‘Succession’ Creator Jesse Armstrong Explains Series Finale Fates for Kendall, Shiv and Roman

Jackie Strause
·12 min read
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[This story contains spoilers from the Succession series finale, “With Open Eyes.”]

Since the Succession series finale released last weekend, creator Jesse Armstrong has only briefly weighed in on the tragic ending he delivered for the Roy family saga.

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Speaking after the May 28 episode in HBO’s featurette, Armstrong said Roman (Kieran Culkin) ended in a “reductive, brutal way” as he drinks at a bar; Shiv (Sarah Snook) in a “terrifying, frozen, emotionally barren place” as the wife of newly named Waystar Royco CEO Tom (Matthew Macfadyen) and for Kendall (Jeremy Strong), “This will never stop being the central event of his life, central days of his life, central couple years of his life. Maybe he could go on and start a company or do a thing, but the chances of him achieving the sort of corporate status that his dad achieved are very low, and I think that will mark at his whole life.”

He also shared that he had the idea of Tom being named the eventual successor to Brian Cox’s Logan Roy for “quite a while now” and that this was the right time for the series to end because “it’s sort of where this show loses interest in them because they’ve lost what they wanted, which was to succeed this prize their father held out.”

In a new interview with NPR’s Terry Gross on the Fresh Air podcast, the creator, showrunner and head writer was joined by executive producer Frank Rich to unpack the specific and overall endings for the major players in the Emmy-winning saga, now that viewers have had some time to digest the finale. Amid the ongoing writers strike, Armstrong also used Succession as an example of why he is supportive of the WGA priorities: “Our room is not one of these mini-rooms; it’s a big, full room and it runs for a long time. And then writers who have written in the writers room, many of them come to be on set. Those kinds of things, although they cost money, I think helped to make the show as good as it is, and there’s just a variety of writer who is likely to get cut out of the financial action unless the WGA gets at least some of what it’s asking for.”

Below are some takeaways from Armstrong speaking about the show’s ending:

Was Kendall Contemplating Death? Armstrong Says No

When speaking about the series finale, Strong acknowledged that Armstrong might have a different take on Kendall’s fate. Strong shared his take that after losing everything in his life and following his dejected exit from the Waystar Royco board room, “the eldest son” is contemplating his death in the final scene of the series. The entire series ends on the shot of Kendall — with bodyguard Colin (Scott Nicholson) steps behind him, echoing the isolation of his father at the end of his life — and staring out into the freezing river when sitting on a bench in Manhattan’s Battery Park.

“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,” Strong shared with The Hollywood Reporter about filming a take of Kendall intending to jump into the water below him. “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.”

In the end, longtime director and finale helmer Mark Mylod did not use that as the final take, explaining to THR: “Both Jesse and I agreed that actually the impulse and the possible intent is implicit in the moment, in the performance. It’s all there. So we don’t necessarily need to go to that kind of literal, physical move toward that railing. By not implicitly doing that, we keep open another and perhaps even more likely but equally tragic future for the character, and that is that he would just have to live out his life in that purposeful emptiness of unfulfilled destiny. A purgatory of unfulfilled ambition for the character.”

Armstrong now says that such a death wouldn’t be possible for Kendall, given the type of protection he has around him — which speaks to what actually happened when filming. Strong said on the show’s official podcast of the take they didn’t use that when he tried to jump over the barrier, Nicholson (the actor who plays Colin) “saw me and ran and stopped me from doing it.”

Armstrong says that on the day of filming, he was “terrified” and concerned for Strong’s safety, because they didn’t have measures set up for that kind of stunt. “I was terrified that he might fall in and be injured. … He didn’t look like he was going to jump in. But once he climbed over that barrier — when you film, there are generally a lot of health and safety assessments made, and that was not our plan that day. And normally I know that if we’d even been thinking of that happening, we would have had boats and frogmen and all kinds of safety measures, which we didn’t have. So my first thought was for his physical safety as a human being, not anything about the character.”

Armstrong continues of the character’s ending: “Kendall, at the end, one of the things he lacks is even the freedom to determine his own course through life. The name and the wealth around him — to lots of us, obviously, it seems extraordinarily fortunate, and it is. But I do believe there is a certain kind of tragedy to a royal name, to a huge business name, to being a Disney or a Windsor or any of those kinds of names, and he can never, ever escape that. And one of the ways he can’t escape that is to have a bubble of protection around him, … of money and human beings. In this case, he’s got his dad’s bodyguard right there with him. So even if he is contemplating it, I don’t think it could ever happen to him. And yeah, for me, that’s not the way the story goes for this kind of person.”

Shiv and Tom’s Ending Is One of “Terrifying Equality”

Much has been dissected about the final scene between Shiv and Tom after Shiv’s big move to vote against Kendall and, with her swing board vote, help name her husband as the eventual successor. When they join each other in their car ride home together (after a rocky season for their marriage), Tom coldly offers her hand and she matches his energy by coldly placing her hand on top of his. The gesture, Mylod revealed to THR, signified a future for their marriage, albeit not a happy one — and that the script direction for the scene read something to the effect of, “Two unexploded bombs being transported with great care.”

