

He arranged to miss part of his wedding-week festivities for the filming. That August, Strong, who was living in Los Angeles with his fiancée, went to film “Detroit.” He had done deep research for the role, watching military documentaries and practicing marksmanship at a shooting range. I could do something that I hadn’t done before.” “I thought, Oh, wow, Roman is such a cool part,” Strong said. McKay gave him the pilot script and said, “Tell me what role you connect with.” Strong picked Roman Roy, the wisecracking youngest son of Logan Roy, a Rupert Murdoch-like media titan. In 2016, Kathryn Bigelow, the Oscar-winning director of “The Hurt Locker,” cast him in a big role, as a National Guardsman in her film “Detroit.” Around the same time, Strong had lunch with Adam McKay, who had directed him as a financial analyst in “The Big Short.” McKay said that he was executive-producing a new HBO show called “Succession,” which he described to Strong as a “King Lear” for the media-industrial complex.

And you get used to people not noticing.” “Your focus just becomes about the work and trying each time to go to some inner ledge. “You come to New York, and you’re doing Off Off Broadway plays, and you are in the wilderness,” Strong told me, of his early career. But, as he approached forty, he felt that his master plan wasn’t panning out-where was his Benjamin Braddock, his Michael Corleone? By his mid-thirties, after fifteen years of hustling in the industry, he’d had minor roles in a string of A-list films: “Lincoln,” “Zero Dark Thirty,” “Selma,” and “The Big Short.” He’d played a staffer in both the nineteenth-century White House and the twenty-first-century C.I.A. By his early twenties, he had worked for all three men, and had adopted elements of their full-immersion acting methods. He read interviews that his heroes gave and, later, managed to get crew jobs on their movies. When Jeremy Strong was a teen-ager, in suburban Massachusetts, he had three posters thumbtacked to his bedroom wall: Daniel Day-Lewis in “My Left Foot,” Al Pacino in “Dog Day Afternoon,” and Dustin Hoffman in “Rain Man.” These weren’t just his favorite actors: their careers were a road map that he followed obsessively, like Eve Harrington casing out a trio of Margo Channings. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
