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Jeremy Strong / An Inestimable Inhabitation
![Alt Text](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/56c346b607eaa09d9189a870/1601915326472-6B9T13JCP4Z0ZS5LOZKY/172_FLAUNT_MAGAZINE_CHAOS_AND_CALM_COVER_JEREMY_STRONG.jpg) The first thing you want to do when you look Jeremy Strong in the face is blow a fat line of coke off the back of a Wall Street toilet. No. You wanna scheme. The first thing you want to do when you see Jeremy Strong is board your chauffeured motorcycle for a bolt downtown. No. You wanna recite King Lear. No. You wanna understand how his interview convalescence is going to impact your bottle line. You want to lie. You want to wear Tom Ford. Actually, the first thing you want to do when you look at Jeremy Strong is give him a hug, a plate of cookies, and some warm milk. All these triggers. Why’s that? Strong has just scooped up an Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series for his role as Kendall Roy on HBO’s supreme satirical smash, Succession. You’re invested, like many. Strong’s on a roll. This evening’s mantel decor chases similar from the Critics’ Choice Awards at the top of the year. A lot, of course, has gone down since then. Off-camera, Strong has been tasked to be a “troop leader and summon a surplus of reserves” for his young family, despite intermittent patches of “quiet despair”. The actor, after winning his Emmy, remarks to The Hollywood Reporter how “incongruous” award ceremonies feel in the mix of a pandemic and economic nosedive. The real award recipients ought to be the “front line hospital workers and delivery drivers.” He qualifies his remark by saying, though, that the evening’s program has been very deliberate in its gratitude, which he deeply appreciates. The win, beyond his “wild imaginings”, can find its due distillation. Strong started acting as a youngster in a Boston church basement, and it’s almost as if we’re back there now. I’ll hold the lamp at just such an angle and he’s gonna be the one that falls ill, exacts revenge, dies—and if that scene lasts a long time, worry not, just hold that god damned lamp steady. Under the sallow track lights, the oatmeal raisin cookies hardening on the collapsible table, you’d almost rather assume the role of seasoned boxing coach for the Middleweight. You see, there’s delight in, and fidelity to, Strong’s journey—he’s not the obvious choice. Give him your best and your simplest pointers, knead his shoulders a bit, and remind him he’s a lion heart—before he gets back out there, a pair of Mickey Mouse-sized dukes up, ready to leave it all in the ring. And it’s moving to witness his joy, not only because you’ve seen him suffer so in character, but because it seems to be driven by a child-like wonderment. Strong is altruistically one of those cultural embers you couldn’t extinguish if you tried—no umbilical to any Hollywood thrones, a devout disciplinarian, a ham, a self-prophesying firefly that, after decades of busting his ass—is now seated center on a magic carpet. But back to those triggers. Let’s say it: back to Kendall. Strong is demonstrably tickled by his inhabitation of the self-sabotaging heir-apparent. He concedes, though, and has remarked to other press before, on the lead-bellying nature of Kendall’s inhabitation at times. Today, it doesn’t stop his occasional suppression of a shit-eating grin at various interludes of the show’s mention, and anyway, it’s been a stretch since he’s stepped into the KR-initialed Ferragamo loafers. Why the glee? It’s not its action, per se, but its themes. Not its exoskeleton, but the unusual (and well fed) innards. Indeed. The experience of the drama is not eclipsable. Succession, nominated for 17 more Emmy’s atop Strong’s, took home seven, including the ultimate pinch me awake, of course: Best Drama.
MAISON MARGIELA coat, GIVENCHY latex top, BRIONI pants, and GIUSEPPE ZANOTTI boots
MAISON MARGIELA coat, GIVENCHY latex top, BRIONI pants, and GIUSEPPE ZANOTTI boots
MAISON MARGIELA coat and GIVENCHY latex top.
MAISON MARGIELA coat and GIVENCHY latex top.