Armstrong similarly describes their final gesture as a “chilly” one that showed the “terrifying equality, but equality, which has never been the case in that relationship before.” He goes on to explain, “Tom has always been subservient. Now he has this status, but his status is contingent. That’s kind of what the whole episode has been about. Shiv’s status is as all the kids are — secure. It’s secure in a financial sense. She has billions of dollars. She has wealth that could never diminish, whatever happened to the world. And she also has a name, which will sort of haunt her and make her interesting, to a certain degree, for the rest of her life, and that can’t be taken away from her. Whereas Tom’s position could be taken away in the click of her fingers.”

He continued, “So for me, there’s a very terrifying equality in that, a remarkable dry hand on hand. It’s not really even human contact. It’s a sort of two pieces of porcelain or something. So, that’s what it is for me. That isn’t what it would be for everyone. And certainly, you could see the situation being a clever stratagem by which Shiv remains in play. Maybe that thought will occur to her tomorrow or the day after. But for me, the show’s ended at this point and the story is over, and that’s where I think they end up.”

Dialogue Was Cut From Roman’s Final Scene

In another moment of final-shot ambiguity, Roman ends his story sitting at a bar, ordering a martini and varying his expression from happiness to dread. “There was something about the tragedy of him having gone absolutely nowhere and learning absolutely nothing in the last two years,” Mylod explained to THR of where the second-youngest Roy sibling ends up. “The one thing he does have is a smattering of self-knowledge, and I think that self-knowledge recognizes the pointlessness, and it drifts out in that ambiguous, grimace-soaked smile that we see in the character in the end.”

Armstrong agrees that Roman “ends up most particularly exactly where he started, which is living the life of a sort of sad playboy, I guess, and sipping a drink, which people might associate with his quasi-love of his life, Gerri (J. Smith-Cameron), who we’ve often seen sipping a martini.” But he also shared that they had more dialogue to the scene (though he didn’t share what it was) that they ended up cutting: “When we were in the edit room, Roman’s face, Kieran’s face was so eloquent that we just used a rather extraordinary set of expressions.”

Tom’s Ascension Was Born Out of “Historical and Business Parallels”

Armstrong begins the interview by saying that it felt like the “appropriate end” for a television drama that the siblings would not be named as their father’s successor in the end: “If you were thinking about this as a business situation rather than a piece of drama, they might have slipped through, one of them, for a little while, for probably an unsatisfactory interregnum … as they tanked the share price.”

But Tom leading the company felt natural and eventually obvious to the creator, like something that would be covered in The Wall Street Journal or The Financial Times. “They have to have certain qualities, the person who can succeed from a founder, and I guess there are few examples in life,” he added, citing Philippe Dauman, who took over from Viacom-CBS boss Sumner Redstone, and Stalin “coming through the middle after Lenin’s death” as examples. “So there were a bunch of historical and business parallels that started to seem like they were pointing in Tom’s direction.”

Rich revealed there was a line that didn’t make the final cut: “[Someone says Tom’s] face is ‘sort of like a piece of Wonder Bread with a smile drawn on it.’ He’s an empty suit, as is said. But, in Hollywood, in the ’30s, in the media companies at that time, it was the joke that ‘the son-in-law also rises.'”

Armstrong “Wrestled” With Show’s Presidential Election Cliffhangers

There are many questions that Succession doesn’t outright answer by the time it fades to black. But one of the most tangible outliers that was never set up to be answered, due to the structure of the season playing out in consecutive days, was the fate of the presidential election and whether or not the show’s fascist candidate, Jeryd Mencken (Justin Kirk), would be the president after Waystar Royco’s news division, ATN, made the decision to call the election for Mencken at Kendall and Roman’s orders.

Armstrong says leaving that open was something he “wrestled” with “quite a lot.”

“It’s because of their influence through the media that they were fascinating to me, and so I wanted to show that, at its most important moment,” he explained of why he wanted to include the election in the final season storyline. “But I also felt that, especially as a British person, that it wasn’t appropriate for the show to declare on what even our fictional world we think is going to be the fate of the republic. … Some people find the episode sort of gut-wrenching and traumatic, and I can imagine — because it’s a very serious time for America. I didn’t feel it was appropriate for us to say which way we think things will go. So that was why we left it poised.”

What to Interpret From Logan’s Death and “Raw” Goodbyes From His Children

In the most shocking moment of the final season, patriarch and media titan Logan Roy died in the third episode and off-camera, after suffering a health issue while aboard his private jet. The mesmerizing episode played out in stretches of uncut takes as the siblings learned of the situation and offered their goodbyes to their father over the phone. Both Armstrong and Mylod previously weighed in on the writing and directing decisions, with Armstrong explaining that he wanted the death to come early so he would have time to explore the fallout and “this feeling of wanting to see how they would cope afterward.”

Speaking to Gross, Armstrong explained the “raw” and “coherence in its incoherence” feeling that he was striving for in the “Connor’s Wedding” episode.

“I’m a rewriter. I rewrite a lot. We reworked the scripts a lot through production, and it can sometimes be hard for the actors as we change things. But that episode, and especially that long stretch in the middle, I wrote it relatively quickly. And then I tried to be very careful about what I revised because, I don’t often feel this, but it felt like it had a coherence in its incoherence that it felt appropriate, and I wanted to leave it rather raw,” he says. “And I tried not to change the last things that Logan said, once I sort of knew that they were the last things that Logan said, because I didn’t want them to have the form of a grandiloquent moment of speech, because that didn’t seem appropriate.”

Read the full interview on NPR.

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