Fresh Air - Jeremy Strong On Delusion, Dreams and Doing What It Takes [Extended Version]

Episode Date: October 9, 2024

Best-known for his role as Kendall Roy in HBO's Succession, Jeremy Strong now stars as lawyer and political hitman Roy Cohn in The Apprentice. The movie, he says, "explores essentially how Trump was made and his philosophical moral framework." Strong talks with Terry Gross about playing Cohn and about some of Kendall's most memorable scenes. Subscribe to Fresh Air's weekly newsletter and get highlights from the show, gems from the archive, and staff recommendations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. Like many fans of HBO's Succession, I became a big fan of actor Jeremy Strong through his portrayal of the character Kendall Roy, one of the siblings hoping to take control of their father's media empire while the father was nearing death. Strong won an Emmy for his performance on Succession and a Tony for his recent starring role on Broadway in Ibsen's An Enemy of the People. Now he's starring in the film The Apprentice. The Apprentice refers to the young Donald Trump as he's trying to establish himself and his father's

business as a real estate developer. The person who is mentoring him and how to become successful is Trump's lawyer, the infamous Roy Cohn, played by Jeremy Strong. Cohn was known for prosecuting and winning the federal government's case against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on charges of giving nuclear secrets to the Soviets. In a controversial decision, they were sentenced to death and executed in the electric chair in 1953. In 1954, during the communist witch hunt period, Cohn was the chief counsel to Joseph McCarthy's Senate investigations into the communist influence in the U.S. Cohn and McCarthy were also leaders in the anti-gay movement that led to an executive order banning gay people from serving in government.

But Cohn was a closeted gay man who died of AIDS. He never came out, and he insisted that his disease wasn't AIDS, it was liver cancer. He was disbarred weeks before his death in 1986. Strong's performance personifies what was written about Cohn on his patch on the AIDS memorial quilt. It read, bully, coward, victim. Let's start with a scene from early in the film, when Trump and Cohn first meet. Trump has gotten accepted to a private dining club in Manhattan. Cohn is seated at a table with several mobsters, including Fat Tony Salerno, the boss of the Genovese crime family. When Cohn notices Trump, who he's never met, he asks his friend to bring Trump to the table.

Cohn is interested in finding out who Trump is. Trump is played by Sebastian Stan. Jeremy Strong as Cohn speaks first. What is your business, Donald? Real estate. I'm vice president of a Trump organization. Oh, you're Fred Trump's kid? That's right.

He's Fred Trump's kid. It sounds like your father is a little tangled up. It looks like he could use a good motor. But tell us about it. Right now, the government and the NAACP are suing us. They're saying our apartments are segregated. This is America. You can rent to whoever the hell you damn want.

But our lawyer wants us to pay a huge fine to settle, and we can't. It's going to bankrupt us and ruin the company. You tell the feds to f*** themselves. File a lawsuit. Always file a lawsuit. Fight them in court. Make them prove you're discriminating. Wow. I guess you might have to get us a new lawyer. Of course, it helps if Nixon and the attorney general are your pals. Jeremy Strong, welcome to Fresh Air. I love the film. And that scene has so much energy to it. You have such swagger in it. Thank you, Terry. I'm honored to be talking to you. Thanks for having me. Oh, it is totally my pleasure. You know, a biopic is different from a film based on an original story. So you had a character who is a known person who you had to portray. What did you do to know, to watch, to listen to him before playing him?

Yeah, you know, I'll just say I haven't watched the film in a while, and hearing that scene back, it's really so charged, isn't it? And Roy, in that scene, encapsulates the playbook, which the film examines the idea that, the idea that what Roy Cohn stood for, these principles that he passed on to Donald Trump, always attack, deny everything, and never admit defeat. They're all kind of the DNA of that scene contains all of them. It's a great introduction of a character. But your question about playing historical figures, you know, I've done a fair amount of work playing people who, you know, were either alive or were historical figures. John Nicolay in Lincoln, James Reeb in Selma,

