Jeremy Strong Gave Succession An Alternate Ending In One Take Of Kendall’s Final Scene

Jeremy Strong’s approach to acting was put under the microscope in a 2021 profile for The New Yorker, in which he said, of playing Kendall Roy: “I take him as seriously as I take my own life.” Strong doesn’t consider himself to be a method actor, but he does connect with his characters very intensely, treating their experiences and emotions as his own through a kind of “identity diffusion” — turning himself into an empty vessel, to be filled by the character he’s playing.

Though the seriousness with which Strong takes his craft has attracted some mockery, there’s no doubt that it gets results. His approach is particularly well suited to the way “Succession” is shot, often filming very long, uninterrupted takes in order to, as director Mark Mylod explained, “give the cast as much emotional flow as possible.” While creator Jesse Armstrong deliberately left the Roy kids’ endings somewhat open, Strong felt compelled in one take of the final scene to stray from what was written on the page. He explains:

“I sat on the bench, and it always to me felt like there was nowhere … there’s no coming back from this. And I looked at these waves and it was so windy that day and so cold and there was some piece of metal clanging and it was this terrible sound, and I sort of couldn’t bear it. And I stood up and walked slowly to the barrier that was set up there and climbed over it and I didn’t really know what I planned to do, and the actor playing Colin [Scott Nicholson] saw me and ran and stopped me from doing it.”

Whether Nicholson was sincerely worried about Strong or simply improvising with the change in the scene is unclear. But given how the lines between actor and character can blur, perhaps it was a bit of both.