Succession director Mark Mylod teared up while shooting Sunday's shocking episode
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Warning: This episode contains spoilers for season 4, episode 3 of Succession.
Mark Mylod has directed more than a dozen episodes of Succession but the Brit tells EW that overseeing Sunday's show, "Connor's Wedding," was an experience like no other.
"I remember shooting it and feeling really quite emotional through the whole thing," says Mylod, who also directed last year's horror-comedy The Menu. "There was an incredible intensity throughout the whole shooting period."
David M. Russell/HBO Justine Lupe and Alan Ruck on 'Succession'
Most of that intensity derived from the mid-air death of Brian Cox's Logan Roy, a demise which came as a shock to both viewers and Logan's children, Roman (Kieran Culkin), Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Connor (Alan Ruck), and Shiv (Sarah Snook), who had gathered on a boat transporting them to the wedding of Connor and Willa (Justine Lupe).
"When Sarah Snook took her phone call to speak to Brian's character, ah, I started tearing up at the point," says Mylod. "I knew the script backwards, but what Sarah did to it on that first take, which I think is the one we used in the cut, was just amazing to me."
Below, Mylod talks more about the episode, the death of Logan Roy, and Cox's suggestion that maybe his character is still alive.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: At what point did you find out that this was going to be the episode that said goodbye to Logan Roy? Or were you part of the brain trust that came up with that?
MARK MYLOD: I'd love to say it was all my idea, that would be a lie. [Succession creator] Jesse [Armstrong] had the idea quite a long time ago, I think possibly way back when we were planning season 3. There was this idea that it would happen early in the season, in a very unexpected way. We obviously had this misdirect, the smoke grenade of setting the episode at Connor and Willa's wedding, to hopefully throw people off the scent even more. It was Jesse's idea from quite a way back and we were working our way towards it. It's one of those lovely things where, if you look back at the writing over previous episodes, you'll see those little hints. I think when the show is at its best, things are so shocking and so surprising, and yet when you step back there's a part of them that also seems inevitable also.
Yes. I've been thinking about the diner sequence from episode 1 of this season with Logan and his security guy Colin (played by Scott Nicholson), which in retrospect seems to presage the events of episode 3.
Yes, very much so. That's exactly what it was. You see an elderly gentleman who's so lonely that he's seeking camaraderie from his employee. There's an underlying sadness to that that's quite bleak.
Were you at the read-through for the episode?
Yeah, the read-through was intense. The writers' room obviously are working for months, and then the draft emerges, and there are subsequent rewrites but, a week or so before we start shooting, we'll all sit around with the cast and read the episode aloud in kind of real time. And this one was a doozy! It really was. It was, without doubt, our most emotional table read. We were losing Brian, and he's number one on the call sheet, the leader of the cast, very much the leader of our production, and that was incredibly sad. [We were] losing a colleague as well as losing a character. It was a tough day at the office, but lovely also.
Macall B. Polay/HBO Jeremy Strong and Sarah Snook on 'Succession'
What was it like shooting the scenes with the trio of younger siblings?
Massively intense and oddly beautiful. It felt like on some level everything had been leading up to this moment, all our work together over the past few years. We've grown very close, and we have a tremendous kind of mutual trust and respect, and I don't just mean the actors, myself and Jesse, but really the whole team, and our whole cast and crew. There was a real sense of unity and purpose going into this. We knew we had a couple of weeks to really try to [capture] the intensity and the chaos and the tension of this beautiful writing.
It was complex shooting it, because that one section, really from the moment that the siblings come upstairs until Kendall goes outside to call Frank [Peter Friedman], that felt like it should be one take. But we shoot on film, so you can only shoot 10 minutes at a time before the camera runs out of a film, and then you've got to reload. After shooting it for a couple of days in sections, it seemed like we really would benefit from just trying to shoot a half-hour take of just that whole section. So that's what we did. We gave the actors a couple of hours to prepare, and me and the camera team worked out a way of basically hiding camera magazines around the set, and having an extra camera already hidden around a corner, so that there could always be at least one camera running, and the other camera team would do a very fast reload. And that's what we did. We ended up doing this long take, a huge proportion of which ended up in the final cut, because there was something about the intensity of that one-act half-hour play that was completely unbroken, that just felt incredibly intense and everything that we wanted it to be.