Jerry Rubin in the Charles Chicago Seven, Lee Harvey Oswald. I feel always an enormous sense of responsibility to a kind of historical veracity and accuracy to try and capture and render the essence of these people. And ultimately, it's not an intellectual, you're not writing an essay on someone. So the information is sort of emotional, intuitive, visceral information. Did you ever fact check any of it? Like, did you feel a responsibility to not only be have acting truth, but have, you know, like fact truth? Absolutely. Yes, I absolutely feel a sort of fidelity to truth with a capital T, which is funny in this case, because

Roy Cohn, if he's anything, to me, he's like the progenitor of alternative facts. He's like not someone who really espoused truth with a capital T. He thought truth was a play thing that you could do as you wish with it. And I should mention here that the film was written by Gabriel Sherman, who is a journalist who wrote a book about, you know, Murdoch and Fox News. Yeah, a book about Roger Ailes. Yeah, I should have said Ailes, right? Well, no, I mean, it's also about Murdoch. But, of course, I read that book when I was working on Succession because, you know, during that time.

Right, well, that's the thing. Like, I feel like your recent career is so connected to Trump. There's intersectionality there. Yeah. What I want to know is, do you feel very adjacent to Trump, like that you know Trump? Because your characters have been so, you know, related to Trump in one way or another and very directly related in The Apprentice. You know, I don't. I don't. I don't. If I'm honest, I feel that my job is to almost be a sort of vessel, which involves kind of clearing myself out.

I went on a silent meditation retreat last week, Terry, and the teacher, who's an incredible man named Jon Kabat-Zinn, who's written a lot of great books. Oh, yeah, yeah, I know. Yeah. Jon talked about a term called anatta, which means no self or not self. And it really resonated with me because I find that that is the place where I tend to be when I'm working, I think, creatively. But your question about whether I felt adjacent to Trump, I guess I don't. I guess I feel like my job is to be a musician, a first chair musician, to play whatever instrument it is that I'm given, to play whatever piece of music that I'm given. Because I was going to ask you if you notate your scripts as if they were music. Because like in the scene that we just heard, there's real music in your voice. You've got a rhythm.

Thank you. You know, I used to, when I was in college, I sort of have held on to old scripts and plays. And when I did, you know, American Buffalo or something, look back in anger in college, I have a million notes and it's sort of notated and annotated to death and then at a certain point i'd stopped writing anything down um i guess at a certain point you develop a trust in your unconscious intuitive self that if it's properly absorbed something then it will be there somehow. Now, I think voice is very important to me for any character. And Roy had a very, very particular way of speaking and a very specific pentameter. And the music of that is something that becomes your job to both master and then throw away.

You know, he writes in Hamlet, Shakespeare says that use can almost change the stamp of nature. And I feel that actors, especially when you're attempting to do some kind of transformational work, which is the kind of work that I love the most and have been inspired by in my life the most. Your job is to kind of change the stamp of your nature. And voice is a really key part of that because there's something about a person's voice that is like their eyes. It's such a way in to that person. Well, why don't we listen to the real Roy Cohn's voice? This is from an interview with Tom Snyder on his late night show, Tomorrow.

I probably watched this a thousand times. Really? As broadcast in 1977. So, here we go. Now here's Roy Cohn, who appeared recently on the cover of Esquire magazine. And the title of that article, as I recall, sir, was The Legal Executioner. I went on to say that you are really a tough man and that at times you can... Tough, mean, vicious. That's all.

What does that kind of publicity do for your business in New York? It's fantastic. The worse the adjectives, the better it is for business. What are they looking for? What are they buying? Scare value. Going back over a period of years, when I

call somebody or write a letter or something like that, this is supposed to make them tremble and think, and lest they act promptly and reasonably, that all sorts of terrible consequences are going to flow. So, what was it like playing somebody who you find, like,

is despicable, too strong a word? your judgments at the door and try to, in an almost diagnostic way, identify their wounds and their struggle and then fight their fight the way they did. I'm simply trying to inhabit him in a fully dimensional way as you do for any character. One of the things you didn't do is use a prosthetic nose. Roy Cohn had a very distinctive nose. Yeah. And there's kind of like a ridge in the middle of it. Yeah.

