Category Archives: Succession

‘What is it about life that’s sacred?’: Harriet Walter backs change in law on assisted dying

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The actor, who has played characters on both sides of the debate, says the UK needs a conversation about euthanasia and assisted suicide

About a decade ago, Dame Harriet Walter, the 73-year-old star of stage and screen, decided to make a living will. The will, also known as an advance decision, informs family, carers and doctors of a person’s wish to refuse specific treatments should they become too ill to communicate those choices. (It stops short of requesting help with end of life; euthanasia and assisted suicide remain illegal in the UK.) But, when it came to actually completing the details of her living will, Walter always found something else to do.

“I had the will sitting in my filing cabinet for about three or four years before I got round to it,” says Walter, who made her name in the theatre but has recently had eye-catching roles in the TV shows Succession, Killing Eve and Ted Lasso. “It’s not something you really want to look at, it’s not something you want to think about. But it will be good to know that there’s something in place that you could use when the time comes. Then you close that filing cabinet.”

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Emmys 2023: Succession’s final season scores 27 nominations

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The acclaimed business drama leads the pack with The Last of Us, The White Lotus and Ted Lasso following

The final season of Succession has dominated this year’s Emmy nominations with 27 nods.

The acclaimed HBO series picked up 14 acting nominations including recognition for Brian Cox, Jeremy Strong, Kieran Culkin and Sarah Snook. It marks the first time in Emmys history that three performers from the same show have scored lead actor nominations in the same category.

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Jeremy Strong to follow Succession with a return to Broadway

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The actor will head up an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 play An Enemy of the People once the hit HBO drama has ended

Jeremy Strong is going from a corporate boardroom on TV to a whistleblower on Broadway.

The actor who plays Kendall Roy in the HBO television series Succession has signed on to play a man who tries to expose water contamination in a Norwegian spa town in Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 play An Enemy of the People.

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Golden Globes: The Power of the Dog and Succession win at celebrity-free ceremony

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Jane Campion’s Netflix drama and HBO hit triumph as stars distance themselves from Hollywood Foreign Press Association

The Power of the Dog and Succession were the big winners at an unusual, stripped-back Golden Globes.

Traditionally, the ceremony is a glitzy telecast with A-listers in attendance but after a year of controversies surrounding diversity and amoral practices, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association lost its footing in the industry, with publicity firms, studios and celebrities choosing to distance themselves.

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Need a warped, tortured or evil character for a Hollywood film? Cast a British actor

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UK stars Olivia Colman, Idris Elba and Benedict Cumberbatch are all in demand with US directors. We look at why

A sensitive, geeky youth, stuck on a lonely cattle ranch, might understandably yearn for a kindly uncle figure; someone to confide in, or be mentored by. But the companionship actor Benedict Cumberbatch offers his brother’s stepson, Peter, in the widely Oscar-tipped western Power of the Dog is a very long, precarious horse ride away from anything avuncular.

In fact, Cumberbatch’s portrayal of the emotionally thwarted Phil Burbank is a study in twisted misery. In one early scene, Burbank notices some fragile paper flowers the teenager has made to decorate a dinner table at his mother’s canteen. But, instead of praising them, “Uncle Phil” is driven to publicly sneer.

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Succession creator Jesse Armstrong on its thunderous finale: ‘That might be as good as I’ve got’

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Season three of the hit show has made even more headlines than usual. We ask its British creator if he’s had enough yet, if actor Jeremy Strong is doing OK – and if his character Kendall is actually Jesus

• Warning: contains spoilers

Yesterday, like much of the rest of the world, I watched the finale of the third season of Succession. And, like much of the rest of the world, I found myself buffeted by one astonishing twist after another – and a gasp-inducing climax that outdid even those of series one and two. Unlike my fellow viewers, however, pretty much the first thing I see after the end credits roll is the face of Jesse Armstrong, the show’s creator, popping up over Zoom and politely attempting to dissuade me from discussing the episode.

Unlike other big TV showrunners – who will happily explain, and sometimes over-explain, every single second – Armstrong prefers to remain hands off. He tries not to read the acres of theorising that Succession inspires. Such post-match analyses, he says, can often feel like a tightrope walk. “There’s a bit of me that just wants to find out what the fuck everyone is saying about the show,” he says from his book-lined study in London. “But you can’t. It wouldn’t be good for me psychologically – and it wouldn’t be good for the creative process of doing the show.”