I remember the first billboard I saw for the show, at Sunset Blvd and Highland Ave. I have a crystalline memory of asking: who the fuck wants to invest what is no doubt an hour per go on these aristocratic looking douchebags? Even the name is pretentious. And is that a Culkin? A couple months later—as the fatally flawed yet endearing characters have entered the American subconscious—the naysayers, myself included, are sensing it entertainment’s deliverance. Rooting for it. Inspiringly, the glee felt by Strong at the show’s success is not taking shape in kitschy endorsements, haughty interviews, or “method acting” (he hates that term) on late night television. No, the glee is felt in the prospect of deepening his relationship to the character and material. “But that is a question,” Strong supplants when queried about the mounting success of the show, “how to stay free? Especially when pressures mount, and people are paying more attention, and there are expectations, and the show has become successful. As much as I try to block that out, I’m aware of that. The natural response is to tense up, and achieve some level of doing great work, but I think any attempt at mastery is the wrong way to go. Better to attempt to be as free as you can and be a fool, come from courting failure instead of trying to achieve success.” Of course, Strong cannot elude the dynamic of the stronger-jawed old man in a comfier seat, even in the awards show bull pen. Actor Brian Cox, the uncompromising and fantastic patriarch of Succession, won Outstanding Actor last year. He was again nominated and thus on hand to placidly nod, a la Mr. Roy, at his fictional protege’s declaration that the receipt of the award was “shared” with him. See, the ubiquity of Logan Roy is the potent fertilizer to the Kendall kernel. Kendall’s cocksure and simultaneously cringe-eliciting behavior is catalyzed most by his father in the drama about a dynastic media and theme park empire and its quest to notch its way up the 1% ladder, despite the slimy rungs and the incomprehensibility of adding more zeroes to a lot of already existing zeroes in the vault. Alas, does the bigger slice actually taste better? The simple answer is yes. The complex answer is yes. The actor considers the psychological wingspan of the hit—attempting a bear hug of the planet with its power, but perpetually hamstrung to the living room, the awkward run ins in the kitchen, the inextricable burs of bloodlines. “The show is about legacy—and not the family business,” Strong attests, “but the legacy of what parents impart to children and the damage they can impart. This is the well water they’ve been drinking from their whole lives. I think the scary thing about the show is that success and power are the virtues. He’s grown up in a family that extols a virtue of dominance and power, and the credo of winning. I read about these different media families, and the President’s book The Art of the Deal—there’s a social Darwinism that is just about ruling and becoming the alpha, and being the alpha is the virtue. The ends justify the means. I don’t know where the ethics are in that. The ethics are justified because of the end result, or in our case, our tentacular reach, and the ratings, and the stock price of how we are evaluated as a company.” Strong, whose father worked in juvenile justice, his mother a hospice nurse—went to college at Yale (his mind’s illumination works off camera, too). He moved to New York City in the early 2000s. He squeaked by. He waited tables, he was in plays few people saw, he odd jobbed. At some fortunate juncture—which he told GQ about in 2019 over Paper Planes (bourbon and aperol), along with perhaps the writer’s insinuation that they both enjoyed the $85 lobster humidor—on a day in which his electricity was cut (Strong maybe a little too reliant on his illumination in lieu of paying bills) he was participating in a play in a storefront “with 30 folding chairs.” That night, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Pulitzer prize-winning playwright John Patrick Stanley saw this play. Days later, Strong was offered a part in the 2006 play Defiance by Stanley. This fostered a film role in 2008 independent effort, Humboldt County. Then he started to chip away. “There’s a few things you can get lost in,” he remarks of the journey’s compassing—albethey often hop scotching—foot steps. “I think my approach to acting is this one line in Hamlet: ‘For use can almost change the stamp of nature.’ I think if you habituate yourself enough to a character, you can change your stamp of nature. There is a residual effect of trying to transform into these people, and they stay with you. Kendall is seven months of working—you kind of disappear.” Of course, Kendall, like other notable first-borns Beyoncé , Albert Einstein, and Winston Churchill, longs for recognition in a variety of forms. Along the way, there’s accidental deaths, there’s sex and abuse scandals, there’s drugs, there seems to be a fucking helipad everywhere we go, there’s meanness and loyalty, toxic exploitation and Hermès-orange boxes round the tree, or just because it’s Tuesday. Inhabiting Kendall, during the said seven-month filming flight, and quite presumably in the wake thereafter, is psychologically trialing. But that’s the point. Strong considers, when I ask—aside from Succession—if some of the anger and frustration that is complicit to a number of his notable roles’ inhabiting, some of which have had historical context (Lincoln, Selma, The Big Short) might ever impede performance. He doesn’t agree or disagree. “I guess you can see your task as an actor to be a vessel,” he shares, “In a sense a desolate feeling. Sort of any piece of work becomes a kind of emotional triathlon. I remember sitting in on a class when I was an undergraduate with this sort of famous acting teacher. We talked about how the job of an actor is to float a line of text onto a line of feeling. So I think your task is to find where it lives on a feeling level, on a visceral level, and not at all on a cerebral or intellectual level. So while it is probably true that anger, for instance, is maybe a toxic emotion that can block or impede something more constructive, it is something that we all feel and know, I guess.” Let’s get into that anger. I ask Strong about the one piece of acting work we’ll see him in this year—one in which he ushers in the closing credits with his fist held in the air. The Trial of the Chicago 7—a Paramount Pictures project directed by Aaron Sorkin that will see distribution by Netflix this Fall—presents a fast-paced, tightly packed portrayal of the Chicago Seven, a group of anti-Vietnam War protestors charged with conspiracy to incite riots at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. Obviously, this wasn’t their intent. Strong plays Jerry Rubin, a counterculture icon of the 60s and 70s. He describes “trying to get inside of his psyche,” when I ask about Rubin—a kind of dopey but profoundly humanistic activist—which to me sounds like a lot of bong loads and lotus pose, but it was more than that. “When a character takes over you, they give you qualities you don’t normally possess. Defiance does not come easily to me but spending time with Jerry, you have to possess it. You take on a different cadence and energy.”
CELINE jacket, MARNI knit tank, and HERMÈS pants
CELINE jacket, MARNI knit tank, and HERMÈS pants
Strong describes being something of a Merry Prankster on set, convincing the prop guys to source fart machines so he could gag on his co-stars. It wouldn’t be sincere to the material if he weren’t in continuous “contempt of court”, legally logged or otherwise. Strong remarks, too, on Rubin’s belief in the “politics of ecstasy.” “There were of course the political convictions,” he says, “but he really believed in being in the moment, and believed in gorilla theatre, and a sense of play, so that gave that character a sense of freedom and an expressivity and whimsy. You know, Jerry got called in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee three times. And he went dressed as Santa Claus, he went dressed as an American revolutionary soldier, and then he went dressed like, I don’t know, wearing Viet Cong pajamas. In a sense, he was fearless in his defiance and had it in his core. So for a time I found myself in the shoes of this very courageous and fiery activist and radical, who saw the world, really, as a battle between freedom and oppression. And whose greatest hope was for what he called an ‘interracial humanhood’.” The film is quite the romp—stylized, studied, and in your face. Then: scenes from The Trial of the Chicago 7, despite consummate empowerment, with interludes of humor, history, and a pretty great wardrobe flex, are haunting. They’re haunting not just because they tell a lopsided and infuriating tale of corrupted and bigoted governmental behavior, framed by an unpopular and to this date arguably pointless war, or even the dysphoric nature of media and an invasive narrative sculpting public opinion. They’re haunting because all this shit is going on right now, fifty odd years later. Strong remarks that the current civil rights movement afoot has added resonance and heft to the picture, but also some wistfulness. “I think that these guys,” he continues, “Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman and Tom Hayden [Eddie Redmayne] and Bobby Seale [Yahya Abdul-Mateen II], they looked at the country in 1968 and they saw imperialist aggression abroad and racist aggression at home. And so sadly, the movie now is about how far we haven’t come, I think, as a society.” We retrain on our earlier considerations—how such searing or saddening historical subject matter might influence a performance, or at least bum you out. The chateaus, Big Apple views, and yacht summits of Succession are a distant galaxy from the violence and class warfare of The Trial of the Chicago 7, a similar sort of dichotomy illumined by Strong’s insistence there ought to be award ceremonies this year for those in the thick of the civil rights fight and the health crisis, rather than for actors and entertainers. “We shot this movie last October and November in Chicago and in New York,” he reflects, “and I remember being on Michigan Avenue and Balbo Street, in front of the Hilton, where these events took place, and marching with a crowd of people chanting ‘No justice, no peace, the people United will never be defeated.’ Trying to channel and understand this moment in time, knowing, even, that it would speak to the present, but having no idea that people would be chanting those same exact words on the streets of LA a few months ago, and on the streets of Minneapolis and Louisville and Portland and Seattle.” Strong shares, though, that he hasn’t been in the belly of the beast for a good chunk of the year. His young family (two girls under age two) spent six months in Denmark, where his wife is from, and, of course, you couldn’t juxtapose a more contrarian place to be amongst quote unquote First World bunkmates. “It was a real shock,” he admits of coming home, “to take a lot of steps backwards and be here. Also it was good to come home, there’s so much happening in this country right now, and it was difficult to be far away from it, and not feel like a part of things. Even just experiencing what everyone I know is experiencing here now. To film those riot scenes, and scenes with this authoritarian and bigoted, racist, despicable judge—Judge Hoffman—it would have all taken on another dimension that I think would have made my blood boil even more than it did. But you know, just inhabiting the story of that world in 1968 and 1969 makes your blood boil. It was sickening to me to be in that courtroom and re-experience what those guys all went through, and at the same time there was such a sense of hope and utopianism and love—a sort of fellow feeling that I saw glimmers of again these past few months. It feels like there’s another movement—a cultural, social movement. That is the main reason I’m happy to have been able to come home, and just feel that being so prevalent in the air again.”
GEOFFREY B. SMALL suit, tank, SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO mesh tank, and GUCCI sneakers.
GEOFFREY B. SMALL suit, tank, SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO mesh tank, and GUCCI sneakers.
We continue on the tattered state of the world. Strong, who numerous times throughout our chat quotes poets and writers, cites early 80s documentary, Koyaanisqatsi. The film depicts, to the dizzying compositions of Philip Glass, how scales of production and demand have leant such crisis to the conditions of our existence, this sort of burn after reading chapter of the Anthropocene. The title is a Hopi phrase for ‘life out of balance’ he tells me. “The thing about Denmark that I love and I gravitate towards,” the actor shares, “is the way in which life seems in balance. There’s not as much thriving in the culture, and not as much looking to the future. Because healthcare is provided and education is provided, and everyone has a median quality of life, there is enough but there’s not too much excess anywhere—life there feels much more balanced to me. Scandinavian countries are singled out, and I’ve met plenty of unhappy Danes, but there is social capital there that we don’t have. A sense of connectivity between you and the person you’re buying your groceries from, that your children probably go to school together, and being supported by the institutions that govern you. We’re missing a sense of tribe, community and we’ve become so isolated. So I guess the antidote must be any way we can bridge these divides. I think that is through representation and through connection on a level. We are so awash with superficiality, especially in entertainment, and I think Succession is trying to get at some underlying casual normalities.” Of course, as Strong suggests, Denmark isn’t producing panoramas of the scope and scale of Succession, nor distributing hundreds of cameras around the world for a live-streamed entertainment awards show—variety is the spice of life, they’ll say, however loaded the spicy dice. Alas, the actor, like a number of folks I’ve spoken with in the course of the pandemic, seems a bit hollowed out and tired by it all. He offers up a buoy, though, citing short story master and essayist, Richard Ford. “‘The key to life is learning to be happy on a low level of events,’” he paraphrases, and then Strong says the passage framed his mindset when the closures commenced and the economy began its capsize. “Because I’ve always found my meaning and happiness,” he says, “in extremity, you know, mostly through acting work, like going to these really extreme places and not totally valuing the rest of it—the rest of it being life itself. So