Succession has made him one of TV’s hottest stars, and as the final series of the Roy family drama arrives, the actor talks about bromance, bars — and the unassuming power of Cousin Greg.
Before meeting me in a bar in midtown New York one Saturday evening, Nicholas Braun spends the afternoon mooching around the Gagosian gallery and drinking cocktails with none other than . . . Matthew Macfadyen. That’s right, Cousin Greg and Tom Wambsgans from Succession — the bromance that brings light relief to the show’s dark heart — are even closer in real life than on screen.
“God, I love Matthew,” Braun, 34, says in a tone that comes perilously close to soppy. “I just feel extremely close to him — when we finished shooting the last season I sobbed saying goodbye. It’s still hard to get through a scene with him without laughing.”
Even though Braun and Macfadyen are currently spending their every working hour staring into each other’s eyes as they finish shooting Succession’s fourth and final series, they couldn’t bear to be parted over the weekend. “I haven’t been to a museum since I don’t even remember. But we wanted to hang, so this was the activity, and then we went to Bemelmans,” Braun says, referring to the iconic Upper East Side bar. (Sidenote: Sam Rockwell was also on this perfect-sounding date. But seeing as he is not part of the Greg-Tom affair we can just ignore him.)
The question of who will take over the Roy family business is the central question of Succession, and when the last series ended it looked like Tom and Greg were joining forces to seize power together: the ultimate Tom-Greg fantasy. They were both duly nominated for an outstanding supporting actor in a drama series Emmy, and last September when they went to the ceremony — well, probably best to let Braun tell this.
“Matthew’s and my hands were on each other’s legs when the nominees were getting read out,” he says.
I’m sorry — your hands were where?
“Yes, and, like, we were looking at each other, squeezing each other’s legs when our names got read aloud. Then when he won, I got to be the first person to give him a hug. And then his wife.”
So is Macfadyen’s wife, Keeley Hawes, jealous of this romance between the two of them, I ask, possibly a bit too excitedly.
“Uhh, no. No, no, no,” he says looking at me as if I’m a bit unhinged. Well, it wasn’t me who was just talking about gazing into Macfadyen’s eyes while feeling up his leg, Nicholas.
Since it launched in 2018, Succession, the HBO drama about the Roy family, a fictional mega-rich media dynasty, has been a critical and commercial blockbuster, with the writers and cast dominating every TV awards show ever since. And deservedly so, because they are all terrific, from Brian Cox’s furious swearing as the patriarch, Logan, to Jeremy Strong’s tortured angst as the eldest son, Kendall. But it’s Braun as Cousin Greg who has really endeared himself to audiences, making an instant star out of the former jobbing actor, to the point that when he met Steven Spielberg, Spielberg cried: “I can’t believe I’m meeting Cousin Greg!”
Braun had actually been acting since he was a kid but was so tired of depressing auditions and failed pilots that he was on the verge of focusing instead on music with his brother, and then he was cast in the show. When I ask Jesse Armstrong, the British writer who created Succession, how he knew Braun was right for the character of Greg, he says: “Nick had that comforting thing for a comedy writer of nailing every comic beat available, but also brought his own rhythms, winkling out extra comedy and pathos.”
Now the man who has been described by the New York Post as “NYC’s hottest bachelor” has his moves around the city feverishly followed by female fans. “He asked me for sugar and I could barely respond,” one sighed on a celeb-spotting site.
Alas this bachelor does now have a girlfriend. “I shouldn’t mention it,” he says, even though he was the one who brought her up. “But it’s really a special thing we got going on.” (He eventually concedes that she’s “super creative” and wants to be a producer.)
Yet despite being a very alpha 6ft 7in and sought after by women across Manhattan, Braun does not carry himself like the millennial Mr Big. He hunches and contorts himself so much that when he’s filming the other actors don’t need to stand on boxes to be at his eye level, even though some are a foot shorter than him. “I do a lot of leaning,” he says. You’ll be riddled with slipped discs by the time you’re 40, I say.