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Adam McKay: ‘Leo sees Meryl as film royalty – he didn’t like seeing her with a lower back tattoo’

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After politics in Vice and finance in The Big Short, director McKay is taking on the climate crisis in his star-studded ‘freakout’ satire Don’t Look Up

Adam McKay calls it his “freakout trilogy”. Having tackled the 2008 financial crash and warmongering US vice president Dick Cheney in his previous two movies, The Big Short and Vice, McKay goes even bigger and bleaker with his latest, Don’t Look Up, in which two astronomers (Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio) discover a giant comet headed for Earth, but struggle to get anyone to listen. It is an absurd but depressingly plausible disaster satire, somewhere between Dr Strangelove, Network, Deep Impact and Idiocracy, with an unbelievably stellar cast; also on board are Meryl Streep (as the US president), Cate Blanchett, Timothée Chalamet, Tyler Perry, Mark Rylance, Jonah Hill and Ariana Grande. It has been quite the career trajectory for McKay, who started out in live improv and writing for Saturday Night Live, followed by a run of hit Will Ferrell comedies such as Anchorman, Step Brothers and The Other Guys. “The goal was to capture this moment,” says McKay of Don’t Look Up. “And this moment is a lot.”

Was there a particular event that inspired Don’t Look Up?
Somewhere in between The Big Short and Vice, the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] panel and a bunch of other studies came out that just were so stark and so terrifying that I realised: “I have to do something addressing this.” So I wrote five different premises for movies, trying to find the best one. I had one that was a big, epic, kind of dystopian drama. I had another one that was a Twilight Zone/M Night [Shyamalan] sort of twisty thriller. I had a small character piece. And I was just trying to find a way into: how do we communicate how insane this moment is? So finally, I was having a conversation with my friend [journalist and Bernie Sanders adviser] David Sirota, and he offhandedly said something to the effect of: “It’s like the comet’s coming and no one cares.” And I thought: “Oh. I think that’s it.” I loved how simple it was. It’s not some layered, tricky Gordian knot of a premise. It’s a nice, big, wide open door we can all relate to.

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Madness in their method: have we fallen out of love with actorly excess?

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The Succession star Jeremy Strong has been widely scorned after a magazine profile revealed his ‘preening’ and ‘self-indulgent’ acting process. But many actors have been lauded for their method – so what has changed?

Robert De Niro is the greatest actor of his generation. So claimed the headline in a popular magazine last year, and it’s not a controversial claim. The evidence offered for this opinion was the same that’s always wheeled out when discussing De Niro’s acting: “[He] took method acting to previously uncharted levels. He got a New York cab licence for Taxi Driver, learned Italian and lived in Sicily to prepare for The Godfather Part II, put on 60lbs to play Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull, learned Latin for True Confessions and the sax for New York, New York. He was the hardest-working man in Hollywood,” wrote the journalist.

For decades, this has been the general feeling about actors: the more method, the better. After all, if they don’t eat raw bison and sleep in an animal carcass (Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant), stay in a wheelchair and be spoonfed by the crew (Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot) or lose so much weight that they start to go blind (Matthew McConaughey in Dallas Buyers Club), they’re just playing make-believe. And why should they get all that fame, adoration and money just for that? All of the above actors were rewarded for their efforts with an Oscar, and actors talking about their method efforts has become as much a part of the run-up to the Oscars as shops playing Do They Know It’s Christmas in the run-up to the holidays.

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Succession recap: series three, episode eight – now that’s what you call a cliffhanger

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In the most horrifying episode of the show so far, Shiv and Roman take things too far at the Tuscan wedding, Logan is left incandescent with rage … and then there’s Kendall

Spoiler alert: this recap is for people watching Succession season three, which airs on HBO in the US and Sky Atlantic in the UK. Do not read on unless you have watched episode eight.

Wedding bells were ringing. So were alarm bells in Waystar Royco’s HR department. But is a funeral toll about to ring out, too? Here are your tasting notes for the penultimate episode, titled Chiantishire …

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‘The women are cannon fodder’: how Succession shows the horrors of misogyny

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Season three of the daddy issues drama speaks volumes about the monstrous Man Club that rules society – and even billionaire’s daughter Shiv Roy can’t escape its sadistic clutches

Everyone eats their share of dung beetle surprise on Succession – HBO’s unrepentant daddy issues drama – but the women’s portions come heavily seasoned with the patriarchy’s favourite ingredients: sexism and misogyny. Even billionaire’s daughter Shiv Roy (played by Sarah Snook) can’t escape it. “It’s only your teats that give you any value,” her brother Kendall (Jeremy Strong) shouts after she rejects his offer to join him in another one of his patricidal business plans. Even before then, he couldn’t help but put a pin in her dreams of taking over the company: “You are too divisive … you’re still seen as a token woman, wonk, woke snowflake.”

