On “Succession,” Jeremy Strong Doesn’t Get the Joke

 

 

By

Michael Schulman

The New Yorker

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.

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. “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 appearance 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 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

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 circumstances 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.”

Strong walked through the scene with Gold, without emoting. Then he disappeared. He often refuses to rehearse—“I want every scene to feel like I’m encountering a bear in the woods”—despite the wishes of his fellow-actors. “It’s hard for me to actually describe his process, because I don’t really see it,” Kieran Culkin said. “He puts himself in a bubble.” Before I interviewed his castmates, Strong warned me, “I don’t know how popular the way I work is amongst our troupe.” Since Kendall is the black sheep of a warring family, Strong’s self-alienation may be a way of creating tension onscreen. Though the cast is generally loose and collegial, Strong, during Season 2, began going to the makeup trailer only when no other actors were there—“which I remember making everyone else roll their eyes,” a cast member told me.

When I asked Brian Cox, who plays Logan, the patriarch, to describe Strong’s process, he struck a note of fatherly concern. “The result that Jeremy gets is always pretty tremendous,” he said. “I just worry about what he does to himself. I worry about the crises he puts himself through in order to prepare.” Cox, a classically trained British stage actor, has a “turn it on, turn it off” approach to acting, and his relationship with Strong recalls a famous story about Laurence Olivier working with Dustin Hoffman on the 1976 film “Marathon Man.” On learning that Hoffman had stayed up partying for three nights before a scene in which he had to appear sleep-deprived, Olivier said, “My dear boy, why don’t you try acting?” Cox told me, “Actors are funny creatures. I’ve worked with intense actors before. It’s a particularly American disease, I think, this inability to separate yourself off while you’re doing the job.”

If Strong approaches his role as if it were Hamlet, Culkin plays Roman like an insult comic. “The way Jeremy put it to me is that, like, you get in the ring, you do the scene, and at the end each actor goes to their corner,” Culkin told me. “I’m, like, This isn’t a battle. This is a dance.” It’s possible that the mishmash of approaches adds to the sense of familial unease. Or maybe not. Culkin said, of Strong’s self-isolation, “That might be something that helps him. I can tell you that it doesn’t help me.” Recently, Strong, concerned about press reports suggesting that he was “difficult,” sent me a text message saying, “I don’t particularly think ease or even accord are virtues in creative work, and sometimes there must even be room for necessary roughness, within the boundaries dictated by the work.”

At the Woolworth Building, Strong reappeared in Kendall’s fleece and power sunglasses. He consulted with Armstrong: shades or no shades? Armstrong suggested that he whip them off mid-scene, but Strong thought that would feel phony. “If we’re holding a mirror up to nature, then let’s not contrive things,” he said later. For Strong, such minutiae are important enough to slam the brakes on a shoot. “Whatever gets you through the night,” Armstrong told me. Between takes, a writer named Will Tracy recalled an earlier scene, which called for Kendall to meet a reporter over a Waldorf salad: “Jeremy said, ‘A Waldorf salad’s way too old-school. That’s something my dad would eat. It should be a fennel salad with a light vinaigrette.’ ” They changed the salad.

In the Rava scene, Kendall complains about his girlfriend, Naomi. During one take, Strong threw in a new line: “She, uh, thinks she’s on the ‘attractive edge of a co-dependent black hole,’ whatever the fuck that means.” The phrase was lifted from an e-mail that Armstrong had sent him about Kendall and Naomi’s relationship. Strong hadn’t asked about repurposing it on camera. “Better to ask forgiveness than to ask permission,” he told me afterward. Ad-libbing is permitted on “Succession,” but Strong’s improvisations often strike his co-stars as prepared speeches. Culkin recalled a scene from Season 1, with the two of them and Sarah Snook, who plays their sister, Shiv. The family is in New Mexico for group therapy, and Kendall, a recovering addict, goes on a bender. (Strong occasionally gets tipsy for scenes in which Kendall falls off the wagon.)

