Jeremy Strong on Kendall Roy’s ‘Succession’ Fate: “He’s Stuck in a Silent Scream Forever”

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[This story contains major spoilers from the series finale of Succession, “With Open Eyes.”]

In a series marked by meteoric rises and falls, no one on Succession fell harder than Kendall Roy. If Logan’s “eldest son” was all but completely alone at the end of the Jesse Armstrong-written and Mark Mylod-directed “With Open Eyes,” at least Jeremy Strong was keeping good company on finale night, watching alongside a close circle.

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“I think some people felt like this moment might pass,” Strong tells The Hollywood Reporter about his crowd’s reaction to Kendall’s fate, toppled one last time on his quest to wear the Waystar crown. “Maybe he’ll have a life. Maybe he’ll get up off of that bench and walk in a different direction, and maybe have some version of a life.”

That’s certainly not how Strong sees it. Speaking with THR, the actor opens up about why he views Kendall’s final scene as a death for the character, saying he filmed an alternate version of the scene where he rushed the railing at Battery Park, intending to leap into the East River. Just as it was with Tony’s fate on The Sopranos, Strong’s Kendall now lives in this permanent state of suspended animation, neither alive nor dead, hopeful or hopeless. But the actor’s take stands: Kendall’s through. No getting up this time. Ahead, he explains why, and much more about Kendall’s end.

Jeremy Strong
Jeremy Strong in ‘Succession’

In the finale, Kendall tells the story about his dad promising him the kingdom when he was 7 years old. Was that new information for you or was that moment always in your understanding of the character?

Jesse gave me a bible, a timeline for Kendall, that I always had and referred to since we started. That was a memory for me that I carried around. In my mind, it happened concretely at this place called the Candy Kitchen, which is on Route 27 out in the Hamptons. Jesse let me throw that in there to crystalize the memory. But in a way, that’s where the seeds of destruction are. The child is tethered to the man. It’s a promise, and also, it’s a sentence. He doesn’t really have a chance. His father says, “One day, this will all be yours.” And that becomes his reason for being, and his only reason for being. The loss of that, finally, that we see in this episode, is an extinction-level event.

Has Kendall always been that 7-year-old at the candy store, awaiting his turn at the helm of the Wonka Factory? 

Yeah. His father never allowed any of us to grow up and become our own adults. We were always being thwarted and undermined. This terrible lack of self-worth has plagued him for his whole life, while at the same time, a belief that this one thing will be a way to claim self-worth.

I said this to a friend the other day, but Jesse’s writing is like a sharpshooter hitting a target from seven years away. He always knew where this was going. I didn’t, but I had a bad feeling.

Would it have clouded you, knowing where Kendall landed?

No, it wouldn’t have clouded me. In Elia Kazan’s autobiography, he writes that the most important moment for an actor to know is the final moment. The final beat. You have to reverse-engineer everything as far back as you can so you know the distance you have to travel. In a way, we made essentially 20 films. We made 40 hours of story. Is every episode its own arc? That’s sort of how it goes. It’s the slow immeasurable death of Kendall Roy. It could be the title of the show for me.

I knew it would be a tragic ending. Whether that tragedy was getting what he wants or not what he wants… they’re both tragic. To get what he wants, he has mortgaged off every last ounce of what was good in him. He’s mortgaged off his integrity, his moral center. He’s lost his children, he’s lost love, his siblings, his father. He made a devil’s bargain to elect [Jeryd Mencken] as president. He has to get this thing, otherwise none of it made any sense, and his life has been in vain, and his life is just an abortive misfire. Which is what happens in the end.

Kendall has been brought low so many times before, and has managed to resume the climb each time. Why does this defeat feel so much more final for Kendall in your mind — other than the show ending, of course?

Jesse and I might have different answers. Philosophically, in terms of his long view of human nature, people don’t fundamentally change and don’t usually do the big thing, don’t get the climactic storybook ending. They don’t take the moment to its crisis. Life is more in the gray area of repeating our mistakes and living on the same fault line we’ve always lived on.

There’s an episode in season one when I lead a failed attempt at a coup. I’m running through the tunnel. I leave the board room through that same door in a very similar state of inner collapse and having failed and lost. I walked through the streets in a similar sunken daze. I said to Jesse and Mark, “I can’t do this again. There’s a progression here. There’s much more at stake now. If I don’t become CEO now, I never will.”

This time, it’s the first time he’s finally lost everything. From inside of it, I felt there was no coming back from this. [Which is why] when we were there at the water, I did try to go in. [Editor’s note: Strong spoke about filming a scene in which Kendall jumps into the East River during his appearance on HBO’s Succession podcast.]

Jeremy Strong in 'Succession' series finale
Jeremy Strong in the ‘Succession’ series finale.

Water serves as this powerful and often destructive symbol on Succession. Kendall could have drowned in season one with the waiter, nearly drowned in season three, and your instincts as Kendall at the end were to jump the rail in Battery Park. Water even gets the final say in the story, the waves speaking the last lines of dialogue. What do you make of water’s purpose in this story — a tide always coming to wash Kendall away?

The symbolism of water and rebirth and death and the unconscious and the shadow… there’s so many. It would be disingenuous to say I have an answer to [the theme of water] that is specific, but, I do think that in a way, he’s linked to that water line. He’s always right there on that line of trying to keep his head above water. But the undertow is there. It’s always there, threatening to submerge him. That’s his addiction. That’s the nothing that Roman says that he is. That sense that he is nothing, it will sink him. He needs to stay above it.