finding value in the day to day, quotidian stuff, and finding ways it’s sacred, has been a great challenge for that.” We photographed the actor at Tres Osos Ranch near Santa Ynez, California, shortly after his return from Europe. Here, fires swallowed up the hillsides a couple of years ago and displaced much of the area communities. During the cover shoot, though, the limitless and ethereal beauty of California’s vastness and topological diversity seemed to elicit signs of healing. A wash of marigolds and rusts, oak trees and eucalyptus, that unequivocal SoCal breeze. A month later the entire West Coast would be choked in fire smoke. This is not a passing fad. Five million acres burned across 10 states is not a freak incident. “We feel very strongly the hots are getting hotter, the dries are getting dryer,” California Governor Gavin Newsom said, with Donald Trump at his side during what I guess was some sort of conciliatory visit? ”Something has happened to the plumbing of the world,” Newsom continues, “and we come from a perspective, humbly, that we assert the science that climate change is real.” The President later suggested that temperatures would begin to get cooler, remarking, “Just watch. I don’t think science knows actually.”
SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO blazer, shirt, and jeans.
SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO blazer, shirt, and jeans.
“I already felt angry enough at our government in our country,” Strong says, “and I’ve lost so much faith in our democracy. So in a way, you get to channel that outrage and anger into the work. Then, at a certain point, as a citizen of the world, making a piece of art is both a worthy endeavor, but it’s also not enough.” Strong describes the anger amassing in his body, standing at the bottom of a hill in Chicago beneath a glowering, riot-gear clad police force “ready to fill their teargas canister, with their dogs and clubs, and this sort of righteous anger felt by activists at that time. While I don’t feel, personally, I can hold a candle to the real people standing in that line right now, there is a voyeuristic sense about being an actor—traveling through the experience of others, and giving them weight, and trying to understand them. I am a controlled person, so losing control and being able to go to the different precipices of characters, there’s something in that I am compelled to, to find those liminal places.”
BRIONI jacket, shirt, and pants and THE ELDER STATESMAN beanie.
BRIONI jacket, shirt, and pants and THE ELDER STATESMAN beanie.
Strong describes that liminality further, how research into the character motives in The Trial of the Chicago 7 triggered experiences from similar points of immersion. He recalls Lincoln, where he played the secretary to the soon to be assassinated President and freer of slaves, portrayed by Daniel Day-Lewis. “And then I worked on Kathryn Bigelow’s film Detroit, which was about the Detroit race riots in 1967, and on Selma, I got to march over the bridge in Selma. And so the sense, you know, the subsoil everything is growing out of is deeply flawed and sort of pathogenic—I’ve been keenly aware of that.” It’s a worthwhile rumination. How much of what we’re witnessing on the boob tube and in our feeds, in our work, and in our relationships, is a true expression of free will, or germinated by a deeper network of GMO-soaked tap roots? The word ‘systemic’ has presumably never seen higher Google inquiry as it has in 2020, and the figures fronting the domestic transition into a consummate theocracy of greed seem beyond even parody. In keeping, the conversation segues into contemporary notions of masculinity. Strong remarks that discourse, in panels or pieces he’s read, often surrounds Kendall as a sort of boy-man, “a boy who has not gone through a process of maturation or individuation, which is outdated,” Strong says. “Instead, there is this boy-man, who is this modern figure of resentment, guilt, fear, aggression, humiliation, and in a sense castration—to his own masculinity.” And how about the other principle male figures in the show? “I think that the character of Logan is a dinosaur—a primitive, dominant, savage male businessman, a corporate titan figure. I think Kendall is in a quandary of how to be his father’s son on some level, wanting his father’s validation deeply, but he doesn’t possess strength and dominance as his native language. He puts on this armor, a version of masculinity, that is not who he is, which people find pitiable and cringeworthy and can care about on some level—seeing him try so hard to be someone he’s not and fill his father’s shoes. He’s been so stifled and denied the ability to grow in a way. It’s left him in a shambles in his identity and selfhood.” I remark to Strong that a prominent slogan, typically from males, that came out of the Women’s March when the President was inaugurated was something along the lines of: “I’m not here