“He kept doing this speech that he had sort of written,” Culkin said. “All I remember is him saying ‘rootin’-tootin’ ’ a lot. By the third take, he starts that speech again, and Snook looks at him, as Shiv, and goes, ‘Shut. Up. Kendall.’ ”

When Strong was done with the Rava scene, which was ultimately cut, we walked west on Park Place. At a corner, he ripped up his script pages and tossed them in a trash can. “This is my favorite part of work,” he said. “It’s like a stay of execution every time you finish a scene and it goes O.K., and you can tear it up and let it go.”

I first met Strong in the summer of 2003, just after graduating from Yale, where I was two years behind him and had seen him act in student plays. I got an internship at a film producer’s office, where Strong, then a day-jobbing theatre actor, worked as an assistant. The producer, an Israeli woman, would scream expletives into her phone all day, while the staff worked on preproduction for an indie film called “The Ballad of Jack and Rose.” Strong taught me how to use the copy machine.

As it turned out, “The Ballad of Jack and Rose” would change his life. The film, directed by Rebecca Miller, starred Miller’s husband, Daniel Day-Lewis, as an aging hippie living on an abandoned commune. Strong got himself hired as Day-Lewis’s assistant for the shoot, on Prince Edward Island. Day-Lewis was already legendary for his immersion techniques: staying in character between takes, building his own canoe for “The Last of the Mohicans.” He arrived in Canada early and helped the crew construct the commune houses, since his character would have built them. (After he botched a window installation, the crew assigned him a dining-room table.) During the shoot, Day-Lewis lived in his own cottage, away from his family. Since his character wastes away from a heart ailment in the course of the film, he starved himself, eating a meagre vegan diet, and became so emaciated that Miller was alarmed.

• 
  

Cartoon by Zachary Kanin

Strong had driven up in his father’s car. Strapped in the passenger seat was Day-Lewis’s prop mandolin, which Strong recalled handling “like a knight errant guarding a relic.” Strong had turned down a chance to act at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, which, he said, felt in some ways like “an abdication of my path.” But he realized that this was an opportunity to be “the sorcerer’s apprentice.” He told me, “My job was essentially a disappearing act, to be unobtrusive and on hand and play along with the game of it. I kept a diary, and, when I looked at it once, later, the thing that was clear was that my antennae were completely alight and absorbent.”

He got so engrossed in his menial tasks that some of the crew cruelly nicknamed him Cletus, after the redneck character on “The Simpsons.” “His whole brain was focussed on Daniel Day-Lewis,” one person recalled. “I never really saw him unless he was standing outside Daniel’s trailer.” Miller remembered that Strong bought a lot of nuts and stashed them in Day-Lewis’s refrigerator, “when Daniel was trying to starve himself to death. He was so concerned about him getting thinner and thinner that he was feeding him up.” Strong remembered the nut story differently, but, out of fealty to Day-Lewis, who is fiercely private, he would not elaborate.

Day-Lewis became an important mentor. Strong said, “At the end of the summer, he wrote me a note that I have still, that contains many of what have become my most deeply held precepts and beliefs about this work, and which I have treasured and will treasure until I die.” (Strong wouldn’t disclose what was in it.) Nearly a decade later, he was cast opposite Day-Lewis in “Lincoln,” as John Nicolay, the President’s personal secretary. Nicolay was “utterly devoted to Lincoln,” Strong said. “Those were easy shoes to fill.” When Strong won his Emmy, last fall, he wore a floppy taupe bow tied loosely around his neck—nearly identical to the black bow that Day-Lewis wore to accept his Oscar for “My Left Foot.”

Strong’s association with Day-Lewis had actually started before “Jack and Rose,” when he still had the poster shrine in his bedroom. When he was sixteen, he got a job in the greenery department of “The Crucible,” starring Day-Lewis, which was filming near where Strong lived. For one scene, he held a branch outside a window. In high school, Strong also interned for the editor of “Looking for Richard,” released in 1996, in which Al Pacino ruminates on playing Richard III, and he worked in the sound department on Steven Spielberg’s historical drama “Amistad,” for which he held a boom mike while Anthony Hopkins gave a speech as John Quincy Adams. When I asked how he got these jobs as a teen-ager, without connections, Strong said, “I just wrote letters.”