And the ridge became discolored. And I think a lot of actors would have had some kind of prosthetic on their nose to duplicate Roy Cohn's nose. You did not do that. Was that your decision? Yeah. At the end of the day, it was something our director wanted to do and we discussed it. You pick your battles, but that was one of them for me. Yeah, he had this operation, this botched surgery. His mother, Dora, wanted to get his nose fixed because she felt that it was a Semitic nose and she wanted to get it fixed.

And instead they botched it and he was stuck with this sort of gash in the middle of his face for his whole life. You know, Ali Abassi, our director, who's a brilliant filmmaker, and he essentially has made these sort of monster movies and so I think he saw this in the same way and I felt that Roy is enough innately a monster this is me objectively before I you know as I'm approaching the work and making those aesthetic decisions, that we don't need to put a hat on a hat. And I felt that the scar in the middle of my face could be in danger of taking us into, you know, Dick Tracy, Toontown world. Yeah. So, you know, the film is in part how Trump became so litigious, like suing so many people and getting sued a lot too. So the movie's in part about that. And to underscore how litigious he can be,

he threatened to sue the film to prevent it from being distributed. His lawyers wrote a cease and desist order to try to prevent it from opening. So there's been a lot of complicated behind the scenes goings on in terms of finding a different distributor and more funding and dealing with this threatened lawsuit. So how involved were you in that part of the story and even knowing what was going on. I was aware. I mean, listen, this movie opens on Friday on 1,500 screens. I think it's playing in every state in this country. I personally think it's sort of imperative that people see this movie just to learn and become informed. The movie explores essentially how trump was made and his philosophical moral framework um but yeah no one would touch this movie the studios

were afraid to touch it the streamers were afraid to touch it who were they afraid of they were afraid of litigation and they were afraid of? And I would say when I heard that, I just thought Roy was, you know, laughing in his grave because these were part and parcel. You know, even the language of the cease and desist letter came out of Roy Cohn's playbook. In what respect? Of cones, you know, to always attack, deny reality and never admit defeat, you know, deny, deflect, delay, to essentially call something something else. And if you do that vociferously and loudly enough, you will make it so. Let's talk about successionion a little bit. Sure. I don't know if I'll remember anything, Terry, but let's try. Okay, great. Thank you. So Succession is the HBO series about a media mogul

who owns a Fox News kind of conservative cable network. He owns theme parks and cruise ships. He's old, his health is fragile, and his four adult children are competing to see which of them will take their father's place. So you auditioned initially for Roman, the Kieran Culkin character. And then Adam McKay, who was an executive producer of Succession and has produced a lot of comedy films, his partner in Funny or Die is Will Ferrell. And we had made the big short together. Oh, that's right. So he asked you, after you didn't get the part of Roman, he asked you to audition for Kendall, which is the role you became famous for.

And you are so well suited to that character. Why didn't you initially see that character for yourself? I first read the pilot, which I ate up, and I came to it already with a great interest in the subject, youberg. And it was like War of the Roses. And so this felt like a dramatized version of that. Roman was a kind of flashy part, the kind of part that, you know, as a young actor, you can be drawn to. Kendall was all about the underneaths, as Jesse wrote about in the last season. And it's not all on the page. Most of it wasn't on the page. It was about those underneaths.

And so it was a bit like sort of looking at the night sky, where it was only after looking at it for a long time did it appear to me in its sort of full dimensionality and radiance. Kendall is this mix of like confidence, sometimes overconfidence, and insecurity, uncertainty, indecisiveness, sometimes decisiveness, but the decision is frequently not the right one. So there's this constant conflict going on within him. What did you relate to about that brew of contradictions within him? You know, my experience as an actor was an experience of years and years and years of kind of struggling and feeling thwarted and feeling, uh, feeling a sense of being denied a sense of being in a wilderness. So those feelings

