‘It was six months of anguish’: Succession’s Jeremy Strong reveals filming show took its toll as Lead Actor Emmy winner claims it’s his NHS worker mother who deserves an award
He’s best known for playing troubled heir-apparent Kendall Roy in Succession.
The show, based on a family-run media conglomerate, tracks their lives as they battle it out to be top dog should their father step down as head of the company.
But taking on the role of drug-addicted, power hungry Kendall took its toll on actor Jeremy, 41, who called that period in his life ‘six months of ago.
‘It was six months of anguish’: Succession’s Jeremy Strong reveals filming the second season of the show took its toll as troubled heir-apparent Kendall Roy (HBO still)
Strong told The Times’s T2 that playing the damaged sensitive child of a primitive master of the universe doesn’t get a lot of lightness, so nor does he.
He said: ‘Last season everything was in such a minor key, and held inside in a silent anguish that had to be sustained for six months.’
He added: ‘I don’t think I’ve ever cared more or put more into a piece of work — it means so much to me. I feel like I’m getting to play one of the great antiheroes of our time.’
Well done: The show achieved great success at the Emmys last month, with Jeremy picking up Lead Actor, but he said it’s his NHS worker mother who should be awarded
The show achieved great success at the Emmys last month, with Jeremy picking up Lead Actor and the show winning Outstanding Drama Series.
Strong said his mother got an award over him because she works for the NHS.
He said: ”It’s a strange year. It did all feel quite incongruous, and I’d rather give an award to my mother, who works in a hospital, and to my wife’s aunt, who works for the NHS.’
The third season of Succession is expected to begin filming this autumn.
He is also set to play 1960s radical Jerry Rubin, a co-founder of the Yippies, the Youth International Party in Aaron Sorkin’s new Netflix film, The Trial of the Chicago 7.
He said: ‘Last season everything was in such a minor key, and held inside in a silent anguish that had to be sustained for six months’ -pictured with onscreen father Brian Cox in January
Daily Mail’s Brian Viner writes of the film: ‘With the U.S. at another convulsive moment in its history, with accusations of racism and police brutality flying from one side and of Left-wing agitators stirring up trouble from the other, Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial Of The Chicago 7 is nothing if not remarkably timely.
‘But in 1968 there was also a war raging. That year’s Democratic Party convention in Chicago was targeted by civil rights campaigners, black rights activists, would-be revolutionaries, earnest pacifists, shaggy-haired hippies and students angry about everything — a Venn diagram of disparate interests linked only by their collective denunciation of the Vietnam War.
‘After violent clashes with the police, eight men were charged with conspiracy and inciting a riot.
‘During the trial, which began in 1969, Bobby Seale, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, was removed from the dock.
‘Which left the so-called Chicago Seven: Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne), Rennie Davis (Alex Sharp), Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen), Jerry Rubin (Jeremy Strong), John Froines (Danny Flaherty), Lee Weiner (Noah Robbins) and David Dellinger (John Carroll Lynch).
He added: ‘In writing and directing their story, which is interspersed with actual news archive, Sorkin does what he always does. He gives his protagonists formidably brilliant minds, their every thought declaimed with silver-tongued eloquence.’
More to come: Jeremy is set to play 1960s radical Jerry Rubin, a co-founder of the Yippies, the Youth International Party in Aaron Sorkin’s new Netflix film, The Trial of the Chicago 7