to talk. I’m here to listen.” I ask how that sentiment crosses over to Succession. “Kendall’s is a relatable conflict, as it concerns the contemporary masculine journey, because there is a set of practices or characteristics that we’re made to feel we need to adopt. This imparted standard, or way of being, is incongruous to our inner-being. There’s a sense of that in this character that I find makes me very sad, that makes him very sad. He’s trying to find somewhere to feel at home that is not about market cap. He is trying to exist within a market cap universe, but that’s not a universe that values or recognizes authenticity, or vulnerability or honesty. He’s lost in all of that, and that makes me care about him most of all.” The care is evident. And perhaps as Strong earlier remarked concerning his desire to “court failure” as opposed to obsess over success—to play the fool—has more cultural gravitas and potential to influence than might initially register. I assert that the fool, at least in the classical sense, the Shakespearean sense, is a giving character, however flawed. “The greater challenge is how to stay hungry and passionate,” he responds, “which is rotating a mindset from being in a place where you want to gain, to being in a place where you want to give. I find the gift inexhaustible, but in the moment of ‘me’, and your own egocentric thing, you’re lost, I think. I guess acting is about service on some level, but there’s a self-important aspect to it, saying ‘look at me.’ If you can reach a place where what you really want is to give yourself to the audience, serve the character, and reach a place of total belief that the character is someone, and you’re trying to serve their needs, pain, struggles—perhaps it might have an effect or illuminate something for someone else.” I mention an article that appeared in Rolling Stone earlier in the month—“The Unraveling of America: Anthropologist Wade Davis on how COVID-19 signals the end of the American era.” It seems, to date, to have solicited quite a bit of praise, however bleak the synopsis. The piece, which Strong attests “packed a punch” and was “very sobering” gyrates from historic symptoms of reign and ruin, to obesity rates to opiates’ gutting of community and family, to our criminal justice system, to the boy-man that’s had to widen the White House throne for his ass (or is it his golf clubs?), to the troubling juxtapositions with places like Denmark, or Vancouver, B.C. that are just seemingly so much more inclusive and humane.
TOM FORD suit, GUCCI shirt, and ARCHIVIO J.M. RIBOT scarf.
TOM FORD suit, GUCCI shirt, and ARCHIVIO J.M. RIBOT scarf.
I became aware of the essay as Strong actually shared it with Flaunt’s Style Director, Mui-Hai Chu, following the day spent in Santa Ynez, enthused to bridge a parallel to the empire crumble exhausted in the article with the resulting photo shoot creative. I think the dirt does it. My take on the thesis in “The Unraveling of America”? That individualistic culture is on a crotch rocket to a second-rate hell. There isn’t even cable. And forget the bong loads and fart machines. Why? Because America has taken the notion of the individual to teetering levels of actual self-abandon. In the essay, Davis touts Asia as the next superpower, and I remark to Strong that Asia is a destination where collectivism and decentralization of the individual is actually a soft but extraordinarily potent power. Nonetheless, here we sit, inside a metaphoric mega stadium, the entertainment complex, literally structured around a stage, for individuals. “I think Kendall is this apotheosis of the fallacy of individualism, and this omnipotence, yes,” Strong reflects. “It certainly doesn’t lead to happiness in his case, or our country’s case. We are in the throes of some growth pains, and the only way out is through. That will require fortitude and some unhappiness, particularly if we are locating our happiness in convenience, ease, and distraction.” It sounds, to me, uniquely individualistic in method, but collectivist in spirit. We consider the spirt of the country. Perhaps due to its belonging to Rolling Stone, Davis’ essay doesn’t dip its toes too deep into the dismal state of media, and the manipulation of fact for political or capitalistic gain. But our conversation does, and what comes to mind is one of the better lines from Strong in The Trial of the Chicago 7. We watch Bobby Seale [the one Black activist, who was eventually separated from the others and given his own trial] denied his fair right to legal counsel, in light of his attorney, Charles Gary, unable to be at his side due to gallbladder surgery. Strong’s Rubin, shortly hereafter, is sat at a press conference. He’s asked a classically twisted, insinuating question about Seale by a journalist, and he coolly and smoothly replies—with that inimitable Jeremy Strong convicted yet empty stare: “You just phrased your question in the form of a lie.”