were accessible to me the way that Kendall, you know who begins the series as the incumbent and then is sort of you know held down and subverted and thwarted uh but with a great need and desire to do the thing he feels that he is born to do. That's something, that vector, it was very alive for me. So in one of the final scenes in Succession, the father has died, the children are fighting to keep the company while the head of another company is trying to buy it out. Kendall has pitched himself as the successor at the final board meeting before the decision is made. They're about to vote and each of the three siblings has a vote too. And the decisive vote is going to be the sister, Shivs. And before she says what her vote is going to be,

she calls a meeting in another room with you and Karen Culkin's character. And she explains why she's not going to vote for you. And this refers back to when you confessed to your siblings that you had accidentally killed a young man while you were very high and he had a drug contact. And you were too high to be driving and you accidentally drove off the road into a lake and you couldn't rescue him from the car. So what you did was run away and then pretend like you had nothing to do with it. But you confessed to your father

who covered it up for you and then you were indebted to him. So I want to play that scene where the three siblings are in a separate room and Shiv, your character's sister, is explaining why she's not going to vote for you. I feel like if I don't get to do this, I feel like that's it. Like I might die. Shiv, can we go in that room? Can you just vote? Please. Please. You can't be CEO. You can't because you killed someone but which what wait which what which what like what like you've killed so many people you forgot which one that's that that's not an issue. That didn't happen.

Wait, it didn't? As in what? It's just a thing I said. It's a thing I said. I made it up. You made it up? It was a difficult time for us, and I think I, you know, whatever, must up something from nothing because I wanted for us all to bond at a difficult moment.

Wait, it was a move? No, not. There was a kid. There was that kid. So there was a kid. I had that kid. So there was a kid. I had a toke and a beer and not... I didn't even get in the car. Hold on.

What? I felt bad and I false-memoried it. Like, I'm totally clean. I can do this. Wait. Did it happen or did it not happen? It did not happen. It did not happen.

I wasn't even there. It did not happen. I wasn't even there. It did not happen. Dude. Vote for me. Just please, vote for me. Shiv, vote for me. No. Yes.

Shiv, don't do this. You can't do this. No. Absolutely not, man. No. Absolutely not. No. Why?

No, why? What, just... I love you do this. No. Absolutely not, man. No. Absolutely not. No. Why? No, why? What, just... I love you. I really, I love you, but I can't on the stomach, you. This is disgusting. It doesn't even make any sense. I'm the eldest boy. God.

I am the eldest boy. You're not. And, you know, it mattered to him. He wanted this to go on. Such a great scene. And I should mention that's Sarah Snook playing Shiv and Kieran Culkin playing Roman. What was that day like for you?

That's such an intense scene. And it ends up where you're actually kind of strangling Kieran Culkin's character. How does that play out for you? It's such an emotional scene. I mean, your character has said he's going to die if he doesn't get to be CEO. And I think he means it.

I mean, I think his life is invested in taking over from his father. He always, always, since childhood, believed he would do that. I haven't watched that or listened to it in a really long time. It really affects me. Like I can feel it in my chest and in my body right now. How does it affect you?

Like what are you feeling in addition to pain? Probably just pain. What was that day like? You know, it was a kind of volcanic day, right? And the stakes were so high, both for me as an actor and for Kendall in his life. So, of course, you approach a day like that with a certain amount of or i do dread and trepidation of just like will it come will we clear the bar of what this writing demands and what what what the potential for this is which is really a kind of cataclysmic scene. Were you upset all day because your character's upset?

No, you know, I don't think it works like that. It doesn't for me. If anything, I'm just sort of quiet all day trying to, you know, go back to that idea of the non-self. I'm just trying to clear, kind of create negative space so that when I start a scene, when I start with those words, I am as present and in that moment as possible and allow that to penetrate me and respond in that moment.

And the coalescence of that is what you end up seeing on television. What does that mean in terms of your interactions with other actors? Do you like to stay away from the other actors and mostly interact in character? Yeah, generally I do. How is that helpful? Like, do you not want to get to know them as people? Would you prefer just to think of them as the characters you're interacting with so that knowing them as people doesn't get in the way? Yeah, I mean, it's not always been a popular answer, but if I'm honest, I would say yes.

