“Kendall wins but loses” – Jeremy Strong on Succession

Jeremy Strong won the 2020 Best Actor Emmy as Kendall Roy in Succession, the multi-award-winning HBO drama series about four very rich siblings behaving very badly while trying to win their father’s approval – and control of his company, a global media and entertainment empire.

With all nine episodes of Succession S3 now on Showmax, we caught up with Jeremy to find out more about the hit show, which is currently at #4 on IMDb’s Most Popular TV Show list and has a 98% critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Early in Season 3, another character describes Kendall’s end-of-Season-2 public attack on Logan and Waystar Royco as “histrionic and meretricious”, and Kendall himself as a “self-regarding popinjay”. What are your views on that?

I mean, firstly, what wonderful writing. My views on that? Well, I certainly disagree with it. At the end of Season 2, when my father refers to the boy in England as an NRPI – No Real Person Involved – I see the heart of darkness with painful and final clarity, his lack of an ethical moral core, and the howling void is revealed to me.

And with that comes an almost divine summons – I’m gonna get Biblical here – to spread the light. Kendall has almost a moment of enlightenment on the way to the press conference, and realises that what he has to do – and in a sense what his whole life has been leading up to doing – is to go on a crusade to detoxify and cleanse the corporate culture.

I would call myself in Season 3 a visionary and a leader. There’s a sense of mission. There’s a messianic sense to the character now, which other people might have all kinds of feelings about. But it’s very clear to Kendall what must be done, in the sense that, in both senses of the term, here comes the sun/son.

You said recently: “I remember things that are instructive. They are like northern lights for me.” What was the most instructive description of Kendall from your earliest conversations with Jesse Armstrong about the character?

I went to visit the writers’ room in Brixton in South London about four or five years ago, when we were starting the first season, and Jesse Armstrong had written on a note card: ‘Kendall wins but loses.’ And that stayed with me, the paradox, the tension of those two things that are ever present in this character. That no matter what, when he’s on the top, he’s on the bottom. There’s a sense of both being on top of the world at this moment, but also in the ninth rung of hell.

Where does Kendall’s “muzzled anguish”, as you’ve described it, come from?

Well, I think it comes from a lifetime of being stifled, of being thwarted, from a lack of nurture and love from his parents. I think this character has a lot of rage.

The show in a way explores legacy, right? But it’s about a legacy of damage, and it’s about a legacy of abuse that is endemic in this family – and understanding that there’s a spill-over into the culture. The toxicity within this family finds its way out into the groundwater, and the groundwater is poisoned.

Where does the anguish come from? I mean, listen, I also think the anguish comes from what happens at the end of Season 1. Until then, it’s a story of ambition. The first season is a story of ascendancy and being the incumbent – and then a tragedy happens. Something that really irrevocably changes this character.

Jesse and I talked a lot about Crime and Punishment and what Dostoevsky described as this ‘monstrous pain’. That monstrous pain of the secret that Raskolnikov has, and the way that that secret separates him from the world and puts an unbridgeable chasm between him and his former self and whatever was good in him. That is a terrible anguish that is muzzled because it can’t be shared. And it has to be internalised. So that’s where that comes from.

You had a lot of intense two-hander scenes with Brian Cox in Season 2 – effectively they bracketed the season – and presumably you have more of them, at an even more intense pitch, in Season 3. How are they to film for you?

Brian is pound for pound as great an actor as has ever walked the earth. So it’s immeasurably exciting to be in the ring with him. He is a primal force, like Logan.

We have a lot to do together over the course of the canvas that we’ve been working on, and we have a lot to do together in this third season. But it’s always like we meet at the top of the mountain, so the stakes are as high as they can possibly be.

We don’t rehearse our scenes, to Brian’s [initial reluctance]. So we just meet each other in the ring, and it’s just like he’s a heavyweight, and it makes me summon every ounce of artistry and courage that I can summon.