There’s this John Berryman poem [called “Dream Song 29”] Jesse used as the key to the map of the show. “A thing once sat on Henry’s heart that is so heavy that after a hundred years sleepless and weeping, he cannot make good.” Each finale is named after the poem, and this one, “With Open Eyes,” that image is this ghastly, reproachful space that’s in his mind, staring with open eyes. It’s not Kendall. It’s the sum total of all of his crimes. Not just the death of the waiter, but the wreckage of his life. Berryman threw himself into a frozen Mississippi river. [Kendall’s ideation] was always there, lurking. There were many times I said to Jesse, “I don’t think there’s any way out for me.”

In the finale, or other times?

In the finale, but earlier times in the show, too. I found myself in the machine room at the Sophie Iwobi show thinking about suicide. I was thinking about suicide on the ledge of the building in season two, after what’s happened with the boy in England.

Even in the finale, it felt like Kendall could have pressed “up” on the elevator.

Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. I felt that, for sure. I felt a complete cessation and stoppage of my life force, and an extinguishing of any hope left in me and in my life. The only possible thing to do, it felt, to me, was to try to die.

The sort of amazing thing that happened that day was when I did climb over the barrier, the actor playing Colin ran and stopped me. Making movies, sometimes you do things that don’t make it into the cut, but are still there [for you as an actor]. When I see the show, that intention [for Kendall to jump] was probably still there at the moment we cut to black, the impulse. It’s beckoning him. But Jesse’s ending stays very true to the integrity of his vision. It would almost be too easy. Instead, Kendall is stuck in a silent scream forever.

On the day [they shot the final scene], it was the coldest day in a century in New York. It was February. The scene kind of became about that cold. I could hardly walk. My face was burning. It made me think about the ninth circle of hell, which is freezing winds and a frozen lake. In a way, that’s where Kendall ends.

Well, he did press “down” on the elevator.

They cut this, but there was a voice [in the elevator] that said, “Going down.” It would have seemed deliberate, so we had to cut it.

Roman (Kieran Culkin), Shiv (Sarah Snook) and Kendall (Strong) in the final scene they filmed for the series.
Roman (Kieran Culkin), Shiv (Sarah Snook) and Kendall (Strong) in the final scene they filmed for the series.

That’s Kendall’s final day, but your final day was in Barbados. When we spoke before the season, you said you released Kendall in part by shaving his head after your final day, with Sarah Snook and Kieran Culkin’s help. Was that because you had the “crown” stuck in your hair?

No, because every time I drank from that thing, I would go outside and retch and go swim in the ocean and wash it off, then have a strong shot of rum punch. (Laughs.) So, I didn’t have any of that left in my hair, no.

It was such a beautiful scene. It makes the ending all that more heartbreaking to me, just to see the joy and I would even dare to say the love between them all. When I was on the dock and they said, “You can have the bauble. Smile, bitch.” In a way, the whole entire show was building towards that. That’s what he looks like when he gets the thing he wants. In this case, what he wants and what he needs are the same things. His happiness is dependent on fulfilling what he thinks is his destiny. That smile — that “Happy Ken” — I didn’t know that I’d be as happy as I felt in that moment. We had already shot the ending, too, so I knew the depths to which I would plummet shortly. It’s just brilliant reverses of fortune in the writing. Just a brilliant somersault.

One thing I thought about last night watching the finale in the middle of this writers’ strike? The writers, man. It begins with them, and it ends with them. Everything we do as actors is because of the writing. We’re nothing without the writers, nothing.

In Kendall’s final scene with Shiv and Rome, Shiv tells Ken, “I don’t think you’d be good at it.” Does Kendall believe that at all?

I don’t think she believes that. I think she’s exerting power to get back at him, a vindictive retribution from childhood that is old and also feels like maybe these people just don’t have the ability to express love and positive reinforcement, when all they’ve gotten is negative reinforcement and a kind of abuse. It’s like when I’m hugging Roman, but I’m also hurting him.

Was that deliberate, Ken hurting Rome?

Yeah. But I also think I’m doing that because I know that’s what he needs in that moment. He wants to be hurt. He wants to be hurt, because that’s how we [as a family] recognize love. That’s what our father gave to us, that’s what our mother gave to us. It’s a warped love expression.

There’s the hug, and then there’s Kendall grabbing Roman’s face…

Kieran and I both want to touch the third rail in a scene. He’s always like, “Let’s go there.” I didn’t know how that would manifest physically, but yeah, I wanted to gouge his eyeballs out.

But to almost zoom out to the macro, the achievement of this show, and episode eight really landed this, is the ways in which all of these misplaced aggressions and personal vindictive moments in this family get scaled up to have a deleterious impact on the world on a global scale. It’s not just sibling rivalry. It’s the butterfly effect of toxicity within a family and toxicity within the world.

That’s the achievement of Jesse’s writing. The death of my character, this slow and moral and spiritual death, like Michael Corleone… Jesse used that to point at something in our culture at this moment in late-stage capitalism, this moment in our political life. Terminal decadence, collapsing empire, alongside this collapse of a man and his empire. It’s a profound document of the times we live in, a chronicle of our times.

Jesse calls you in 10 years and says he has an idea for Kendall Roy. Yes or no?

Jesse calls me anytime, any year, anywhere, I’m listening.

Interview edited for length and clarity.

Succession is now streaming on Max. Read THR‘s series finale coverage.

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