It a bit goes back to what I was saying about being on silent retreat, which is taking a break from the social domain so that you can be in touch with yourself on a deeper level. Kendall, as written, was someone who was going through, you know, a very deep level of existential agony and confronting crises after crises, including having the death of a person, you know, weighing on him. You know, Jesse wrote in the first season from John Berryman's Dream Songs, and I'm going to misquote it because it's a long time ago, but it was, you know,

there sat down a thing once on Henry's heart so heavy that after a thousand years weeping sleepless, Henry could not make good. So that becomes something that you have to put on yourself as an actor, that this thing sat down on your heart so heavy that after a thousand years, you cannot make good. So I don't take that lightly. And I feel that my job is to actually understand that and try and inhabit that so that when that character says I'm blown into a million pieces on the dirt floor of the parking lot at the end of season four, that I can mean those words. So I have to do whatever I have to do to earn that and arrive at that place.

And that often doesn't involve having a social bonhomie with other actors. Who I, I mean, by the way, the other thing I feel listening to that scene is how absolutely incredible Sarah and Kieran are. And, you know, you're not doing this alone. It might sound like I'm saying you're doing this alone, when you're between action and cut, it's something you do together. I personally think that whatever anyone wants to do outside of action and cut is their own business. And different people approach this work in different ways and need different things to serve it to their fullest. Yeah, that's good. Everybody's different. Yeah. If you're just joining us, my guest is Jeremy Strong. He stars in the new film The Apprentice as the unethical lawyer Rory Cohn, who became Donald Trump's lawyer and mentor when Trump was a young man. In the HBO series Succession, Strong played Kendall Roy.

We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. This is Fresh Air. When voters talk during an election season, we listen. We ask questions, we follow up, and we bring you along to hear what we learned. Get closer to the issues, the people, and your vote at the NPR Elections Hub. Visit npr.org slash elections. It's a high-stakes election year, so it's not enough to just follow along. You need to understand what's happening so you are fully informed come November. Every weekday on the NPR Politics Podcast, our political reporters break down important stories and backstories from the campaign trail so you understand

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one of the siblings competing to become the successor to their father, who is old and nearing death, and they want to take over his media empire. So in the final scene of Succession, you've lost the company, you've lost the company. You've lost everything that you've ever had or ever wanted. And you're sitting on a bench next to the Hudson River.

The only thing that separates you is a guardrail. And you look so dejected and in such despair that it looks like you are seriously considering jumping into the river and ending it. And the series ends like that. When I interviewed Jesse Armstrong after the end of the series, I asked him about that scene. And I want to play my question and what Jesse Armstrong had to say. And Jesse Armstrong wrote this episode and, you know, was the showrunner and creator of this series. So here we go. My understanding is that Jeremy Strong improvised a take in which he climbs over the railing from the pedestrian side of the river to the river side and looking as if he's really maybe about to jump in and his bodyguard like runs over to prevent that from happening. And that was improvised. Were you there when Jeremy Strong improvised that?

Sure. Yeah, we were there. It's biting cold and we were, you know, I'm there every day and certainly for that important scene. What did you think? planned that day and normally i know that if we if we'd even been thinking of that happening we would have had boats and frogmen and all kinds of safety measures which we didn't have so my first thought was for his physical safety as a human being not anything about the character um yeah so that's what i felt on the day good lord above so jeremy, did you improvise that scene? Did you know you were going to do it? Did I know I was going to climb over the barrier? Yeah, was that something? So how did you end up doing it?

You, I think, learn over a lifetime to obey your deepest instincts. And, you know, it's that thing of better to ask forgiveness than to ask permission uh i was obeying a deep impulse i mean my my feeling and strong conviction was and is but it's jesse's show at the end of the day and by the way it makes me so happy to hear his voice was that this was a extinction level event for kend Kendall and that there was no coming back from it. And at this point, he had lost everything. He had lost his father. He had lost his siblings.

He had lost his ex-wife. He had lost his children. He'd lost his putative reason for being. And also remember he was an addict uh so i just did not believe that he was coming back from that so when you're thinking of doing something as radical as changing the last moment of the series yeah it's only radical because maybe you weren't there for the way we made the whole show it's not radical at maybe you weren't there for the way we made the whole show. It's not radical at all. You know, over seven years, I was as much involved in what happened on the show or what happened in any given scene.

