50 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER13, 2021
PROFILES
THE STRAIGHT MAN
“Succession”’s Jeremy Strong wants to know what’s so funny.BY MICHAELSCHULMAN
W
hen Jeremy Strong was a
teen-ager, in suburban Mas-
sachusetts, he had three
posters thumbtacked to his bedroom
wall: Daniel Day-Lewis in “My Left
Foot,” Al Pacino in “Dog Day After-
noon,” and Dustin Hoffman in “Rain
Man.” These weren’t just his favorite
actors: their careers were a road map
that he followed obsessively, like Eve
Harrington casing out a trio of Margo
Channings. He read interviews that his
heroes gave and, later, managed to get
crew jobs on their movies. By his early
twenties, he had worked for all three
men, and had adopted elements of their
full-immersion acting methods. By his
mid-thirties, after fifteen years of hus-
tling in the industry, he’d had minor
roles in a string of A-list films: “Lin-
coln,” “Zero Dark Thirty,” “Selma,” and
“The Big Short.” He’d played a staffer
in both the nineteenth-century White
House and the twenty-first-century
C.I.A. But, as he approached forty, he
felt that his master plan wasn’t panning
out—where was his Benjamin Brad-
dock, his Michael Corleone?
“You come to New York, and you’re
doing Off Off Broadway plays, and you
are in the wilderness,” Strong told me,
of his early career. “Your focus just be-
comes about the work and trying each
time to go to some inner ledge. And you
get used to people not noticing.”
Then it happened. In 2016, Kathryn
Bigelow, the Oscar-winning director of
“The Hurt Locker,” cast him in a big
role, as a National Guardsman in her
film “Detroit.” Around the same time,
Strong had lunch with Adam McKay,
who had directed him as a financial an-
alyst in “The Big Short.” McKay said
that he was executive-producing a new
HBO show called “Succession,” which
he described to Strong as a “King Lear”
for the media-industrial complex. McKay
gave him the pilot script and said, “Tell
me what role you connect with.” Strong
picked Roman Roy, the wisecracking
youngest son of Logan Roy, a Rupert
Murdoch-like media titan. “I thought,
Oh, wow, Roman is such a cool part,”
Strong said. “He’s, like, this bon-vivant
prick. I could do something that I hadn’t
done before.”
That August, Strong, who was living
in Los Angeles with his fiancée, went
to film “Detroit.” He had done deep re-
search for the role, watching military
documentaries and practicing marks-
manship at a shooting range. He ar-
ranged to miss part of his wedding-week
festivities for the filming. But, after one
day, Bigelow fired him. “I was just not
the character that she had in her mind,”
Strong said. “It was a devastating expe-
rience.” (Bigelow says that the charac-
ter wasn’t working in the story; after
Strong pleaded with her, she came up
with another part for him, as an attor-
ney.) Then he flew to Denmark to get
married, staying at a castle called Drags-
holm Slot. That’s when he got the call
that the “Succession” people had cast
Kieran Culkin as Roman.
Evidently, the role hadn’t been Mc-
Kay’s to give. Strong tried to let go of
the fantasy he had pursued single-mind-
edly for decades. But the show’s creator,
Jesse Armstrong, agreed to audition him
for the role of Kendall Roy, the moody
middle son and Logan’s heir apparent.
“I’ve always felt like an outsider with a
fire in my belly,” Strong told me. “And
so the disappointment and the feeling
of being thwarted—it only sharpened
my need and hunger. I went in with a
vengeance.” He tore through books about
corporate gamesmanship, including Mi-
chael Wolff ’s biography of Rupert Mur-
doch, and cherry-picked details he liked;
apparently, Murdoch’s son James ties
his shoes extremely tightly, which told
Strong something about his “inner ten-
sile strength.”
At the audition, Strong, his shoes
tied tight, read a scene between Ken-dall and the C.E.O. of a startup that
he’s trying to acquire. Armstrong was
skeptical. He asked Strong to “loosen
the language,” and the scene transformed.
“It was about, like, Beastie Boys-ing it
up,” Strong recalled. “I was missing the
patois of bro-speak.” By the end of the
day, he had the part.
Kendall is the show’s dark prince, a
would-be mogul puffed up with false bra-
vado. He is often ridiculous in his self-
seriousness, especially when he’s trying
to dominate his indomitable father. Strong
was perfectly cast: a background player
who had spent his life aspiring, and often
maneuvering, to fill the shoes of his act-
ing gods. “Kendall desperately wants it
to be his turn,” Strong said. Last year, he
won an Emmy Award for the role.
Strong, who is now forty-two, has the
hangdog face of someone who wasn’t
destined for stardom. But his mild ap-
pearance belies a relentless, sometimes
preening intensity. He speaks with a slow,
deliberate cadence, especially when talking
about acting, which he does with a monk-
like solemnity. “To me, the stakes are life
and death,” he told me, about playing
Kendall. “I take him as seriously as I take
my own life.” He does not find the char-
acter funny, which is probably why he’s
so funny in the role.
When I asked Strong about the rap
that Kendall performs in Season 2, at a
gala for his father—a top contender for
Kendall’s most cringeworthy moment—
he gave an unsmiling answer about Ras-
kolnikov, referencing Kendall’s “mon-
strous pain.” Kieran Culkin told me,
“After the first season, he said something
to me like, ‘I’m worried that people might
think that the show is a comedy.’ And I
said, ‘I think the show is a comedy.’ He
thought I was kidding.” Part of the ap-
peal of “Succession” is its amalgam of
drama and bone-dry satire. When I told
Strong that I, too, thought of the show
as a dark comedy, he looked at me with
incomprehension and asked, “In the sense