The Succession men are at it again. In two separate March cover stories, Emmy winners Jeremy Strong and Brian Cox open up about playing Kendall and Logan Roy, respectively, and share their thoughts and feelings about one another.
Gracing the cover of GQ‘s March issue, Strong spoke at length with writer Gabriella Paiella about the fallout from his viral New Yorker profile—which inspired several of his celebrity friends, like Jessica Chastain, Anne Hathaway, and Aaron Sorkin, to defend the actor. Strong called the profile—which highlighted the intensity of his artistic process and arguably characterized him as difficult to work with—his “15 minutes of shame, with a long tail.” He noted that he and the writer of the profile, New Yorker staffer Michael Schulman, attended the same college, Yale, adding to Strong’s sense of shame: “I hadn’t felt judged like that in a very long time.”
“The shadow is the part of ourselves that we don’t want to share with the world and we want to disavow,” Strong continued. “The part of me that is striving. The part of me that wants what I want. I was less bothered by other actors having feelings or opinions about the way I work. Really, it was just feeling exposed.”
Strong does not, however, hold anything against co-stars like Brian Cox, who indicated in the New Yorker profile that Strong can be difficult to work with. “Brian Cox, for example, has earned the right to say whatever the fuck he wants,” Strong told GQ. “There was no need to address that or do damage control… I feel a lot of love for my siblings and my father on the show. And it is like a family in the sense that, and I’m sure they would say this, too, you don’t always like the people that you love. I do always respect them.”
In his own cover story for Town and Country‘s March issue, Cox told writer William Cohan that he has no regrets about what he said regarding Strong’s process, and maintains that working with a method actor is “fucking annoying.” But Cox also went out of his way to say that he finds Strong to be immensely talented, even if their processes are wildly different. “He’s a very good actor,” Cox said of Strong. “And the rest of the ensemble is all okay with this. But knowing a character and what the character does is only part of the skill set.”
As an example, Cox highlighted the intense scene in which Strong’s Kendall admits to his siblings that he was responsible for the death of a cater-waiter. In Cox’s memory, Strong had a difficult time shaking the scene after the camera’s stopped rolling. “He’s still that guy, because he feels if he went somewhere else he’d lose it,” said Cox. “But he won’t! Strong is talented. He’s fucking gifted. When you’ve got the gift, celebrate the gift. Go back to your trailer and have a hit of marijuana, you know?”
The fictional father and son will be back on screen—ostensibly talking to each other instead of about each other—when Succession returns for its fourth and potentially final season on Sunday, March 26th. “It will feel like a death, in a way,” said Strong about stepping away from Kendall Roy.
As for what will transpire in season four, Sarah Snook told Town and Country that the Roy family “gets tested more than it ever has been.” For those hoping that might result in Kendall and Logan finally letting bygones be bygones and connecting as father and son, don’t hold your breath. According to Succession creator Jesse Armstrong, “it’s a bumpy ride” with a “lot of hard rendering and conflict.” In that case, maybe we should hold out hope for a season five.
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