And I was as much an authority and had as much ownership over my character as the director and the writers did. So it was always a collaboration. At the end of the day, it's in the edit that Jesse and Mark Milod's sort of authorial decisions take precedence over mine, but they always welcomed my impulses and often used them. You know, the moment that Jesse chose is extremely powerful and he's sort of frozen in a kind of inner scream and i love that he chose that the moment that i attempted to search for i'd had no idea what would happen was equally truthful to to what we had done so far. And Kendall was rescued by essentially a surrogate of his father, Colin. I mean, Scott, who played Colin, was a former NYPD.

And Scott saw me walking over to the thing, and he raced over and grabbed me and held me in his arms. And I felt that after I had crossed that threshold to be rescued by him, I could find purchase in life again. So that was just me exploring something in a take. We only had about 10 minutes of light and we had one camera and it was the coldest day on record in like a century. So we didn't have a way of covering that scene. So we only had one shot of it. And the take died too soon. So there wasn't actually a way for them to use it, even if they had wanted to. I want to talk a little bit about your life. So you grew up in,

I think what you've described as a rough neighborhood in the Jamaica plain area of Boston. And then your family moved to a suburb. What was the difference in neighborhoods? And what was the difference in who you were in each neighborhood and how you tried if you tried to fit in? Yeah, you know, Jamaica Plain, which has now become quite gentrified, was different in the late 70s and early 80s. And I went to school in West Roxbury and sort of that was where I grew up. And it was certainly more urban than where I'd later moved to. It was really diverse. It was really, my father worked in juvenile justice and ran these essentially jails for the Department of Youth Services. My mother was a hospice nurse.

They're both sort of givers. You know, they're both empaths and I think really courageous people. And, you know, I started doing plays in the basement of a church down at the bottom of the hill from the street I grew up on, Jamaica Street. And, you know, that was kind of it. I don't even really remember, but it's been an obsession of mine since I was maybe five years old. Acting has been an obsession. Yeah.

You mentioned your father worked in juvenile jails in the area, and I think he was kind of the equivalent of a warden. Is that fair to say? Yeah, but much more benevolent than that and much more loved than what you think of as a warden. These were facilities for minors, but kids who had been locked up for very serious offenses, gang and murder and rape and heavy, heavy stuff. But my father really believed in the rehabilitative potential and redemptive potential of these kids. And I would go visit him at these places and some of them would make,

you know, things for me in, in woodshop and, uh, you know, and that, that was his world. But yeah,

I was like a street kid. Um, and, and then when I was 10, we moved out to an affluent suburb that was just a different world. You know, I'd never seen homes like that, or I don't think I'd ever seen a Mercedes-Benz before. And we rented a house there, and, you know, I think I felt like an outsider. Well, let's take a short break here and then talk some more. If you're just joining us, my guest is Jeremy Strong.

He played Kendall Roy in HBO's Succession. He now stars in the new film The Apprentice as the young Donald Trump's lawyer and mentor, Roy Cohn. The movie opens on Friday. We'll be right back. This is Fresh Air. This message comes from Pushkin. In Revenge of the Tipping Point, best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell returns to the subject of social epidemics and tipping points

and the dark side of contagious phenomena. Available wherever books are sold and wherever you get your audiobooks. This message comes from the Pop Culture Moms podcast. Best friends and pop culture enthusiasts, Andy and Sabrina, seek advice from the moms we love most on TV and movies, exploring the highs and lows of parenting.

