THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER13, 2021 57
ments in Brooklyn and Copenhagen,
and during the pandemic they bought a
summer house in Tisvilde, a seaside town
north of Copenhagen. Strong’s family
was awaiting him there. There hadn’t
been much time for sightseeing in Rome,
so our driver circled past the Colosseum,
shouting out fun facts—“Five hundred
before Christ was built the first sewer
system!”—as Strong, trying to describe
a scene from “Succession,” quoted pas-
sages from “The Wasteland.”
As we passed through airport secu-
rity, Strong set off the metal detector. He
stepped back and took off his lucky-
charm necklace. It beeped again. He took
off his belt. It beeped a third time. “I
have a leg brace,” he explained to a se-
curity guy, and lifted his pants leg. After
getting patted down, he told me that he
had hurt himself on set. “I jumped off a
stage, thinking I could fly, but it turns
out I can’t,” he said. “It made sense in
the moment, though.” In the scene, Ken-
dall is at the Shed, in Hudson Yards,
planning his fortieth-birthday party.
During one take, in a moment of “exul-
tant anticipation,” Strong leaped off a
five-foot-high platform and landed in
hard Gucci shoes, impacting his femur
and his tibia. (The take was not used.)
This was not his first “Succession” in-
jury. In Season 1, Kendall gets stuck in
traffic on the way to a board meeting
and sprints through the streets. Strong
wanted to be sweaty and breathless for
each take, and he fractured his left foot
running in Tom Ford dress shoes. “It’s
the cost to himself that worries me,” Brian
Cox told me. “I just feel that he just has
to be kinder to himself, and therefore
has to be a bit kinder to everybody else.”
Before the f light, Strong popped a
Xanax; he gets anxious flying, which he
attributes to the “total surrender of con-
trol.” As we boarded, an attendant told
him that his cloth mask was unaccept-
able. With ten minutes until the gate
closed, he raced through the terminal
looking for a surgical mask. He found a
vending machine, but the instructions
were in Italian. When he finally figured
it out, the mask got stuck in the rotating
dispenser. He tried tilting the machine,
but then told himself to keep cool. He
ran into a candy store, which carried child-
size surgical masks. He returned to the
gate wearing a tiny sherbet-colored square.
At seven that evening, we touched
down in Copenhagen. Strong was re-
lieved to be returning to Tisvilde. “I don’t
feel stress there,” he said in the car. “I
don’t feel colonized by all the wanting
and needing. If I’m in L.A. or New York,
I feel so encumbered by the weight of
the profession that I’m in. And ambi-
tion.” But, before leaving the city to join
his family, he wanted a hamburger. No-
ma’s burger offshoot was closed, so he
looked up the nearest location of Gaso-
line Grill, a chain that makes his sec-
ond-favorite burger in Copenhagen. The
Web site said that the burgers were avail-
able until eleven, or until they sold out.
The driver brought us to the Vesterport
train station, where there was a Gasoline
Grill kiosk on the platform—but the
woman there said that they were all gone.
“See, now I’m determined,” Strong said.
We drove to another location, at a gas
station. No dice. Foiled in his quest for
the second-best burger in Copenhagen,
he got back in the car and slumped his
head. It was getting dark, so he directed
the driver toward Tisvilde. “It does illus-
trate a good point,” he said. “Which is
that all drama is about wanting some-
thing very badly and not getting what
you want.”T
he next morning, I met Strong at
his house in Tisvilde, the converted
laundry building of a now demolished
turn-of-the-century hotel. He and Wall
had begun the pandemic at her family’s
farmhouse, in the Danish countryside,
where they chopped wood and vacu-
umed up spiders. Craving civilization,
Strong found Tisvilde on Google Earth.
They rented the laundry building on
Airbnb, and he wound up buying it. Since
then, new floorboards had been installed
incorrectly and were now warped and
ridging up, like a mountain range.
We walked to the beach to meet up
with Strong’s wife and kids. Tisvilde is a
laid-back place, full of thatched roofs that
look like shaggy creatures. Strong was
approached by bands of blond teen-age
boys who recognized him from “The
Gentlemen,” a Guy Ritchie gangster flick
that Strong did not care to discuss on the
record. At the beach, Wall, who was eight
months pregnant, was playing with their
two small daughters. Strong, happily free
of Kendall, helped build sandcastles and
jumped in the water. He admits to strug-
gling with work-life balance. “I don’t knowif I even believe in balance,” he told me.
“I believe in extremity.”
He had met Wall, an even-tempered
child psychiatrist, at a party in New York
during Hurricane Sandy. When I asked
her if she sensed a difference in her hus-
band while he was playing Kendall, she
said, “He does a really good job of main-
taining what he’s doing but also creat-
ing a space for the family and a normal
life.” Strong, who was towelling off, over-
heard. Later, he told me that her answer
had surprised him. “I think she feels a
sort of energy shift,” he said. “But it does
make me feel like I’m living a double
life.” He brought up the espionage term
“the legend,” the fake biography that a
spy memorizes before assuming a phony
identity. “You have to commit to your
legend,” he said, of acting. “At the time,
I’m not sure which one is more real. Am
I committing to the legend at home,
where I’m the father and the husband,
or the legend at work?”
He walked me to a nearby forest, hav-
ing picked up a macchiato in town. (A
self-described “coffee snob,” he had trav-
elled through Italy with his own grinder,
and had beans delivered from a roastery
in Aarhus.) The woods were thick with
towering birches. Strong’s leg ached, but
he insisted that we keep going. He asked
if I had read the Milan Kundera novel
“Slowness.” “You get here, and it forces
you to decelerate,” he said.
We reached a rock engraved with the
word troldeskov: troll forest. As we walked
on, a mossy carpet appeared underfoot,
and the trees became gnarled and gar-
goyle-like, deformed by the howling
winds off the Kattegat sea. “They look
like something in a Bosch painting,”
Strong said. “They look anguished.” It
seemed like a place where Dante might
find a portal to the underworld.
We broke through to an empty beach.
Strong stood on a dune and looked out
to sea in a Byronic pose, clutching the
fuchsia macchiato cup in one hand. I
asked about the sense of “wanting” he
had mentioned the evening before. “I
think my life has been animated by want-
ing,” he said. “I felt like there was so
much to prove, both to myself and to
the community, for so long. But, in a
way, I got that out of my system.” As
we turned back to the troll forest, he
added, “Now I feel like I’m up against
myself in the ring.”