‘Succession’ star Zoe Winters studied conservative hosts for Kerry’s flop audition tape

Christopher Rosen
·4 min read
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One thing is clear from the early stages of the final season of “Succession”: no one is safe from failure. On Sunday’s episode, “Rehearsal,” Kerry Castellabate (Zoe Winters) – Logan Roy’s (Brian Cox) self-proclaimed “friend, assistant, and advisor” – was dealt her first major blow after a steady rise up the WayStar Royco ranks over the last two seasons. 

Striving for an on-air position at Logan’s conservative news network, ATN, Kerry’s awkward audition tape was a laughingstock among the Roy kids and a flop with Logan himself. With but a few words and grunts, the family’s patriarch made clear he wanted Kerry kept away from the anchor desk. In typical “Succession” trickle-down fashion, Logan expressed this to Tom (Matthew Macfadyen) who then tasked the ostensible execution to Greg (Nicholas Braun). Kerry, naturally, didn’t take the news well, threatening to rip Greg apart like “human string cheese.”

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Speaking to Variety in an interview published after Sunday’s episode, Winters said her scene with Braun was a delight. “Nick Braun and I had so much fun working on that scene, and there were many different versions of it,” she said of her violent barb. “They threw me a couple of alts for that last dig that she gives him, but essentially, a number of versions of, ‘I’m f–king coming for you.’”

Winters has excelled as Kerry over the last two seasons and is further proof that the old adage of there being no such thing as a “small part” holds truth. As she explained to The Hollywood Reporter in another interview, Winters has hundreds of pages of character research and backstory about Kerry, a depth that allows her to thrive as a performer even in scenes where she barely says a single word. When it came time to film her big audition tape fail – which finds Kerry not only expressing a happy personality in a garish, phony fashion but also dressed in bright colors as opposed to her normal wear – Winters said she researched conservative hosts like Laura Ingraham and Tomi Lahren.

But, she added, “I also wanted Kerry to have her own version of it. My in for it was, I think women have this pressure to have charm, and that’s magnified on television. So you see these political presenters and commentators with charm, and I think what we’re witnessing here, and what I appreciate about Kerry is, that she’s not interested in charm. Instead, she’s wrestling with presenting what her idea of charm looks like, and failing and having it be uncomfortable. Her hair is teased out, she’s in this bubblegum pink dress, she’s on this platform, she probably used whitening strips that morning, and everything on the outside is telling her to be this thing that she inherently is not.”

In her interview with Variety, Winters said she didn’t intentionally try to be bad as a news anchor but she wanted to show Kerry’s work. “I didn’t want her to be good. I wanted her to be trying,” she said.

“What’s so painful about Kerry in this episode is that with the Roys, one of the worst things you can do is to try and to fail,” she added. “It’s all about winning, and Kerry does not win at this.”

“Succession” airs Sundays on HBO.

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