Jeremy Strong has a story to tell, but is not sure he should tell it. I am having lunch with the Succession actor in the Hollywood Hills. The city sprawls below as he picks at his kale. He is in the midst of filming series four of the family backstabbing saga, which returns in the spring, as the standout Kendall Roy, and the lines feel blurred. Strong’s grey hair is dyed Kendall black and he is wearing a chunky gold medallion that is suspiciously like the one he has in the show.
Strong looks at home in LA now, but it was not always like this. He is 43 and an Emmy winner for his performance as the Roy family’s most troubled son — a bruised antihero and mess, the best TV character of the past decade. Now he seeks an Oscar, for Armageddon Time, by the Ad Astra director James Gray. In the autobiographical film Strong plays a version of Gray’s father; it was loved at Cannes. But success is new to Strong — he struggled until he was cast in Succession at the age of 37, which brings us back to that story.
It starts in 2010. Strong was in Hollywood, trying to find work. “It was a long time ago,” he sighs, in his doleful voice. “But not that long for me.” He was mostly doing fringe theatre in New York at the time and does not, shall we say, have typical chiselled movie star looks or height. Did he feel the film industry was for a different type of man? “For sure,” he says. He smiles, like he has told himself a joke. “OK, f*** it. I will tell you this story . . .”
“I was living across the street,” he begins, gesticulating out of the window. “I’d gone to Yale and Rada, but there was a movie I got an audition for — Cowboys & Aliens [starring Daniel Craig]. The role was this impish cowboy and I got a hat, bolo tie, chaps, boots and worked on the dialect. But I pulled up to the audition and it was guys in T-shirts who looked like models. I had a crisis of faith.”
Strong went to the bathroom. He was thinking, “Shall I just take this off?” He felt ridiculous. But, he explains, you have to commit and so he gave his audition in full garb. He thought that it went well. “It would’ve been life-changing.” He did not get the part.
“But,” he continues, “they told me there was a top-secret film about Captain America.” The Marvel blockbuster was released in 2011 and Strong was told he, clearly, would not play the lead. “But,” he smiles, “they needed someone to play Captain America’s young body, before he turns into a superhero. They said they needed a transformational actor and would use CGI to put the actual actor’s face and voice over my own.”
Strong pauses. “I was broke,” he says, “I needed money. I considered it. But that’s my story of LA. It was just never going to happen for me here. It didn’t feel like what I had to offer was valued.” He said no. “And the next day I went back to New York and did a play about a veteran from Afghanistan in a wheelchair during the blackout of 2003.”
I call Chris Evans, the actor who actually did play Captain America. He knew Strong at school. They grew up in Sudbury, Massachusetts, and Evans recalls seeing Strong play the Hobbit in children’s theatre: “Phenomenal.” He had no idea Strong was picked to play his weak body in Captain America — “Oh no!” he gasps — but was always baffled why it took Strong so long to make it.
“It just goes to show the industry is so unpredictable,” he says. “But I’m so happy things worked out, because I don’t think there was ever plan B for Jeremy.”
Armageddon Time is set in the early 1980s. Strong plays Irving, a plumber with a short fuse. Anne Hathaway is his stoic wife, Esther, and Anthony Hopkins his sweet father-in-law. It is a classy set-up, to explore the politics of both society and huge Jewish family dinners.
Strong went all in for the role. He does this — an interview in the New Yorker last year went viral because the actor said how meticulously he prepares and, online, he was torn to bits for having the cheek to like Method acting. He said the article made him feel “foolish”, but, thankfully, he seems unchanged — an honest man who happily drops quotes like the “anvil and furnace that forged artists” and is, simply, in love with his job and very, very good at it.
“You have to take the raw materials of our lives and transpose them into art,” Strong explains. “A great actor once told me you’re not just there to put on clothes and say words and, if there’s not some Gordian knot you are also actively puzzling through, what’s the point?” Which actor told him that? “Matthew McConaughey.”
To prepare for Irving, Strong stood outside Gray’s childhood home in Queens. (He was not allowed in.) To further explain the work he put in, he quotes Hamlet, talks of “osmosis” and, while explaining a scene in which Irving hits his son, speaks of compassion, violence and the changing nature of fatherhood. Strong has three daughters with Emma, his wife, a Danish psychiatrist.
This film felt personal too. Strong’s family on his father’s side is Jewish and his grandfather was a plumber in Queens. He wore the latter’s watch on set and could also relate to Irving’s alienation, of living somewhere where his family is less well-off than the neighbours. “We moved to a fairly affluent town for better public schools,” Strong says. Born in Boston in 1978, Strong and his family moved to the suburb of Sudbury 10 years later. “My parents were ostracised. We were not welcomed into the country club. That was something I felt aware of.”
So he has always felt like an outcast. Plus he thinks a lot, which is perhaps why it took him so long to get a foothold in a business where thought is hardly rewarded. For years he loved theatre. But it left him broke, so bit parts in films like Zero Dark Thirty and The Big Short were important. Still, his career did not achieve both cash and satisfaction until Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 and, of course, Succession.
Series three of Succession ended with his father, Logan (Brian Cox), cutting his children out of a seismic deal. Kendall has been in the standout scene of each series — first that desperate sprint through a log-jammed New York; then his breakdown in a kitchen; most recently a tense dinner with his father in Italy. What happens next? Strong laughs.
“What can I say without being renditioned to an HBO prison?” he says with a smile. “Well, I guess what I can say is that we have made 30 hours of story so far and to my great elation and terror they’ve just upped the ante. It has been as hard a season as we’ve ever had.”
The show will be filming in Scandinavia. While Kendall was clearly isolated from his siblings last time around, the new run will be different. Still, when I ask who he is closest to in the show, since I had heard that he keeps himself to himself, he offers an answer that only Strong could. “You’d be surprised if you saw me on set,” he begins. “I’m a fairly accessible person, but sets are sociable places and I find that distracting. So, really, it’s more about concentration, less about me avoiding people.” So who is he closest to? “It is more a question of who does Kendall feel closest to. And the answer, really, is nobody. He feels quite alone in this family and so, for me, I take that as a cue.”
He would have been wasted as Captain America’s weedy body double. But, years ago, all this success seemed remote. He recalls staying in his grandfather’s basement in Queens so he could travel to auditions in the city. He had a CD player and listened to Bridge over Troubled Water on repeat while his friends — including Michelle Williams and Jessica Chastain — were becoming stars. Going to Cannes, as he did with Armageddon Time, just felt impossible.
“I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t difficult to see people I was close to getting work,” he says. “I felt that I had a lot to offer but was entirely cut off from those chances. It has been a 25-year grind of working hard and meeting, with very little result. I had fulfilling experiences, doing plays in 60-seat theatres where I felt like I levitated. But I was struggling. I had some difficult times as a younger person.”
Did he ever feel that he should give up? “I did have experiences where I was belittled or told it was foolish.” Who by? “There were people in my life who told me that. In my extended family. And, when you’re young, you internalise those voices. But I guess there is just something in me that couldn’t give up.”
Now he feels ready. The play about the vet in a wheelchair? He says it began a run of work that led to more plays, better film roles and Succession. He kept his head down, took risks, got rejected, but is now in a film with Hopkins, a hero. “I’ve spent my life preparing for this moment,” he says, smiling. And, as with everything else, he says that with great sincerity — he has wanted to be an actor since he was four.
Written by: Jonathan Dean
© The Times of London