A loooong Jeremy Strong interview that discusses his method acting
“To me, the stakes are life and death,” Jeremy Strong said, about playing Kendall Roy in “Succession.” “I take him as seriously as I take my own life.” https://t.co/0P9BkUFect
- The New Yorker (@NewYorker) December 6, 2021
Some choice quotes/anecdotes:
* “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.
* Kieran Culkin: “After the first season, [Jeremy] 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.”
* While shooting the 1968 protest scenes for “The Trial of the Chicago 7," Strong asked a stunt coördinator to rough him up; he also requested to be sprayed with real tear gas. Aaron Sorkin: “I don’t like saying no to Jeremy, but there were two hundred people in that scene and another seventy on the crew, so I declined to spray them with poison gas.”
* In 2014, Strong played Robert Downey, Jr.’s mentally disabled brother in “The Judge.” (To prepare, he spent time with an autistic person, as Hoffman had for “Rain Man.”) When RDJ 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.
* 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.
* Brian 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.”
* “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.”
* 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.
* When he was sixteen, he got a job in the greenery department of “The Crucible,” starring Daniel 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 teenager, without connections, Strong said, “I just wrote letters.”
* 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 met Michelle Williams when they did a play together. Several years later, just after Heath 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!”
* 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.”
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