There was a moment, while watching that sequence, when I thought, oh it's a shame its not the four kids. Then Alan Ruck got involved and, while I don't want to say he stole the show, he certainly made his presence felt.
He took my legs out, figuratively, shooting that. I didn't expect to be so moved. It's beautiful writing for a start, obviously, but, man, he chomped into that in the best way, he really did, both in that extraordinary, almost blankness of the reaction, which felt incredibly emotionally honest, and then of course in that lovely scene with him and Justine, him and Willa, where the tragedy kind of peeled back some curtain back into a real honest look at their relationship. I thought they were both exquisite in that, I really did.
I've got to tell you, I'm rooting for those two crazy kids!
[Laughs] Me too! It's odd, isn't it? I remember the first season, shooting in the U.K. for Tom [Matthew Macfadyen] and Shiv's wedding, and there was an odd scene where Alan's character kind of asked Justine to go steady, be exclusive in her business dealings with him, and being oddly moved by it. [It's] some weird f---ed manifestation of a modern relationship and there's something really lovely about it.
What was it like shooting the scenes on the plane?
Equally intense. It ended up being a beautiful dilemma for Jesse and I in the edit. The thought was that 90 percent of Tom's words would be heard through the speaker, through the phone, and we would stay almost exclusively with the siblings in the boat. But Matthew (Macfadyen)'s performance, and all the cast on the airplane, which we shot after we'd shot the boat, was so incredibly strong that we actually ended up including a lot more of it than we originally intended. There was an intensity to it that I didn't expect.
David M. Russell/HBO Brian Cox and Matthew Macfadyen in 'Succession'
What was the thinking behind Logan almost not being onscreen for his own demise? Brian Cox is a Shakespearean actor, I'm sure he could have handled a death scene speech by Logan like nobody's business.
Yeah, absolutely no doubt about that. This is slightly speaking for Jesse, but I think I can represent him accurately, the idea was to really try to represent a modern life, a modern death, as accurately as possible, as well as obviously to a certain extent to create the biggest surprise as we could. We're not above that certainly. But there was that idea that in modern life, unless it's cancer or something where it's more expected, if it's a sudden death then the reality is, it's a phone call, it's an email, it's a text. It's messy. And this just seemed right to us as well as dramatically surprising.
There were key decisions to make of how much we would see or not of Brian's character. Whenever I put the camera on him, lying on the floor, it felt oddly disrespectful, so I didn't, except for one very deliberate moment where the camera specifically sees that it is Logan there. It felt intense and it still does remembering it.
I don't know if you read this, but Brian gave an interview to Vulture in which he teased the possibility that Logan might not be dead.
[Laughs] He's going to pop out the coffin at some point!
Well, he said, you see the body bag, but you don't see who's in it.
It's a very good point. I refuse to comment further.
The episode did screen over Easter weekend as well. But I'm not going to ask you to comment on that.
[Laughs] Yeah, I'm not going to do a John Lennon and compare us to Jesus.
My theory is that someone killed Logan and Succession has been a slow burn whodunnit.
[Laughs] That's another way to go!
Feel free to use these ideas.
They're all logged!
As you mentioned, Brian Cox was number one on the call sheet. Who was number one after he left?
[Laughs] The lovely think about this season really is, I can't remember another time when we had such unity with the siblings, particularly the start of the season, and united in their grief obviously in this episode we've just had. I'm sure we'll do our damndest to mess that up over the next few weeks, but it has been really lovely to have the cast, the siblings, the four of them, operate with a closeness where we could get that flavor, that warmth, that side of the dynamic of their relationship, which we've really not been able to do so much in previous seasons.
Jeff Spicer/Getty Images 'Succession' director Mark Mylod
Have you directed more episodes this season?
Yes, we've got all 10 episodes in the can now. I'm really proud of all of them. I directed the last two, 9 and 10, where we've really tried our damndest to give the series the right ending. It was obviously pretty intense and emotional doing that after five, six years together. But I'm really proud of them, I really am, I don't think we could have tried any harder.
Succession airs Sundays on HBO and HBO Max.
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