Jeremy Strong discusses playing Roy Cohn in ‘The Apprentice’: ‘The most fascinating person I’ve ever tried to inhabit’

Liam Mathews
·4 min read
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While starring on the Emmy Award-winning HBO series “Succession,” Emmy winner Jeremy Strong developed a reputation as an actor who takes himself and his craft incredibly seriously, perhaps overly so. There was a controversial New Yorker profile, and critical comments from his co-star Brian Cox that suggested some frustration with Strong’s methods (or Methods, you could say). Strong famously could not understand why people thought “Succession” was a comedy, even though it was hilarious. Even when his fellow actors were playing it as a comedy, he was always deadly serious.

In a new interview with The New York Times, Strong reflected on his reputation for humorlessness, and it sounds like he might be lightening up. Just a little bit. 

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Asked if he’s interested in comedy, he acknowledged that “Succession” was “wickedly funny,” which is a change from how he used to talk about the show. “I don’t know that that show can be put into any box, but it had an incredible amount of humor in it.”

Strong said that while he does not gravitate toward comedy, he doesn’t dislike it, expressing admiration for the legendary comedic actor Peter Sellers. He gave a little bit of insight into his perhaps peculiar sense of humor. He explained that the last time he worked with Sam Gold, the director of his current Broadway play “An Enemy of the People,” they did a play called “The Coward.” Strong talked in a silly falsetto the whole time. 

“Your very own paper, The New York Times, said that after two hours, you’re starved for silence,” Strong told interviewer David Marchese. “I thought, That’s exactly what I was trying to do. It’s a myth that I am this humorless person.”  

(Here’s how the Times’ Charles Isherwood opened his 2010 review of “The Coward”: “Silly voices should be used sparingly in the theater, as they generally are in other realms of entertainment. There is a reason why the men of Monty Python and the various gagmeisters from ‘Saturday Night Live’ deploy their comedy in sketch-sized doses. After listening to the shrill, artificial falsetto employed by Jeremy Strong in the title role of the new play ‘The Coward’ for more than two hours, my ears were starved for silence. I felt as if I’d been listening to a musically challenged youngster in a long and unpromising first encounter with the flute.”)

Strong also copped to not being great at loosening up. Asked what he does for fun, Strong said “It’s probably something I’m not great at doing.” But he said he does like action movies. “I saw ‘The Equalizer 3’ the weekend it opened in Denmark by myself. It’s a good decompressant for me.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Strong says that doing “An Enemy of the People” is his response to what he received after the New Yorker profile, because Henrik Ibsen wrote “An Enemy of the People” after a very personal play, “Ghosts,” was derisively received, similarly to how Strong’s honesty about who he is led to him being mocked. 

Strong also discussed his upcoming role in the film “The Apprentice,” in which he plays the infamous lawyer Roy Cohn in the 1970s and 1980s when he served as a mentor to Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan). 

“I went right into Roy Cohn, partly just to sort of shake [‘Succession’] off,” Strong said. “Roy Cohn, you can’t overstate his influence in our country, his legacy of the denial of reality and certain things that he imparted to Donald Trump. His playbook has a tentacular reach that is staggering — the most fascinating person I’ve ever tried to inhabit. I should say a disclaimer: My job is to be a humanistic investigator of a subject and to withhold judgment. So while I personally might have a lot of judgment about Roy Cohn, that is not the part of me that engages in the creative work.”

Strong is an early contender for Best Supporting Actor at next year’s Academy Awards for his performance as Cohn.

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