Why Jeremy Strong Doesn’t Miss Playing Kendall Roy on ‘Succession’

According to Jeremy Strong, playing the number one boy on HBO’s Succession wasn’t always top tier. Spending four seasons as Kendall Roy, the presumed heir to Logan Roy’s media empire, “fucked me up,” the actor told The Times of London in a recent interview. “It’s not something I have any wish to do any longer,” Strong replied when asked about a potential Kendall spin-off. “I’m aware it is one of the main chapters of my life, but I don’t miss it.”

Strong, who won an Emmy and Golden Globe for his four seasons with Succession, acknowledged “that show was an incalculable gift” and the writing “a banquet.” “So I miss that,” he continued. “But Kendall’s struggle was difficult to carry for seven years. And there’s just so much more I want to do.”

In an interview with Vanity Fair after the end of Succession, Strong said that the series represented the steady decline of Kendall’s humanity. “For me—not necessarily for Jesse or for anyone else—this show could have been called The Death of Kendall Roy,” he explained. “The slow, inexorable death of Kendall Roy, over four seasons mirrors, in a way, the death of a system and a country. We see the dying of the light in this person. And in tandem, we see the collapse and dying of a light in late-stage capitalism, and in this country at this moment.”

Given his immersive acting method, Strong said that Kendall’s descent complicated his own life “because he’s become very real to me,” he told VF, “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.”

More than a year removed from the most major role of his career, Strong told The Times of London, “I’ve rediscovered play. I sometimes lost touch with joy.” During that time, Strong won a Tony for his Broadway play An Enemy of the People and played Donald Trump’s late political fixer Roy Cohn in The Apprentice.

As he told VF at the film’s New York premiere, Strong relished the opportunity to try out a new character. “Roy’s legacy is a legacy of shamelessness, mendacity, lies, dissimulation, brutality, and winning as the only moral measure,” the actor said. “But he also, like, had a bedroom full of stuffed-frog figurines and a Mickey Mouse sign on his door that said ‘Roy.’ He had a kind of guileless innocence and charm at the same time as he was a lethal, brutal, ruthless, savage, remorseless person. So I’ve never quite seen that polarity in one person before.”

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