The last time Jeremy Strong and I met, on a humid afternoon in Brooklyn in the summer of 2019, him merrily quoting Dostoevsky, Flaubert and Balzac — as Strong is wont to do, lobbing literary references about in the sticky air like shuttlecocks — he also declared: “Success, maybe even an awareness of success, is anathema to creative work.” The next day the 41-year-old actor flew to Croatia to film the final episode of Succession’s second season, the last three minutes of which would feature a plot twist that, a year on, has fans still picking their shattered jaws up off the floor.
Today we’re back in Brooklyn, although separated by screens this time. And 36 hours earlier, Strong won the outstanding lead actor Emmy, the highest prize in US television, for his haunted, hollow-eyed performance as Kendall Roy, the troubled addict and former heir-apparent to his father Logan’s media empire.
It was a big night all round for Succession, the wildly successful tale of ambition, legacy, power and deep familial dysfunction among the 0.1 per cent, “a sort of King Lear meets the media industrial complex”. It won the outstanding drama award and its British creator, Jesse Armstrong, was awarded the prize for outstanding writing for a drama series, for that deft, perfectly paced, bombshell finale.
“I don’t think I’ve ever cared more or put more into a piece of work — it means so much to me,” Strong says, reclining on a brown leather sofa and wearing a shirt of almost the exact same shade. “I feel like I’m getting to play one of the great antiheroes of our time and, as I say that, I feel the sword of Damocles hanging over me, ready to strike me down at any moment.”
That might also be the booze. He has only just emerged from “the Hades of hangovers” post-Emmys, and I don’t mean to bring him down again, but I’m worried. What he said about creativity last time — is that going to be a problem?
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“I know. F***.” he says. “It’s that Kipling thing [Rudyard, rather than the cakes] about treating both success and failure as impostors, but at the same time I’m human and fallible, and of course I care about things like peer recognition,” he says. “But there’s that Tennessee Williams essay, The Catastrophe of Success, which says that at your own peril do you rest in that for more than a moment.”
This being 2020, he was barely allowed even that moment; the pandemic put paid to a physical awards ceremony and deprived Succession’s tight-knit cast, which includes Brian Cox, Matthew Macfadyen and Kieran Culkin, of a well-deserved knees-up. Strong and his Danish, Oxford-educated psychiatrist wife, Emma Wall, holed up for the night in a suite at Manhattan’s Bowery Hotel.
“Nick [Braun, aka Cousin Greg] came over afterwards and we had a few-hours-long Zoom call with some of the other cast, and Nick ended up in a bathtub giving an acceptance speech,” Strong says, chuckling. “But 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.” He says this with no faux humility. “Those are the people who should be getting aggrandised right now.”
What doesn’t feel incongruous, he attests, is his latest role as the 1960s radical Jerry Rubin, the co-founder of the Yippies, the countercultural Youth International Party, and one of the protestors in the dock in Aaron Sorkin’s new Netflix film, The Trial of the Chicago 7.
After a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, at which anti-Vietnam protestors were teargassed and beaten by police officers, Rubin and seven other prominent antiwar leaders were charged by the US government with incitement to riot, among other crimes. Their chaotic six-month trial was seen by those on the left as a direct effort by the government to forcibly squash dissent. “I would prefer it to feel less relevant,” Sorkin said recently.
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“The movie came together and fell apart a lot of times,” Strong says. Until, in October 2019, he, Sacha Baron Cohen and Eddie Redmayne found themselves marching down Michigan Avenue in Chicago, across the street from Grant Park, where the 1968 riots took place, chanting: “No justice, no peace,” “The people united will never be defeated,” and “Whose streets? Our streets.” Seven months later, when the Black Lives Matter protests erupted around the world in the wake of the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, both at the hands of police officers, “I was hearing the exact same chants through our window in Copenhagen [where he was based during lockdown], and then I was in California, chanting those same chants on the streets in LA.
