When Jeremy Strong was a teen-ager, in suburban Massachusetts, he had three posters thumbtacked to his bedroom wall: Daniel Day-Lewis in “My Left Foot,” Al Pacino in “Dog Day Afternoon,” 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 hustling in the industry, he’d had minor roles in a string of A-list films: “Lincoln,” “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 Braddock, 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 becomes 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 analyst 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 research for the role, watching military documentaries and practicing marksmanship at a shooting range. He arranged 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 experience.” (Bigelow says that the character wasn’t working in the story; after Strong pleaded with her, she came up with another part for him, as an attorney.) Then he flew to Denmark to get married, staying at a castle called Dragsholm Slot. That’s when he got the call that the “Succession” people had cast Kieran Culkin as Roman.
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An interview with J. Smith-Cameron, who plays Gerri on “Succession.”
Evidently, the role hadn’t been McKay’s to give. Strong tried to let go of the fantasy he had pursued single-mindedly 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 Michael Wolff’s biography of Rupert Murdoch, and cherry-picked details he liked; apparently, Murdoch’s son James ties his shoes extremely tightly, which told Strong something about his “inner tensile strength.”
At the audition, Strong, his shoes tied tight, read a scene between Kendall 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 bravado. 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 acting gods. “Kendalldesperately 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 appearance belies a relentless, sometimes preening intensity. He speaks with a slow, deliberate cadence, especially whentalking 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 character funny, which is probably why he’s so funny in the role.
“I just realized—I’m indifferent to landscape.” Cartoon by Victoria Roberts Link copied
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 Raskolnikov, referencing Kendall’s “monstrous 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 appeal 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 that, like, Chekhov is comedy?” No, I said, in the sense that it’s funny. “That’s exactly why we cast Jeremy in that role,” McKay told me. “Because he’s not playing it like a comedy. He’s playing it like he’s Hamlet.”
Actors try to find the real in the make-believe, but anyone who has worked with Strong will tell you that he goes to unusual lengths. Last year, he played the Yippie activist Jerry Rubin in Aaron Sorkin’s film “The Trial of the Chicago 7.” While shooting the 1968 protest scenes, Strong asked a stunt coördinator to rough him up; he also requested to be sprayed with real tear gas. “I don’t like saying no to Jeremy,” Sorkin told me. “But there were two hundred people in that scene and another seventy on the crew, so I declined to spray them with poison gas.” Between takes of the trial scenes, in which the Yippies mock Judge Julius Hoffman, played by Frank Langella, Strong would read aloud from Langella’s memoir in silly voices, and he put a remote-controlled fart machine below the judge’s chair. “Every once in a while, I’d say, ‘Great. Let’s do it again, and this time, Jeremy, maybe don’t play the kazoo in the middle of Frank Langella’s monologue,’” Sorkin said.
Strong has always worked this way. In his twenties, he was an assistant to the playwright Wendy Wasserstein, typing up her manuscripts. At night, he performed a one-man play by Conor McPherson in a tiny midtown bar, playing an alcoholic Irishman. Wasserstein discovered that Strong was spending a lot of time with her Irish doorman, studying his accent. Before Wasserstein died, in 2006—Strong was one of the few people who knew that she had lymphoma—she thought of writing a play based on him, titled “Enter Doorman.”
This fall, Strong was shooting James Gray’s film “Armageddon Time,” playing a plumber based on the director’s father. Strong let his hair return to its natural gray—it’s darkened for “Succession”—and sent me videos of himself shadowing a real handyman for research, repeating back terms like “flare nuts” in a honking Queens accent. Costumes and props are like talismans for him. In 2012, he played a possible victim of childhood sexual abuse in Amy Herzog’s “The Great God Pan,” at Playwrights Horizons. “There was a shirt he wore that was really important for him, and for compositional reasons we wanted to try it in a different color,” Herzog told me. “I remember him saying that the shirt he was wearing had functioned as his armor, and this new shirt wasn’t like armor.” They let him keep the shirt.
