as a security guard in order to finance a
trip to L.A. Father and son stayed at the
Oakwood apartments and paid a scammy
manager to help Jeremy get auditions.
Then they came home.
One of the other kids in Act/Tunes
was the older sister of Chris Evans, the
future Captain America. “I was probably
nine, ten, going to my sister’s shows, and
even then thinking, Damn, this kid is
great!” Evans said, about Strong. He later
went to Strong’s high school, and still
speaks about him with the awe of a fresh-
man gaping at an upperclassman: “He
was a little bit of a celebrity in my mind.”
In “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,”
Strong played Bottom to Evans’s Deme-
trius, and Evans has vivid memories of
Strong playing identical twins in a Gol-
doni farce. “The cast would poke their
heads through the curtain, just to watch
him do his thing,” Evans said. “In the
end, one of his characters drinks poison.
I think every night the death scene grew
by about thirty seconds.”
Strong applied to colleges with a rec-
ommendation letter from DreamWorks,
the studio that produced “Amistad,” and
got a scholarship to Yale. He thought he
would major in theatre studies, but, on the
first day of Yale’s intro-to-acting class,
the professor talked about Stanislavski
and drew diagrams of circles of energy.
“Something in me just shut down,” Strong
said. “I remember feeling, I need to run
from this and protect whatever inchoate
instinct I might have.” He majored in
English instead, while starring in extra-
curricular productions of “American Buf-
falo,” “Hughie,” and “The Indian Wants
the Bronx.” These were all plays that Pa-
cino had done, as if Strong were check-
ing off boxes on his theatrical résumé.
During his junior year, Strong even man-
aged to arrange for Pacino to come to
campus to teach a master class. The heav-
ily promoted visit was largely sponsored
by the Yale Dramat, the school’s under-
graduate theatre group.
Many alumni recall the visit as a de-
bacle. Pacino’s acting advice was vague.
Strong had appointed himself the inter-
mediary between the Dramat and Paci-
no’s office, and the costs of town cars,
posters, and a celebratory dinner blew
up the budget. To lure Pacino, Strong
had persuaded the Dramat to concoct a
prestigious-sounding award, and the stu-
dents commissioned a pewter chalice
from Mory’s, a New Haven tavern, on
which the winners’ names would be en-
graved each year. But Pacino took the
chalice home, adding to the enormous
bill. “Basically, in order for Jeremy to have
his fantasy of meeting Al Pacino play out,
he nearly bankrupted a hundred-year-
old college-theatre company,” an alum-
nus said. “But he had one wonderful night
of getting to hang out with Al Pacino.”
Strong admits to being a “rogue agent”
in the Pacino affair, but he doesn’t re-
member the cost overruns. “I never re-
ally felt accepted by the Dramat com-
munity,” he told me. Within the soap-
opera bubble of college theatre, his sheer
determination was polarizing. “You al-
ways had the feeling that he was oper-
ating on some level that was past the level
that you were at,” another classmate re-
called. “I’d never met anyone else at Yale
with that careerist drive.” (Their gradu-
ating class included Ron DeSantis, the
current governor of Florida.) Other peers
recall a more ingenuous superstriver. One
summer, Strong and five classmates went
to L.A., where he had wangled an in-
ternship at the production office of Dustin
Hoffman, hero No. 3. Strong didn’t have
a car, so he got a colleague to loan him
a prop Mercedes with a hole in the floor.
On his first payday, a friend recalled, “Jer-
emy was, like, ‘Everybody, we’re going
shopping!’ We went to Rodeo Drive, and
he blew his whole paycheck on two shirts.”
(Strong, citing his “fanatically fastidiousaesthetic,” said that he was more likely
to have shopped at Maxfield.)
Strong moved to New York three
weeks before 9/11. He lived in a tiny apart-
ment in SoHo and waited tables at the
restaurant downstairs. Friends remem-
ber the apartment as comically austere,
with a mattress on the floor, piles of books
and scripts, and a closet of incongruously
high-end clothes; he had a Dries Van
Noten suit and a Costume National
hoodie that he wore to shreds, but few
essentials. Strong said that he was living
in what Sir Francis Bacon called “gilded
squalor.” In addition to working at the
restaurant, he was a room-service waiter
at a hotel, and he shredded documents
as a temp for a construction company.
He would go to a FedEx store and cadge
free cardboard envelopes, slip in head
shots and tapes of monologues, and
hand-deliver them to agencies. “The first
year in New York was really hard,” he
told me. “I don’t think I had any audi-
tions. It was this feeling of being cut off
from your oxygen supply.”
At some point, Chris Evans, who
had broken out with “Not Another Teen
Movie,” got a call from Strong, who
was looking for help getting represen-
tation. “I said, ‘Holy shit, Jeremy! First
of all, I can’t believe that. Second of all,
this is your lucky day,’” Evans told me.
He had Strong meet his agent at C.A.A.,
but the guy never followed up; Holly-
wood is made for Chris Evanses, not