“I don’t think that, but the market does,” he explains.

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Succession’s plot twist prompts surge of interest in leaving money in wills to Greenpeace

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When Cousin Greg was disinherited by his grandfather in favour of the environmental group, inquiries about such legacies soared

In one bewildering and painful scene in the hit TV drama Succession, Cousin Greg sees his future of ease and wealth turn to dust. His grandfather, Ewan, announces he is giving away his entire fortune to Greenpeace, depriving Greg of his inheritance.

Now Greenpeace is hoping to benefit in real life as well as in the fictional world of the media conglomerate Waystar Royco. Thousands of people have looked into leaving money to the environmental group since the darkly comic storyline about Cousin Greg losing his inheritance and then threatening to sue the organisation was broadcast. More than 22,000 people have accessed online advice about making donations in their wills to Greenpeace. The group’s legacy webpage has also seen a tenfold surge in traffic since the episode was first broadcast earlier this month.

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Succession recap: series three, episode five – catastrophe strikes as Logan loses his grip

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As the patriarch succumbs to a meltdown brought on by health woes, Shiv tries to save the day at the shareholder meeting. What a hilariously excruciating hour

Spoiler alert: this recap is for people watching Succession season three, which airs on HBO in the US and Sky Atlantic in the UK. Do not read on unless you have watched episode five.

The long-awaited shareholder meeting played out like a blend of anxiety dream and boardroom farce. But who would emerge victorious? Here are the minutes from episode five, titled Retired Janitors of Idaho …

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Succession’s Nicholas Braun: ‘I feel better being honest than hiding’

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He’s the reluctant sex symbol who is now partying with the Clintons. But actor Nicholas Braun is only just coming to terms with his life-changing role as Cousin Greg, TV’s favourite antihero in Succession. He reveals how he is learning to embrace his newfound fame

Nicholas Braun arrived on Long Island by train, and then he took a car to the compound. This was three years ago. Braun had been invited to a weekend-long party at a fancy home owned by friends of the American actor Jeremy Strong, who Braun knew from the set of the Emmy Award-winning television show Succession, in which they both star. At the compound he was patted down by members of the secret service, which startled him at first, and then delighted him. (He later referred to the agents as “my boys”.) As guests flashed around, Braun remembers thinking, “How is it I’ve ended up here, at a party in a locked-down compound that has a federal agency working the door?” And then the Clintons arrived.

By this point, Braun had filmed just one series of Succession, the HBO juggernaut, which revolves around and pillories the Roy family, a venomous media dynasty in the mould of the Murdochs. (Perhaps you’ve heard of it.) Braun plays Greg Hirsch, a distant cousin and Roy family satellite who, as the show progresses, finds himself increasingly surrounded by powerful and prestigious people and the mucky opulence in which they operate, and becomes both seduced and confused by his new surroundings, often to comic effect.

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Succession star Kieran Culkin: ‘Just be unlikable, it’s fun’

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The actor talks to his friend Edgar Wright about rooting for Roman, his ambition to move to London and why he’d like to have a crack at being Angela Lansbury

New York-born actor Kieran Culkin, 39, made his film debut at the age of eight, alongside his elder brother Macaulay in Home Alone. While still a child he also had roles in Father of the Bride, The Mighty and The Cider House Rules. He later appeared in Music of the Heart, Igby Goes Down and Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs the World. He now stars as Roman Roy in HBO drama Succession, which returned to Sky Atlantic last week, a role for which he’s been Emmy and Golden Globe-nominated.

One of the many reasons I love Succession is that I always think I’m watching “Evil Kieran”…
[Laughs] That’s good to know. Roman might be the most acerbic of the Roy siblings but I still root for him and am willing him to step up. That’s true for a lot of the characters. I really feel it with Tom [Wambsgans, played by Matthew Macfadyen]. I desperately want him to tell Shiv to go fuck herself and show the family his true self but Tom never does, he just rolls over. It’s so deliciously dissatisfying.

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‘It’s barely started and I’m already terrified’: my crash course in Succession

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Blackmail! Backstabbing! Boar on the Floor! I binged seasons one and two of the dazzling drama about a dysfunctional, super-rich family. Bring on season three!