“Yeah, I know!” he says, looking stricken. “I had, like, a posture strap. But, um, yeah . . .” he trails off. On Succession Greg is the hopeless outsider and Braun comes across as a bit Gregish in this bar, Pebble, to be honest. He partly owns it, yet when we arrive the staff don’t even know his name. (“It’s Nick?” he says with Greg’s upward-tick intonation.) When he then orders food — “I’ll have the devilled eggs?” — it takes enormous self-restraint not to make a reference to “Greg the egg”, the belittling nickname used by the Roys. In his very dress-down outfit of a hoodie and jeans Braun seems about as out of place in this swanky three-storey bar, with its retro dark wood and expensive furniture, as Greg is among the Roys. (Mark Ronson is another investor in Pebble, which makes more sense.)
In fact Braun has become something of a hotspot magnate. It started when he was on “a big night with a buddy of mine, [the New York hospitality impresario] Jon Neidich”, he says, and Neidich mentioned, at 3am, that he was opening a bar. “And I was, like, ‘Dude, you gotta tell me when you’re starting bars, man,’ obviously like a hundred drinks into it. And he’s like, ‘Do you want in on this one?’ ‘Yeah!’ And we shook on it right there.” Trying in vain to suppress memories of Greg getting wasted at Tom’s bleak bachelor party, I ask if he regretted shaking on anything at 3am.
“No, I checked it out the next morning and it was great,” he says. This was the Lower East Side dive bar Ray’s, which has become downtown’s celebrity hang- out, with Gigi Hadid, Zoë Kravitz and ASAP Rocky all spotted there. This was followed by the stylishly retro deli S&P, on 5th Avenue, then Pebble. “I don’t know. I think it was, like, always a cool dream. Like, ‘Be great to have a bar some day.’ "
Braun grew up in Connecticut and New York, commuting between his divorced parents’ homes. His father, Craig Braun, a Grammy-winning record sleeve designer, helped Andy Warhol with the famous banana cover for The Velvet Underground & Nico album and came up with the Rolling Stones’ lips logo. But when Nicholas was six Craig decided to train to be an actor. Nicholas would tag along to his father’s auditions, and this soon became a father-son project, with Nicholas auditioning as well and becoming the more successful of the two. He ended up playing a teenage superhero in the 2005 film Sky High and became a Disney favourite, starring in 2009′s Princess Protection Program alongside Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato. But when the Disney Channel offered him his own show, he turned it down, because quick teen fame was not his goal.
Back then, acting for Braun was mainly just a way to be with his dad in New York and, most important, to get out of school: “I f***ing hated school. I was so bored and I wasn’t, like, the best at making friends. It just didn’t come easily to me, being an insecure young guy,” he says with effort, still pained at the memory. It didn’t help that he was always tall, making him stand out awkwardly (his mother is 6ft 3in and his father is 6ft 1in). He half-heartedly went to college, but dropped out, knowing now that acting was where his heart was.
Now, he says, he’s doing exactly the thing he should be doing. Because like Greg, Braun is not as vague as he initially seems. “Greg has a kind of faux naiveté, and I think I do that too,” he agrees. But whereas with Greg this is a trick to get more of what he wants — namely, money and power — with Braun it feels more like someone so stunned by his good fortune that he is dealing with it by underplaying everything. Just a week before we meet he got back from Sundance, where his next film, Cat Person, premiered. He plays the pathetic-slash-creepy male lead, Robert, in the film adapted from Kristen Roupenian’s 2017 viral New Yorker short story.
“Honestly, he’s not that different from general guys in their thirties, someone who has never found love and doesn’t quite know how do it. So I didn’t play him as a creep, but someone who is desperate to find a connection,” he says. Braun has also just sold a series to HBO, which he is writing, about an indie band in the early 2000s. On top of that, this summer he will direct and star in a film that he has written and is planning to come to London to be in a play. As a side project he writes songs, one of which — Antibodies (Do You Have The) — went viral during lockdown. It’s quite annoying that you’re doing all this and are still only 34, I say.
“It’s not happening quick enough for me,” he says, and there’s a sudden flash of Greg’s secret inner steel.
Greg is seemingly an innocent who turns out to be (possibly) a schemer and Braun is the low-key hipster who turns out to be the busiest man in town, so much so that he has even inspired a sex toy: the “Greg the Egg”, which vibrates every time Braun speaks on screen.
“Oh God, I forgot about that,” he says, seemingly all flustered, and then makes that sheepish grin again, and once again I don’t entirely believe him.
Series four of Succession starts March 27 on Neon.
Written by: Hadley Freeman
© The Times of London