Jeremy Strongs. It wasn’t until the tele-
vision renaissance of the past twenty
years that the line between stars and
character actors blurred, elevating such
idiosyncratic performers as Adam Driver
and Elisabeth Moss, just as the New
Hollywood of the sixties and seventies
had produced Pacino and Hoffman.
The one place where Strong found
creative fulfillment was Williamstown,
the summer-theatre haven in the Berk-
shires. In 2002, he got a slot in the festi-
val’s non-Equity troupe of ten young ac-
tors. “We were unpacking our bags, and
Jeremy had, like, four or five garments—
but all of them were, like, Prada,” a mem-
ber who roomed with him recalled. Strong
returned to Williamstown two years later.
Michelle Williams, who had just fallen
in love with Heath Ledger on the set of
“Brokeback Mountain,” was performing
in “The Cherry Orchard,” and Strong
got close to her. Williams recalls Strong
coaching her in iambic pentameter for a
Shakespeare audition and goofing around
with her “Cherry Orchard” castmates
Jessica Chastain and Chris Messina. “We
would go to parks after dark and roll
down hills in our clothes until we were
sopping wet,” Williams said.
Several years later, just after Ledger
died, Strong was broke and moved into
Williams’s town house, in Boerum Hill,
a social hub that he nicknamed Fort
Awesome. He lived there rent-free, on
and off, for more than three years. “There
was an emptiness in the house,” Wil-
liams told me. “So people moved in.”
She said that Strong lived in a basement
room with her great-grandmother’s
player piano: “He had this little bed and
stacks and stacks of books about Lin-
coln.” Friends were amazed by the sit-
uation.“He would invite us to parties
over there,” the Williamstown room-
mate said. “I was, like, ‘How the fuck
did you pull this off ?’ He’s living in a
luxury town house with a movie star!”
Some of Strong’s acquaintances see
his ability to attach himself like a rem-
ora to famous actors as part of his pas-
sion for the craft; others see it as bla-
tant networking. I told Strong that I
hoped to interview some of his collab-
orators. Usually, this requires breaching
layers of handlers, but Strong took con-
trol, giving his famous friends my phone
number and instructing them to con-
tact me. One day, I was at an A.T.M.
and got a call from Matthew McCo-
naughey. “This guy’s committed,” he said.
By the mid-aughts, Strong was mak-
ing headway Off Broadway. He played a
soldier in John Patrick Shanley’s “Defi-
ance” (he joined weapons exercises at
Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina), and
a young Spinoza in David Ives’s “New
Jerusalem” (he binged on seventeenth-cen-
tury Dutch philosophy). In 2008, an actor
in the Public Theatre’s “Conversations
in Tusculum” had a family emergency,
and Strong was asked to understudy on
six hours’ notice. He went onstage with
a script, then returned the next night, offbook. The Times critic Ben Brantley wrote
that Strong was “excellent,” which helped
him get an agent at I.C.M. But his plans
to become the next Day-Lewis were drift-
ing. For a while, he lived in the Holly-
wood Hills, where, driving home on Sun-
set Boulevard, he would pass a billboard
that read “WHAT THE SHREK JUST HAP-
PENED?” He was thirty-one and asking
himself the same question. Six years later,
when he was cast in “Succession,” he felt,
he told me, “a sense of inevitability.”I
met Strong in Rome in July, a week
after he’d wrapped the third season of
“Succession,” which concludes with a
family wedding in Tuscany. (The season
finale airs this week.) Having lived Ken-
dall’s angst for nine months, he was in
the process of unburdening himself. He
was finally able to appreciate the beauty
of Italy, he told me over salumi, since
Kendall would have been too jaded to
notice: “Another day, another villa.” (Pre-
sumably, this had also dampened a trip
he took earlier in the summer, with Rob-
ert Downey, Jr., and their families, to a
villa owned by Sting and Trudie Styler.)
On a drive down to the Amalfi Coast,
where he went to decompress, he had lis-
tened to the Tom Waits song “Who Are
You.” Discussing Kendall, he said, “It’s
weird saying his name in the third person.”
Strong had sent me text messages
from Italy, including a poem by Cecil
Day-Lewis (“Daniel’s dad”), and thoughts
on the “invisible work” of acting. Since
I’d seen him in New York, he had shaved
his head, twice—once as Kendall and
once as himself. On his phone, he showed
me photos of Jack Dorsey, the co-founder
of Twitter, both clean-shaven and with
a Rasputin beard. Strong thought that
Kendall should go through a similar
“physical evolution,” he said, citing the
third line of Dante’s Inferno. (“The
straight road had been lost sight of.”)
No one, Strong included, wanted a cli-
chéd scene of Kendall staring into the
mirror with a razor, so the transforma-
tion took place off camera. Neverthe-
less, when a stylist shaved his head,
Strong went silent, to experience the
moment as part of Kendall’s backstory.
After the season wrapped, he shaved his
head again, as an exorcism.
The next morning, we set out for the
airport. Strong and his wife, Emma Wall,
who was born in Denmark, have apart-“Every gig now is about luring sailors to their deaths—
remember when it used to be about the music?”