My to-be-watched pile is worse than my to-be-read pile, but at least all the prestige shows I need to watch have ended. I will get to them, but there is no urgency. Not so with Succession, another award-laden entity, urged upon me by critics and friends. Two series have passed me by and now the third season of the epic tale of media baron Logan Roy and his clan is almost upon us. It is time to go in.

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‘His rage, his pain, his shame, they’re all mine’: Jeremy Strong on playing Succession’s Kendall Roy

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Strong’s role as the self-destructive media heir takes commitment – and the actor goes all in

• Plus: inside the Succession writers’ room

Earlier this year, Jeremy Strong left his apartment in Brooklyn, walked across the bridge to Manhattan and headed towards the far west side of the island, where he was filming the third season of the feverishly adored and heavily accoladed HBO series Succession. Strong plays Kendall, the alternately bullied and rebellious son of the vilified, Murdoch-esque media tycoon Logan Roy, played by Brian Cox, and Succession follows the jostling among the patriarch’s four children for his affection and respect, both of which he generally withholds. None of them is as visibly crushed by this as Kendall, who bears more than a slight resemblance to James Murdoch, even down to the dabblings in hip-hop. With every timid step Strong makes on screen, every apologetic dip of his chin when he starts to talk, he captures the pain of a son who knows he has failed to live up to his father’s expectations from the first time he cried. He won an Emmy last year for the role, beating, among others, Cox, in neatly Freudian style.

Strong likes to walk while learning his lines, so on that day in New York as he was walking he was also talking, reciting a speech he would soon be saying to Cox, in which Kendall tries to curry favour with his father, but also to be seen as his own man. “Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a ghost-grey Tesla rolling to a stop, so I looked in it, and there was James Murdoch,” Strong says when we meet in a London hotel. “He looked at me and I looked at him, and there was a flicker between us. Then he was gone. So we had a moment.”

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‘People want imperfection’: Hiam Abbass on Succession, Ramy and playing complex women

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She is enigmatic Marcia Roy in Succession, but as the Egyptian-American mother in the award-winning Ramy, she’s a hoot. The Palestinian actor examines her many-layered roles

You would be hard pressed to find two TV characters in 2021 with less in common than Marcia Roy and Maysa Hassan. The former is the enigmatic, sophisticated wife of billionaire patriarch Logan Roy in the HBO hit Succession. While the series is dominated by huge personalities, she is a mysterious presence – albeit one who is despised by Logan’s children. The latter, on the other hand, is an open book – the unfiltered, sometimes offensively so, Egyptian-American mother of the title character in the Golden Globe-winning comedy Ramy.

But they are played by the same actor, Hiam Abbass, whose ability to switch from calamity to calm speaks to a varied career across theatre, cinema and, latterly, award-winning television series. Though she has lived in Paris since the late 80s, the Palestinian actor was born in Nazareth, Israel, and started her career with the then-burgeoning Palestinian National Theatre, El-Hakawati. Though the company toured Europe, it was far from an easy existence back at home. “The Israeli authorities didn’t like all of the activities happening at our theatre,” explains Abbass, a warm presence who is fluent in English, Arabic, French and Hebrew. “They would come in and close it down. Part of my work there was dealing with how, politically, we could stay open. Travelling to Europe opened my eyes a little to the possibility of breathing some different air. It was hard to work all the time to justify your being.”

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Watchmen, Succession and Schitt’s Creek dominate virtual Emmys

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The most diverse field in Emmys history garnered several awards for black actors and a full sweep for a Canadian sitcom

It was uncharted waters for the 72nd Emmy awards – the first major acting awards show held since the pandemic began, a strange and subdued ceremony in which stars accepted awards on Zoom. But unwelcome new methods (the telecast required more than 100 live feeds), and the end of former Emmys juggernauts Game of Thrones and Veep, ushered in a celebration of new series and talent: Canadian comedy Schitt’s Creek swept the comedy awards, HBO’s Succession dominated in drama and the evening’s most-nominated show, HBO’s prescient, eerie Watchmen, cleaned up in the limited series category.

Related: Emmy winners 2020: the full list

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Emmys 2020: Watchmen and The Marvelous Mrs Maisel lead nominations

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The acclaimed HBO graphic novel adaptation leads the pack with 26 nominations, with the Amazon period comedy following behind

HBO’s acclaimed graphic novel adaptation Watchmen leads this year’s Emmy nominations with 26 nods.

Related: Lorde and Mick Jagger urge politicians to seek permission before using music

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