Jeremy Strong says playing Kendall Roy on Succession “f***ed me up”

Jeremy Strong played Kendall Roy for all four seasons of HBO’s Succession, but he has no intention of ever returning to that world. During an interview with The Times of London, Strong said that playing the role “f***ed me up” so much that he “sometimes lost touch with joy.“

“That show was an incalculable gift. The material a banquet. So I miss that,” Strong said. “But Kendall’s struggle was difficult to carry for seven years. And there’s just so much more I want to do… It’s not something I have any wish to do any longer. I’m aware it is one of the main chapters of my life, but I don’t miss it.“

Strong famously went deep into method acting (which his on-screen father Brian Cox disagreed with) while playing Kendall Roy, and when the series concluded, he immediately lept into his next gig to put Succession behind him. “I went right into Roy Cohn, partly just to sort of shake [‘Succession’] off,” Strong said. “Roy Cohn, you can’t overstate his influence in our country, his legacy of the denial of reality and certain things that he imparted to Donald Trump. His playbook has a tentacular reach that is staggering — the most fascinating person I’ve ever tried to inhabit. I should say a disclaimer: My job is to be a humanistic investigator of a subject and to withhold judgment. So while I personally might have a lot of judgment about Roy Cohn, that is not the part of me that engages in the creative work.”

The Apprentice spent months struggling to find a domestic distributor as Donald Trump’s legal team attempted to block its release, but it is now playing in theaters. Our own Chris Bumbray found it to be a “thoroughly entertaining film with a broader appeal than you might think” and considered Strong to be the true star. “Strong initially plays Cohn as a diabolical figure who uses Trump as a pawn in his own desire for power. But as the film goes on, we see that Cohn, in his own way, grew to love Trump as a surrogate son, only to be discarded as his profile became toxic and he lost what made him so fearful of an opponent,” Bumbray wrote. “His tragedy is nearly Shakespearean, and he makes you see that the human (and soul) is a man many consider utterly repugnant.” You can check out the rest of his review right here.