TOM FORD suit, GUCCI shirt and boots, BOTTEGA VENETA sunglasses, and ARCHIVIO J.M. RIBOT scarf.
TOM FORD suit, GUCCI shirt and boots, BOTTEGA VENETA sunglasses, and ARCHIVIO J.M. RIBOT scarf.
In this stomach-clenching civil rights portrait, the line offers comic relief, but is troublingly eerie and a little too close to home, some 90 days out from the perverse Presidential election we’re all going to have a front row seat for, whether we want it or not. “The gradual departure from facts,” Strong attests, “and going to whatever we’re in now—which is that facts are whoever has the loudest and most forceful voice in the room—there’s a sense of questions being posed in the form of lies. Almost more insidious is post-truth. We’re in post-objectivity and truth has become subjective, and it’s incredibly dangerous and frightening, and it’s happening in invisible and ubiquitous ways.” It’s a globalized ball of gas we’re inhabiting, alright, and as such, we’re gonna close the conversation on the topic that started it—the pains and aches and process of the pandemic. I ask Strong about Succession—of which the production and filming of season three was postponed like every other series or film—meaning we won’t likely tangle with the Roys again until next Fall: what was it foreshadowing? Strong is clearly tickled when I raise the idea of Succession’s postmodern unmooring, where anti-heroes abound and power is so saturated, the quest for it becomes something esophageal and inverted. He smiles that big smile, and then lowers his head a bit to speak out from under his slightly furrowed brow. “What I love about acting is that you get to go to these places, in a controlled environment. Things that we feel in our day-to-day lives like rage, despair—and confusion is a big one—you know, I’m drawn to characters who are confused—and I guess I’m drawn to characters that are in peril, and in trouble somehow, and then trying to work through the gordian knot of their feeling. There was something that I read when I was getting ready for Succession, because I was reading a lot about the shadow, and I think a lot of what’s happening in this country is the shadow rearing its monstrous head.” Let them be Santa Ynez shadows, then, for the day. Strong warmly agrees, then concedes that the early stages of all this felt something of a gift, where we were all wrapped up in the phenomenon of shutting down planet fucking earth. Now, though, he attests after a return back home, that things feel at “a breaking point, at some sort of threshold.” We’ve spent the better of this article talking about the momentum of Kendall Roy, the show, cropping up here, there, winning awards… all paced at an incredible clip, but now just sorta stuck on pause. “It’s a gift for all of us to slow down,” he concludes, “and for the noise level to sort of quiet. I had a great hope to, you know, use this time to reflect, to work on myself—I think we all should have committed to that—but when I look back to the last six months, it’s been fallow in a lot of ways creatively, because there’s been no real outlet for me. But it’s also been time I get to spend with my family, and my children, that I wouldn’t have otherwise had. So that’s certainly not fallow. That feels inestimably valuable.”
DIOR MEN jacket, shirt, and pants, ESQUIVEL shoes, and ARCHIVIO J.M. RIBOT scarf.
DIOR MEN jacket, shirt, and pants, ESQUIVEL shoes, and ARCHIVIO J.M. RIBOT scarf.
Written by Matthew Bedard Photographed by Carlos Serrao Styled by Jenny Ricker Groomer: Kerrie Urban Set Designer: James Lear Location: Tres Osos Ranch Issue 172 $15.99 Issue 172 - Chaos and Calm Cover: Quantity: Add To Cart