Unlike the ultra-privileged Roys, Strong grew up working class, in Boston. His father, David, worked in juvenile jails. His mother, Maureen, was a hospice nurse and a spiritual seeker; she would bring Strong and his younger brother (who now works for Zoom) to ashrams, or to an African Methodist Episcopal Church in Cambridge, where they were among the only white congregants. Until Strong was ten, the family lived in a rough neighborhood in Jamaica Plain. “My parents felt tremendous economic pressure, just trying to survive and tread water,” he said. “Often, it was somewhere I just wanted to get out of.” They kept a canoe on cinder blocks in the back yard; since actual vacations were a “pipe dream,” the boys would sit in the canoe and take imaginary trips.

In order to send their kids to better public schools, his parents moved the family to the suburb of Sudbury, which came as a culture shock. “I had never seen a Mercedes-Benz before,” Strong recalled. “It was a kind of country-club town where we didn’t belong to the country club.” To fit in, he did some quick character work, trading his Chicago Bulls jerseys and gold chains for J.Crew polo shirts. But the biggest change was that he got involved in Act/Tunes, a children’s theatre group, where, starting in fifth grade, he acted in musicals, including “Oliver!,” in which he played the Artful Dodger. His father picked up extra shifts as a security guard in order to finance a trip to L.A. Father and son stayed at the Oakwood apartments and paid a scammy manager to help Jeremy get auditions. Then they came home.

One of the other kids in Act/Tunes was the older sister of Chris Evans, the future Captain America. “I was probably nine, ten, going to my sister’s shows, and even then thinking, Damn, this kid is great!” Evans said, about Strong. He later went to Strong’s high school, and still speaks about him with the awe of a freshman gaping at an upperclassman: “He was a little bit of a celebrity in my mind.” In “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Strong played Bottom to Evans’s Demetrius, and Evans has vivid memories of Strong playing identical twins in a Goldoni farce. “The cast would poke their heads through the curtain, just to watch him do his thing,” Evans said. “In the end, one of his characters drinks poison. I think every night the death scene grew by about thirty seconds.”

Strong applied to colleges with a recommendation letter from DreamWorks, the studio that produced “Amistad,” and got a scholarship to Yale. He thought he would major in theatre studies, but, on the first day of Yale’s intro-to-acting class, the professor talked about Stanislavski and drew diagrams of circles of energy. “Something in me just shut down,” Strong said. “I remember feeling, I need to run from this and protect whatever inchoate instinct I might have.” He majored in English instead, while starring in extracurricular productions of “American Buffalo,” “Hughie,” and “The Indian Wants the Bronx.” These were all plays that Pacino had done, as if Strong were checking off boxes on his theatrical résumé. During his junior year, Strong even managed to arrange for Pacino to come to campus to teach a master class. The heavily promoted visit was largely sponsored by the Yale Dramat, the school’s undergraduate theatre group.

Many alumni recall the visit as a debacle. Pacino’s acting advice was vague. Strong had appointed himself the intermediary between the Dramat and Pacino’s office, and the costs of town cars, posters, and a celebratory dinner blew up the budget. To lure Pacino, Strong had persuaded the Dramat to concoct a prestigious-sounding award, and the students commissioned a pewter chalice from Mory’s, a New Haven tavern, on which the winners’ names would be engraved each year. But Pacino took the chalice home, adding to the enormous bill. “Basically, in order for Jeremy to have his fantasy of meeting Al Pacino play out, he nearly bankrupted a hundred-year-old college-theatre company,” an alumnus said. “But he had one wonderful night of getting to hang out with Al Pacino.”

Strong admits to being a “rogue agent” in the Pacino affair, but he doesn’t remember the cost overruns. “I never really felt accepted by the Dramat community,” he told me. Within the soap-opera bubble of college theatre, his sheer determination was polarizing. “You always had the feeling that he was operating on some level that was past the level that you were at,” another classmate recalled. “I’d never met anyone else at Yale with that careerist drive.” (Their graduating class included Ron DeSantis, the current governor of Florida.) Other peers recall a more ingenuous superstriver. One summer, Strong and five classmates went to L.A., where he had wangled an internship at the production office of Dustin Hoffman, hero No. 3. Strong didn’t have a car, so he got a colleague to loan him a prop Mercedes with a hole in the floor. On his first payday, a friend recalled, “Jeremy was, like, ‘Everybody, we’re going shopping!’ We went to Rodeo Drive, and he blew his whole paycheck on two shirts.” (Strong, citing his “fanatically fastidious aesthetic,” said that he was more likely to have shopped at Maxfield.)

