Jeremy Strong worried viewers thought Succession was a comedy

The New Yorker

New Yorker staff writer Michael Schulman spent six months profiling Strong, whom he describes as "one of the most intense people I have ever met in my life." “To me, the stakes are life and death,” Strong told Schulman of playing Kendall Roy. “I take him as seriously as I take my own life.” Schulman explains that Strong does not find his character funny, "which is probably why he’s so funny in the role." When asked about Kendall's cringeworthy rap in Season 2, Strong gave an unsmiling answer about Raskolnikov, referencing Kendall’s “monstrous pain.” Kieran Culkin told Schulman, “after the first season, he said something to me like, ‘I’m worried that people might think that the show is a comedy.’ And I said, ‘I think the show is a comedy.’ He thought I was kidding.” When Schulman wrote that he told Strong that he, too, thought of the show as a dark comedy, "he looked at me with incomprehension and asked, 'In the sense that, like, Chekhov is comedy?'" Schulman wrote that he responded: "No, I said, in the sense that it’s funny." As Succession executive producer Adam McKay put it: “That’s exactly why we cast Jeremy in that role. Because he’s not playing it like a comedy. He’s playing it like he’s Hamlet.” Even Brian Cox said he was concerned with Strong's intensity as an actor. “The result that Jeremy gets is always pretty tremendous,” Cox said. “I just worry about what he does to himself. I worry about the crises he puts himself through in order to prepare.”

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