Find Pop Culture Moms wherever you get podcasts. This message comes from the Open Book with Jenna podcast. Join the Today Show's Jenna Bush Hager for inspiring conversations with celebrities, experts, and authors. Hear from guests like Stephen Colbert, Nicholas Sparks, and more. Search Open Book with Jenna to follow now. This is Fresh Air. Let's get back to my interview with Jeremy Strong, who became famous for his role on HBO's Succession as Kendall Roy. He stars on the new film, The Apprentice. It's about Donald Trump as a young man striving to become successful and his unethical lawyer and mentor, Roy Cohn,

played by Jeremy Strong. Both of your parents had very dramatic jobs. Both of your parents were immersed in life-changing events of people, your father, young people who've been convicted of crimes, and your mother, people who are approaching death. She was a hospice nurse. That's a lot of drama to grow up with. Was there a lot of discussion of their work in the house? Were you always hearing stories about kids who got into trouble and people who were dealing with imminent death and were in hospice.

No, I think they actually really shielded my brother and I from that and protected us from any of that heaviness or drama. But I did sort of grok as a young person how important and how much their work mattered to them, that had an effect on me. And I'm sure I sound incredibly self-serious in this conversation, which I don't mean to, but I don't take any of this sort of frivolously because these are lives, these are people's lives that essentially I'm playing with. And, you know, someone like Roy Cohn, so, you know, it's not a game for me. And I do think there was something about how central my parents' work was to their lives and how much they gave of themselves to it that imprinted itself on me. Was it your mother who first explained what death was?

You know, I don't know. You know, the truth is, it's only recently, I'm in my mid-40s, now that I have kids, have I started really thinking about that? I've been a bit of a fantasist. You know, my mother told me as a kid, never face facts, which is not that far from maybe Roy Cohn in a way. But as someone who, you know, if you want to be an actor, if you want to be an artist in this world, it's so hard, it's so impossible that you sort of have to cling to some willed delusional optimism with great

tenacity and relentlessness. And I felt that my life depended on it in In a lot of ways, I think it did. But I feel incredibly lucky that I'm getting a chance to work. Early in your career, you interned with or worked on cruise four films with Daniel Day-Lewis, Dustin Hoffman, and Al Pacino, three very intense,

but very different actors. What was your relationship in each of those things? Like, which films, which actors did you crew for? Yeah. Well, you know, I grew up so far away from any of this. And I had such a yearning to do it and to be part of the world of it. I still feel that yearning. And those were three of my greatest heroes and still are. So I worked as an intern on Looking for Richard, which was a documentary that Pacino made about Richard III,

which is really incredible. And I stayed at some family friend's. It was about the Shakespeare play Richard III. Yeah, about Richard III, which is really incredible. And I stayed at some family friend's. It was about the Shakespeare play, Richard III. Yeah, about Richard III, the play. And, you know, was very, very, very peripherally involved in anything. I think I was 14 or 15. And, but, you know, I still have a Dog Day Afternoon poster on my wall. And Al has seen The Apprentice and, of course, Al played Roy Cohn in a definitive way and was very kind to me about it, which, as you can imagine, meant the world to me. But, yeah, so I worked on that and sort of got to observe that and observe him a bit and learn about Shakespeare and, you know, just soaked it all up.

And I'd heard that The Crucible was going to be filmed in Massachusetts, and so, you know, you just kind of by hook or by crook, I wrote letters and dozens and dozens of letters. What would you say to your letters asking to work with Daniel Day-Lewis or Dustin Hoffman? I don't really remember. You know, for The Crucible, it was just I'm this kid and, you know, I'll take off from school. I'll work for free. I'll do anything. And I ended up working in the greens department as an intern, an unpaid intern, like hanging leaves on trees on a place called Hog Island outside of Ipswich, Massachusetts.

And, you know, just getting to be a fly on a magnificent wall. You know, it was Daniel and Joan Allen and Paul Schofield and Nicholas Heitner directed it. And, you know, as a young person who's never been on a film set or has never been in the presence of what you consider to be real actors, it's just priceless to be able to witness some of it and some of the texture of what it actually is. Did you get to talk to Daniel Day-Lewis or observe his method or anything? No, not then. I mean, observe, sure, from a distance. I just remember looking up, he was riding on a horse and he looked down and that was just an infinitesimal moment, but a seismic moment in my life. And later, much later, I worked for Daniel on a film and then we made a film together 10 years after that. So he's someone that I admire immeasurably.

