Jeremy Strong, who shot to stardom playing the scheming Kendall Roy in the HBO phenomenon “Succession,” won his first Tony Award for playing Dr. Thomas Stockmann in Amy Herzog’s adaptation of the Ibsen drama “An Enemy of the People.”
The character, a medical officer who discovers that his town’s beloved spa is dangerously polluted, finds himself in a thankless position: When he speaks the truth, the townspeople turn on him.
It’s a role that has been physically demanding for Strong, 45, a famous method actor — buckets of ice cubes are dumped on his body each night, and at one point, he becomes so incensed that he tears his shirt off, buttons flying every which way. (In an interview with The New York Times in April, he likened playing the role to “walking the plank,” “summiting Everest” and “walking a beautiful tightrope over an abyss.”)
The Times’s chief theater critic, Jesse Green, wrote that Strong, who won an Emmy award for his work on “Succession,” delivers a “spectacularly accurate yet non-showy” performance that appears to have been modeled on Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the infectious disease expert. That encompasses, Green wrote, “not just his messianic faith in science but also his barely mastered disdain, social weirdness and haircut.”
Though Strong established mainstream success on the screen, he spent his early career in the theater. His first Broadway role was playing an ambitious moral chameleon opposite Frank Langella in “A Man for All Seasons” in 2008. “Enemy” is the first time he has returned to the stage in more than a decade.
“It felt necessary,” he told The Times in April. “The play felt like a summons.”
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
