Succession ’s J. Smith-Cameron on Spoiled Brats, Ambition, and Weird Sex

Devoted viewers of HBO’s hit drama Succession have a high tolerance for schadenfreude. The sleek, buttoned-up production follows a family of one-percenters inching deliciously close to self-destruction. The male characters, led by ruthless and mercurial patriarch Logan Roy (Brian Cox), each represent a different nadir of vice, but this season has seen a number of phenomenal women actors—the likes of whom include Hiam Abbass, Jeannie Berlin, Holly Hunter, Cherry Jones, and Sarah Snook—assume roles that upset the status quo by toppling the power dynamics of the Roy family and its business. In fact Succession’s roster of hardest-hitting power players boasts a robust showing of women over the age of 60.

This shouldn’t feel radical, and yet it does when you pause to consider that the majority of television roles are written for women in their 20s and 30s. Each actor, in her own way, brings to life a convincing portrait of an intelligent, shrewd, imperfect, and at times unlikeable (yet extremely recognizable) woman. Marcia Roy (Abbass), Nan Pierce (Jones), and Rhea Jarrell (Hunter) have all sparred with Logan and even each other, emerging with compelling victories. (Marcia’s “Thank you, Rhea,” in earshot of Logan in last week’s episode is a personal favorite, as is the panic and rage Nan’s refusal to sell PGM incites in Logan.) This deftness is owed both to showrunner Jesse Armstrong and his writers room: Half of the show’s writers have been leading women writers from theater and TV since season one.

Even among this cast of indomitable women, one character has become a favorite of Succession’s audience like no other: Gerri Kellman, the inscrutable general counsel of the Roys’ media empire, Waystar Royco. Back in season one she emerged unscathed from Kendall’s (Jeremy Strong) attempted coup against his father’s leadership, despite largely being the backbone of the operation. Thanks to her position she holds the company’s darkest secrets—and therefore its future—in the palm of one well-manicured hand. Perhaps that’s why, in the now infamous “Hunting” episode, she’s the one person Logan knows he can’t bully into a game of Boar on the Floor. “The very fact that these characters are so specific and they are flawed and dimensional is what makes them like real people,” Smith-Cameron tells Vogue over the phone. “Despite their age or gender, they’re completely believable individuals [in that] they’re not representing some feminist stereotype at all.”

Last week’s episode, “Dundee,” saw the Roy family patriarch begin to spiral more spectacularly than any of his children. As Logan becomes increasingly preoccupied by reckoning with his own mortality and fallibility, the task of navigating the company through the volatility of the cruises scandal and choosing his successor falls—as nearly all of Waystar’s crises do—to Gerri.

Back in season one Gerri refused to be named even interim CEO of the company: “I don’t want the job that makes your head explode,” she said in the aftermath of the stroke that had incapacitated Logan. It’s a sharp contrast to this season, during which she entertains Roman’s (Kieran Culkin) proposal of a CEO-chairman partnership to helm the company together. “In talking with Jesse I had confirmed that it wasn’t that Gerri was not very ambitious,” Smith-Cameron says of the way her character ceded power last season. “It’s more that she doesn’t want the leadership in that circumstance,” specifically the billions of dollars in outstanding loans that threatened to swallow the company whole last season.

Throughout last week’s episode we see Gerri confer with Shiv (Snook)—not former heir apparent Kendall or her current co-schemer Roman—over the extent to which the Roys’ father should be included in the company’s increasingly precarious standing when a scandal from the cruises business threatens to go public. What she reveals, as she convenes Shiv and Waystar’s senior executives, is that the person who will inherit the stewardship of Waystar and its sums of cash will also be the face of the company as Cruisegate goes public. The revelation leads Shiv to insist to her father that Rhea is the right choice to name as CEO, apparently with the hopes that the forthcoming controversy will conveniently swallow the outsider in its implosion.

Though the opportunistic Rhea thinks she gets what she wants, it’s Gerri’s vigilance and judgment call to involve Shiv instead of the Roy men that gets her there. “She’s constantly connecting the dots as an attorney. She’s very alert and paying attention, and I think that that’s a resting state with her,” Smith-Cameron says of Gerri’s always-on characterization. Add in Logan’s ongoing health problems, a failed buyout of competitor Pierce, and the cruises bombshell: It’s no wonder she’s always on high alert. “All the stakes have been much higher,” she adds. “She’s probably scared and excited about what’s going on....I think it’s all very exciting and keeping her up at night.”

This season Roman has also been keeping Gerri up at night. For the uninitiated it consists of phone sex that veers towards the comical; Gerri indulges Roman’s shame kink and spends a few minutes calling him outrageous names like “little slime puppy.” “I mean, I’m not sure what to say about that,” laughs Smith-Cameron of the pseudo-sexual relationship that has developed between the two characters onscreen. “Luckily for me my character is as bewildered by it as the actress who plays her.” As the only Waystar insider who isn’t family, it’s a significant example of her balancing nous with security and risk, forging a new relationship that might later benefit both her and the company itself.

After years of fixing the family’s missteps, does Smith-Cameron think there’s anything gratifying for Gerri in being able to call one of the Roys a spoiled brat from time to time? “I definitely think that she’s been dying to tell them all they’re spoiled brats!” she says. “But if you’re trying to get me to say that she enjoys being the dominatrix, I’d draw the line there. Because I think she’s way too careful to really indulge in that kind of thing. It’s probably refreshing after all these years to be able to be blunt with Roman and for him to think it’s funny or get a kick out of it. His fetishes aside, just to be able to be frank with one of the Roys must be incredibly freeing.”

Who says Gerri doesn’t have all the power—and the fun?

Originally Appeared on Vogue