wanted to get out of.” They
kept a canoe on cinder blocks in the back
yard; since actual vacations were a “pipe
dream,” the boys would sit in the canoe
and take imaginary trips.
In order to send their kids to better
public schools, his parents moved the
family to the suburb of Sudbury, which
came as a culture shock. “I had never
seen a Mercedes-Benz before,” Strong
recalled. “It was a kind of country-club
town where we didn’t belong to the coun-
try club.” To fit in, he did some quick
character work, trading his Chicago Bulls
jerseys and gold chains for J.Crew polo
shirts. But the biggest change was that
he got involved in Act/Tunes, a children’s
theatre group, where, starting in fifth
grade, he acted in musicals, including
“Oliver!,” in which he played the Artful
Dodger. His father picked up extra shifts