Strong moved to New York three weeks before 9/11. He lived in a tiny apartment in SoHo and waited tables at the restaurant downstairs. Friends remember the apartment as comically austere, with a mattress on the floor, piles of books and scripts, and a closet of incongruously high-end clothes; he had a Dries Van Noten suit and a Costume National hoodie that he wore to shreds, but few essentials. Strong said that he was living in what Sir Francis Bacon called “gilded squalor.” In addition to working at the restaurant, he was a room-service waiter at a hotel, and he shredded documents as a temp for a construction company. He would go to a FedEx store and cadge free cardboard envelopes, slip in head shots and tapes of monologues, and hand-deliver them to agencies. “The first year in New York was really hard,” he told me. “I don’t think I had any auditions. It was this feeling of being cut off from your oxygen supply.”

At some point, Chris Evans, who had broken out with “Not Another Teen Movie,” got a call from Strong, who was looking for help getting representation. “I said, ‘Holy shit, Jeremy! First of all, I can’t believe that. Second of all, this is your lucky day,’ ” Evans told me. He had Strong meet his agent at C.A.A., but the guy never followed up; Hollywood is made for Chris Evanses, not Jeremy Strongs. It wasn’t until the television 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 Berkshires. In 2002, he got a slot in the festival’s non-Equity troupe of ten young actors. “We were unpacking our bags, and Jeremy had, like, four or five garments—but all of them were, like, Prada,” a member 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,” Williams 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 Lincoln.” Friends were amazed by the situation.“He would invite us to parties over there,” the Williamstown roommate 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 remora to famous actors as part of his passion for the craft; others see it as blatant networking. I told Strong that I hoped to interview some of his collaborators. Usually, this requires breaching layers of handlers, but Strong took control, giving his famous friends my phone number and instructing them to contact me. One day, I was at an A.T.M. and got a call from Matthew McConaughey. “This guy’s committed,” he said.

By the mid-aughts, Strong was making headway Off Broadway. He played a soldier in John Patrick Shanley’s “Defiance” (he joined weapons exercises at Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina), and a young Spinoza in David Ives’s “New Jerusalem” (he binged on seventeenth-century 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, off book. 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 drifting. For a while, he lived in the Hollywood Hills, where, driving home on Sunset Boulevard, he would pass a billboard that read “WHAT THE SHREK JUST HAPPENED?” 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 Kendall’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.” (Presumably, this had also dampened a trip he took earlier in the summer, with Robert 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 listened 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 clichéd scene of Kendall staring into the mirror with a razor, so the transformation took place off camera. Nevertheless, 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 apartments 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 passages from “The Waste Land.”

As we passed through airport security, 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 security 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, Kendall is at the Shed, in Hudson Yards, planning his fortieth-birthday party. During one take, in a moment of “exultant 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” injury. 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 flight, Strong popped a Xanax; he gets anxious flying, which he attributes to the “total surrender of control.” As we boarded, an attendant told him that his cloth mask was unacceptable. 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 relieved 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 ambition.” But, before leaving the city to join his family, he wanted a hamburger. Noma’s burger offshoot was closed, so he looked up the nearest location of Gasoline Grill, a chain that makes his second-favorite burger in Copenhagen. The Web site said that the burgers were available 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 illustrate a good point,” he said. “Which is that all drama is about wanting something very badly and not getting what you want.”

The 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 vacuumed 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 struggling with work-life balance. “I don’t know if 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 husband while he was playing Kendall, she said, “He does a really good job of maintaining what he’s doing but also creating a space for the family and a normal life.” Strong, who was towelling off, overheard. 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, having picked up a macchiato in town. (A self-described “coffee snob,” he had travelled 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 gargoyle-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 wanting,” 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.” ♦

---

“Every gig now is about luring sailors to their deaths—remember when it used to be about the music?"