Strong’s dedication strikes some collaborators as impressive, others as self-indulgent. “All I know is, he crosses the Rubicon,” Robert Downey, Jr., told me. In 2014, Strong played Downey’s mentally disabled brother in “The Judge.” (To prepare, he spent time with an autistic person, as Hoffman had for “Rain Man.”) When Downey shot a funeral scene, Strong paced around the set weeping loudly, even though he wasn’t called that day. He asked for personalized props that weren’t in the script, including a family photo album. “It was almost swatting him away like he was an annoying gnat—I had bigger things to deal with,” a member of the design team recalled.
“I think you have to go through whatever the ordeal is that the character has to go through,” Strong told me. This extreme approach—Robert De Niro shaving down his teeth for “Cape Fear,” Leonardo DiCaprio eating raw bison liver for “The Revenant”—is often described as Method acting, a much abused term that, in its classic sense, involves summoning emotions from personal experience and projecting them onto a character. Strong does not consider himself a Method actor. Far from mining his own life, he practices what he calls “identity diffusion.” “If I have any method at all, it is simply this: to clear away anything—anything—that is not the character and the circ*mstances of the scene,” he explained. “And usually that means clearing away almost everything around and inside you, so that you can be a more complete vessel for the work at hand.”
Talking about his process, he quoted the jazz pianist Keith Jarrett: “I connect every music-making experience I have, including every day here in the studio, with a great power, and if I do not surrender to it nothing happens.” During our conversations, Strong cited bits of wisdom from Carl Jung, F.Scott Fitzgerald, Karl Ove Knausgaard (he is a “My Struggle” superfan), Robert Duvall, Meryl Streep, Harold Pinter (“The more acute the experience, the less articulate its expression”), the Danish filmmaker Tobias Lindholm, T.S. Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, and old proverbs (“When fishermen cannot go to sea, they mend their nets”). When I noted that he was a sponge for quotations, he turned grave and said, “I’m not a religious person, but I think I’ve concocted my own book of hymns.”
We first sat down in April, at a restaurant in Williamsburg. Strong, an avowed foodie, seemed to know everyone who worked there. He was midway through shooting Season 3, and he wore Kendall’s brown corduroy jacket everywhere; Strong often borrows items from the wardrobe department, to help “elide the line” between fiction and life. He also wore a chain of good-luck charms that looked like dog tags, including one in the shape of the BT Tower, in London, which he used to gaze at from the window of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where he took classes as an eighteen-year-old. “It was like a prayer I had, not knowing if I would have the courage to be an actor,” he told me, over trout almondine. He went on, “I can’t work in a way that feels like I’m making a television show. I need, for whatever reason, to believe that it’s real and commit myself to that sense of belief.”
Later, he told me that his recounting of his “Succession” audition had been colored by Kendall. “The narrative was: I’m determined, I’m a fighter, I’m full of doubt,” he said. “And those things are all true of Kendall. I think they’re maybe true of me, but they’re not, maybe, what I would have talked about if I weren’t in the middle of working.” I began to wonder if I’d been interviewing an actor playing Kendall Roy or a character impersonating Jeremy Strong.
One spring morning, Strong was outside the Woolworth Building, in lower Manhattan, filming a short scene between Kendall and his ex-wife, Rava, played by Natalie Gold. Kendall is picking up his two small children to take them to Italy when Rava drops some unnerving news: the kids have told her that their nanny screams at them and steals money from wallets. Like “Succession” at its best, the scene is full of passive-aggressive parries. “Great,” Kendall says, before ushering the kids into a Suburban. “You just planted fire ants in my brain.”
On the sidewalk, Jesse Armstrong hovered behind a monitor. “You’re seeing Kendall right at the end of the season, and it’s been a long and painful process,” he explained. In the Season 2 cliffhanger, Kendall denounces his father at a press conference, and he begins Season 3 on a messianic high. Before the season started shooting, Strong was vacationing in Bora Bora and rode a Fliteboard, a motorized surfboard that provides a precarious sense of flight. He brought that sensation to Kendall, he told me: “He thinks he’s flying, but he’s about to fall any second.” By the eighth episode, when he’s off to Italy, his legal revolt against his father has sputtered. Armstrong told me, “That high Kendall had, the possibility of change, has dwindled, too. So he’s not in a great place.”
