Jeremy Strong Went To Some Seriously Dark Places In The 'Succession' Finale To Cap Off His Amazing Run As Kendall Roy

Kevin Mazur. Getty Images.

Spoilers for Succession, but I feel like anyone clicking on this will have seen the finale from last Sunday. Thanks to Vanity Fair, we got some juicy details from Kendall Roy himself about what went down to cap off the epic HBO series. Jeremy Strong is someone whose acting process I'm fascinated by. Covered it multiple times in this space. But to read about what he put himself through psychologically, it's really like some next-level shit and then some. 

Like, what if I told you that during that siblings-bonding kitchen scene, for every take — yeah, they didn't do just one! — Strong would drink what was in the blender every single time until director Mark Mylod started cutting around it?

"My God, they put the nastiest shit you can possibly imagine into that blender! So every take, I had to go outside and retch and then jump in the ocean to reset. But it was fun…I guess my feeling is, I would not be committed enough to what that character wants in that moment if I didn't drink that thing. She's saying, 'we'll give this to you if you drink this thing.' So —yeah, that's just me. Mark [Mylod] knew at a certain point he had to call cut, because if he didn't call cut, I'm gonna do it, you know?"

…But that's more of a physical, visceral reaction to something objectively disgusting. It's not the darkness I'm referencing in the headline per se. That is more about what Strong went through in his own head. Yeah. You're gonna wanna get a load of this.

In the very last scene of Succession, Strong's Kendall is sitting on a bench at the edge of Battery Park on what was such a cold February day that schools were closed. It was actually Strong's impulse and recommendation to show creator Jesse Armstrong and Mylod to shoot there. What ensued is pretty damn harrowing. I'll skip around to fit it all into one plus-sized excerpt.

"As scripted, it was meant to end with an aerial shot where we see Kendall walking, and we see Colin following him. I begged [Armstrong and director Mark Mylod], 'Can we go to the water? I want to keep walking.' We ended up at the bitter end of Battery Park, facing the water. I'd never seen waves like that in the East River. It felt biblical. And there was this terrible clanging on some scaffolding nearby. We didn't know what we were looking for, but something profound happened. We only had about eight minutes to shoot that piece at the end because the sun was going down. The water was calling to me. It felt right to all of us.

"Listen to the John Berryman poem that Jesse has named these finales after. John Berryman himself died by suicide, jumping into the frozen river. I tried to go into the water after we cut—I got up from that bench and went as fast as I could over the barrier and onto the pilings, and the actor playing Colin raced over. I didn't know I was gonna do that, and he didn't know, but he raced over and stopped me. I don't know whether in that moment I felt that Kendall just wanted to die—I think he did—or if he wanted to be saved by essentially a proxy of his father.

"[…] To me, what happens at the board vote is an extinction level event for this character. There's no coming back from that. […] It was hard for me to watch [the finale], what he goes through, because he's become very real to me, and in a way is indistinguishable from myself. This, to me, was a life and death thing. And I took it as seriously as I take my own life."

Here's a little snippet from the director, via Variety, on what happened there, along with more from Strong on the show's podcast.

A less self-assured, grounded person could buckle under the weight of a hit TV show like this and never be able to get out from under it. Strong is the epitome of a fearless actor and doesn't give a single flying fuck what anyone thinks about him or what he has to do to get into character. You can agree with Brian Cox when he says (paraphrasing), "Dude, smoke a J and RELAX every now and then." And you can acknowledge that while acting shouldn't be this serious, it obviously works wonders for Strong, who delivered one of the better central long-form performances in the history of television.

I feel like where most actors and/or humans would draw a line for themselves, with Jeremy Strong there is no line. He was basically going through the experience of wanting to jump into an ice-cold river as if he was feeling that way in his own life. Suicidal ideation in a way.

There might've been a similar more viral version of this Twitter commentary immediately after the finale that I wasn't able to track down, but doesn't make it any less right:

A wealth of subtext, inner darkness from Kendall in the waning golden hour, on the precipice of the ultimate self-destruction he's been almost longing for all along…and yet still cursed by his legacy and the ghost of his father. Whatever Kendall decides to do from this moment, to use Strong's word, it's going to be a struggle and suffering of biblical proportions, personally speaking. Hauntingly beautiful.

Maaaaaan what a show Succession is/was. Seeing it in real time was a hell of a privilege. The actual Logan Roy successor was hidden in plain sight all along (read Clem's blog) but was still a stunning twist/revelation fit for a finale. Who knew the closing of a massive corporate sale could be such pulse-pounding, enthralling event TV? Awesome stuff. And once again, salute to Jeremy Strong. Total acting badass.

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In the spirit of redeeming the toxicity of the Logan-Kendall Roy dynamic, get yourself some Father's Day merrrrrrch.