For years, Jeremy Strong was a relatively anonymous, steadily gigging actor. He did theater and some recurring TV work (“The Good Wife,” “Masters of Sex”), and was able to land decent supporting roles in big movies (“The Big Short,” “Selma”). Then “Succession” changed everything. The hit HBO show, a biting satire about the emotionally dysfunctional, media-conglomerate-running Roy family, became an icon of 21st-century television. Within it, Strong created an icon of his own with his portrayal of the damaged and tragically self-defeating eldest son, Kendall Roy. The show, which ended last year after four seasons, sent Strong’s career into a different orbit. It also made people interested in the man behind the character. This was not always good. In 2021, a much-discussed profile in The New Yorker depicted Strong as — depending on your point of view — a deeply dedicated and ambitious artist or a self-serious pain in the butt. In a way, Strong’s current project — he plays the lead in an adaptation of Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People,” which opens on Broadway on March 18 — is his attempt to address some of what “Succession” opened up for him, for better and for ill. The play, in which a doctor who expects acceptance for telling the truth about an environmental disaster in his small town instead receives scorn, allows Strong to tell another socially relevant story. It also serves as a comment on how your public and private selves can feel at odds. “I had the experience of being taken by this incredible current,” says Strong, who is 45, about “Succession” and its wake. “It left me somewhere different from where I began.”
I don’t know if I would say disingenuous, but almost everybody gives a version of an answer that is similar to the one you gave: I want to do the work I feel good about, and if there’s overlap between that and the career goals, then that’s great. But you don’t Forrest Gump your way into a degree of success that puts you in the 1 percent of actors. That’s true. It’s very intentional.
It is. So then why do actors seem to not want to talk about that? Is it gauche? Can I give you a very Jeremy Strong answer?
Jeremy Strong and Brian Cox in “Succession.”
Craig Blankenhorn/HBO
You know, the quote that comes to mind for me is “Ass, gas or grass. No one rides for free.” [Laughs.] Listen, there was a moment when the show ended where I felt a profound sense of, Was this the thing? Was this the event of my life? And then a great determination to achieve exit velocity from it so I could attempt to do more.
From reading other pieces about you, I knew that you offer up a lot of quotations. I was thinking — What’s the deal with that?
Yes, but I’m going to connect it with other things. Great.
What’s the deal with that? The question is such a definitive question. I think of myself as a sieve. The thing that I most understand is creating a sort of negative space so that I can be a vessel for writing and create character through a pastiche of writing and imagination and whatever things activate me. Now, is that all a kind of camouflage?
Yeah. I don’t know! I guess my feeling is this interview wouldn’t be that interesting — I don’t know what I would have to offer that isn’t my feelings about work, the things I feel inspired by. Do I know who I am? I don’t know if I believe if the self is a discrete, fixed thing. But you meditate.
Strong (left) with Rafe Spall, Hamish Linklater, Steve Carell, Jeffry Griffin and Ryan Gosling in “The Big Short” (2015).
Jaap Buitendijk/Paramount, via Everett Collection
What did your family think when they saw that quote? That was maybe misconstrued. I think what I was trying to say is that is what you do as an actor: Your character is the legend that you have to master. You have to internalize it and know it so well that, were you captured, you would be bulletproof in your understanding of your legend. That’s what I meant. I’ll also say, just to throw something on top of that, I read this great biography of Ibsen by Robert Ferguson, and he said that Ibsen had this twin engine of a need to both display and conceal. He was desperate to be looked at and terrified of being seen. I can understand that.
You quoted Ted Hughes earlier about the need to ignore one’s fears. For you, what are those fears? They’re myriad. Even talking to you. This interview feels very fraught to me, although I’ve loved talking to you. The fear of being exposed.
Exposed as what? In a way, what I said to you about Ibsen: desperate to be looked at, terrified of being seen. Some acting teacher said that acting is basically standing naked and turning around very slowly in front of an audience. It’s vulnerable and there’s so many fears. But I guess I’m interested in learning how to live with less fear. Maybe it’s not possible to live without fear, but what Ted Hughes wrote is a good counter to that: accepting that those fears might exist, even humiliation or feeling foolish and, then, what are you going to do about that? You can cower or you can reinvest your heart.
It’s funny: You said that you talk about acting because nothing else about you is that interesting. But you’re not the one who’s supposed to judge what’s interesting about you. That’s my job. Maybe having done this thing since I was a young kid, it feels like one area where I feel some sense of authority. Not authority with a capital A but subjective authority. You’ve talked to so many brilliant people and leaders in their fields; I don’t really have any authority to talk about other things.
I want to read something to you that Arthur Miller wrote. It’s from the preface of his adaptation of “An Enemy of the State”: “There is one quality in Ibsen that no serious writer can afford to overlook. … It is his insistence, his utter conviction, that he is going to say what he has to say and that the audience, by God, is going to listen.” This is the key part: “It is the very same quality that makes a star actor, a great public speaker, and a lunatic.” Do you recognize yourself in what Miller is pointing to there? I’m not sure. Parsing it, it feels like he’s talking about the Byronic hero, egotism. I’m talking about Keats and negative capability. I don’t think I’m someone who particularly has a drum to bang. I want to disappear. What do you make of what he said?
I like how the inclusion of “lunatic” suggests the irrationality of what actors do. That’s right, and there is something deeply irrational if you’re going to touch the third rail in this work. Which you better do or I don’t think it’s worth a damn. Especially because you’re being called on to experience and embody the extremities of human experience. You know, doing “Enemy of the People” is my response to what I experienced from The New Yorker article.
Strong (left) with Michael Imperioli in “An Enemy of the People.”
Emilio Madrid
Really? In what way? Ibsen wrote a play called “Ghosts,” which was a very personal play and the play was met with derision. “Enemy of the People” was his response to what happened when “Ghosts” was savaged. The thing that he felt he had to offer to the world, this thing that felt sacred to him, was not met with what he felt was any generosity or understanding. He felt betrayed by people who he thought were his allies or respected him. So he wrote “Enemy of the People” out of a sense of betrayal and hurt. I’m an actor: I want to channel things that I feel into a piece of work, and that’s why I’m doing this play.
Why? Don’t know. It’s sort of tabula rasa in color.
What do you do for fun? It’s probably something I’m not great at doing. I’ll tell you this, David. I like a good action movie. I saw “The Equalizer 3” the weekend it opened in Denmark by myself. It’s a good decompressant for me.
Are you interested in comedy? I thought “Succession” was wickedly funny. I don’t know that that show can be put into any box, but it had an incredible amount of humor in it. It’s not something that I gravitate toward, but it’s not something that I am against. Peter Sellers, he’s like a god to me. The last time I worked with Sam Gold was a play called “The Coward,” which was essentially “Barry Lyndon” meets “The Jerk.” I did the whole play in falsetto. Your very own paper, The New York Times, said that after two hours, you’re starved for silence. I thought, That’s exactly what I was trying to do. It’s a myth that I am this humorless person.
Can I give you my armchair–expert psychologist’s guess at why you think about your work the way you do? Yeah.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity from two conversations. Also, this is my last Talk column. I shared some reflections on five years of these conversations here. Keep an eye out for our great new Q&A franchise, The Interview, starting in late April. And thank you so much for reading.
Source: Television - nytimes.com