“It does feel like a cautionary tale about how far we haven’t come as a culture,” Strong says. Yet the weighty issues of democracy and free speech are balanced by a lightness of touch. Rubin was a notorious prankster, dressing in judges’ robes and police uniforms for court; he appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee dressed as Santa Claus and bought a pig to run for president against Richard Nixon. The cerebral, bookish Strong, not someone I would immediately pick as a prankster, adopted something of Rubin’s spirit. “He was a very liberating character to play, and I brought a lot of high jinks,” he says with a twinkle in his eye. “My favourite thing a director has ever told me was Aaron Sorkin, quite angrily, saying: ‘Once more, without the cowbell, please.’ ”
Strong grew up in suburban Boston, where his mother was a hospice nurse who took him to “ashrams and an African Methodist Episcopal church where she sang in the choir”, and his father a social worker who ran youth prisons. At amateur dramatics in chilly church basements, he “found a sense of freedom that I’d never really had, and still don’t have, in my real life; just getting lost in it and leaving yourself behind somehow”.
He studied English at Yale, where he spent all his spare time putting on plays, and after graduation moved to New York, a couple of weeks before 9/11. The first few years in the city were, he says, “incredibly hard — a lot of years of doing plays in store fronts and little theatres above falafel shops. And I could not get an agent to save my life.”
In his Emmy acceptance speech he thanked all the people who had supported him “when all this seemed basically impossible”. How long, I ask, did it feel that impossible for? “Working on The Judge, and The Big Short, those were great [if supporting] roles for me, but there still wasn’t steady work until Succession. This show has changed my life — it was never a given that this would happen,” he says.
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“I’ve always wanted to work on things that felt meaningful, but also central to the culture,” he continues. “Succession is a diagnostic on the deeper maladies that are afflicting our country — wealth differentials, the corrosive effects of power and what Rolling Stone last month called ‘terminal decadence’ — and The Chicago 7, being about police brutality, about protest, about the wingspan of our democracy and whether those wings have been clipped, it feels amazing to get to be part of two things like this.”
However, last time we met, given what his friend Robert Downey Jr calls his tendency to “hug the cactus”, he was feeling the strain. Tortured, troubled Kendall, “the damaged sensitive child of a primitive master of the universe”, doesn’t get a lot of lightness, so nor does Strong. “Last season everything was in such a minor key, and held inside in a silent anguish that had to be sustained for six months. There was a sense of powerlessness that the character had,” Strong says. “The Houdini magic trick at the very end allowed me to make that reversal, and suddenly I found my power. The pilot light that had been nearly extinguished came roaring back.”
While he hasn’t seen any scripts, he has been told some “broad strokes” of the next season. “I feel like the energy of it will be more expansive and empowered.” Having finished last season proclaiming that, for now, Logan’s toxic reign is over, “I think we’ll see what my reign looks like,” he grins.
Strong’s domestic set-up could not be more different from that of his lonely, tragic alter ego. He met Wall in October 2012, at a party in a friend’s loft in SoHo on the night of Hurricane Sandy — he’d only gone because he’d lost power. They married in Copenhagen in August 2016, and now have two daughters, Ingrid, two and a half, and 11-month-old Clara.
A couple of weeks after Clara’s birth they left Brooklyn for Denmark, intending to spend six months in Wall’s motherland as they had with Ingrid. When the pandemic hit, however, they stayed on, in a little fishing village outside Copenhagen.
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“It was a pretty idyllic place to be,” he says. “Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, has handled this from day one with such poise and equanimity and leadership and co-ordination. I saw a handful of masks the entire time I was there because everything was completely under control, there was such widespread testing and everyone conformed to what was being asked of them.
“But it was hard for me, seeing what was happening at home,” he says. “And it was quite shocking to come back here last month. The city has a black eye right now and it’s hard to see New York at half-mast.”
However, he’s not buying into the notion that New York is “dead”. “New York has become so monied the creative classes have migrated away. Too much ease and too much wealth can make things easier, they can make things frictionless, but that might not actually be a virtue,” he muses. “I mean, look at the show I work on. So maybe New York will reinvent itself in a slightly different way.”
In the meantime, travel bans and border closures mean that the international scope of Succession — Iceland, Croatia, Hungary, Turkey, Scotland — may not be possible even when filming does finally resume. “I don’t think Jesse will compromise the show, so the writing will be calibrated to whatever world we’re circumscribed in,” he says with a shrug. “Chekhov can write a play that’s set in a dining room where happiness is made and lives are smashed.”
The Trial of the Chicago 7 is available on Netflix from October 16
