These father-son disagreements are not just for show.
“Succession” star Brian Cox is doubling down on his stance that the acting style embraced by Jeremy Strong, who plays his mercurial middle son on the HBO series, is “f–king annoying.”
“He’s a very good actor. And the rest of the ensemble is all okay with this. But knowing a character and what the character does is only part of the skill set,” Cox, 76, explains in an interview with Town & Country published Tuesday.
“It’s f–king annoying,” Cox added of Strong always being in character. “Don’t get me going on it.”
Strong, 44, made headlines in 2021 when the New Yorker revealed his full-immersion acting methods, which he has employed for his role as Kendall Roy.
Cox, who plays Kendall’s demanding father, Logan Roy, expressed worry about Strong’s techniques at the time.
“I’ve worked with intense actors before. It’s a particularly American disease, I think, this inability to separate yourself off while you’re doing the job,” Cox told the New Yorker.
“The result that Jeremy gets is always pretty tremendous,” Cox went on. “I just worry about what he does to himself. I worry about the crises he puts himself through in order to prepare.”
Cox addressed his concerns in a 2021 appearance on “Late Night with Seth Meyers,” sharing, “He does get obsessed with the work. And I worry about what it does to him, because if you can’t separate yourself — because you’re dealing with all of this material every day. You can’t live in it. Eventually, you get worn out.”
In a new interview with GQ for the March 2023 cover, also published Tuesday, Strong admitted his TV dad earned the right to voice his opinions.
“Everyone’s entitled to have their feelings. I also think Brian Cox, for example, he’s earned the right to say whatever the f—k he wants,” Strong reasoned. “There was no need to address that or do damage control.”
“I feel a lot of love for my siblings and my father on the show. And it is like a family in the sense that, and I’m sure they would say this, too, you don’t always like the people that you love. I do always respect them,” Strong continued.
Cox had previously suggested “there is a certain amount of pain at the root of Jeremy” — but Strong doesn’t believe that to be true.
“I don’t think there is. There’s certainly a lot of pain in Kendall, and I haven’t really met Brian outside of the confines of that,” Strong divulged.
He also disclosed he has not considered changing his acting approach.
“Am I going to adjust or compromise the way that I’ve worked my whole life and what I believe in? There wasn’t a flicker of doubt about that. I’m still going to do whatever it takes to serve whatever it is,” he told GQ.
He continued, “Which is not to say that that is the same thing as riding roughshod over other people. It has to do with autonomous concentration. It’s a very solitary thing. I think there’s very low impact on others except for what they might want to project onto it and how that might make them feel.”
Strong shared that he sacrificed himself for the sake of the “Succession” audience — and added that doing so made the work “torturous.”
In November 2017, before filming for the first season of “Succession” began, Strong wrote a letter to himself — as both himself and Kendall Roy — on Waystar Royco stationery that he later texted to the author of the GQ profile.
The letter read: “I NEED TO BE STRONG BUT I DON’T FEEL STRONG. I FEEL COMPLETELY ALONE IN ALL OF THIS. I HAVE TO BE THE LEAD BUT I DON’T KNOW IF I’M UP TO IT BUT I DO F—KING KNOW.”
“Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong recalled a moment during Season 1 filming where he “didn’t recognize” Strong.
“The way that he’d been carrying himself for the preceding weeks as he played Kendall in the dark place meant that his whole physicality was completely different,” Armstrong told GQ.
Strong said he even likes to isolate himself from his cast members on set, wary of crafting off-screen relationships with his on-screen siblings that are too casual.
“It’d be one thing if I was working on ‘Friends’ or something,” he said. “I worked on a Guy Ritchie movie, and I approached that very differently.”
Season 4 of HBO’s “Succession” returns March 26.
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