So, you know, you've quoted several people during the course of our conversation, and you've become kind of famous for that in interviews. And I always find those quotes really interesting. But what really amazes me is that you remember the quotes. Like, I talk to interesting people all the time, and I try to really remember what they've said. I read a lot of books and try to remember sentences that really jumped out in my mind. And, of course, they just kind of slip away. Now, you're an actor, so you need a good memory to remember your lines. Did you do anything to develop your memory, or did you always just have a good one?

I don't have a good memory. I actually have a very— No. Come on. I have so many holes in my memory of my own life, actually. But for whatever reason, certain things stay with me, I guess because they help me. They become sort of wayfinders for me, certain things that certain people have said um but it's not like uh something i practiced or i'm trying to learn for cocktail party um you know i've been learning plays since i was a little kid and i did theater for my whole life until about 10 years ago. And then I started doing more film and television.

But even on succession, you're learning a 90 or 100 page script every 10 days. And I have to learn that upside down and left and right. And if I was thrown out of a plane in the middle of a cyclone, I would still know it. That's how well I have to know a text so that I can internalize it the way I feel that I need to. And it's a muscle, so maybe it's just through habit and repetition, maybe that muscle. But I have to work very hard at it. Some people have a photographic memory or can just learn things very easily, but I've never been someone for whom anything comes particularly easily. Well, let's take a short break here and then talk some more. If you're just joining us,

my guest is Jeremy Strong. He played Kendall Roy in HBO's Succession. He now stars in the new film The Apprentice as the young Donald Trump's lawyer and mentor, Roy Cohn. The movie opens on Friday. We'll be right back. This is Fresh Air. This message comes from the podcast Strict Scrutiny. Join law experts Melissa Murray, Leah Littman, and Kate Shaw as they break down the biggest legal headlines and SCOTUS decisions. New episodes drop every Monday.

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We can't help you, but we will find someone who can. Listen to the How to Do Everything podcast from NPR. This is Fresh Air. Let's get back to my interview with Jeremy Strong, who became famous for his role on HBO's Succession as Kendall Roy. He stars in the new film The Apprentice. It's about Donald Trump as a young man striving to become successful, and his unethical lawyer and mentor, Roy Cohn, played by Jeremy Strong. Were there parts of yourself when you started acting as a child that you were glad to be liberated from? Sure. I mean, kind of social anxieties, feeling inhibited.

I still feel that way, you know, although I'm much more comfortable in myself now. But like, you know, I'm getting ready to do a movie about Bruce Springsteen. I'm playing John Landau, Bruce's producer, manager, partner, mentor, friend since 1974. And greatest fan. I've seen the future of rock and roll, and his name is Bruce Springsteen. But if you read Bruce's autobiography, which I read recently, which is just an astonishingly beautiful book. Isn't it? I know.

It really is. It really is. But I guess when you read about his early life in Freehold. Freehold, New Jersey. Freehold, New Jersey, And how liberative music was. And it was a way out. You know, that's Born to Run. It was a way out of himself and of the way he felt and of that world. And I think I certainly felt the same way about then theater.

And then, of course, it becomes something different as you get older. In the beginning, it's just pretend, and it's a mimetic thing, and you're putting on funny voices and, you know, putting lots of gel in your hair, whatever. And then I think, as you get older, I remember watching Robert Duvall in Tender Mercies and just thinking,

oh, he's doing something entirely different from performance. He's entirely within himself and he's just being, you know, I say just, but it's the hardest thing in the world to do. You speak so much through other people's voices and quoting them. And it makes me wonder if like growing up in theater as you did and becoming other people all the time through most of your life, if it kind of taught you to speak through other people. Probably. And that became just like a habit of who you are. A habit, but also a way of communicating with the world. I think it's not an accident that I communicate in a way on the most primal level through other people's words, whether those are

writers for plays or films or poetry or whatever. I must have a belief that they are expressing it better than I could, but it's not a camouflage so much as just a deeply ingrained, long-standing way of communicating. I feel much more at home, in a sense, with other people's words, playing someone else than I do when I walk out of the NPR studio. So I want to end with a song. There are two musical moments in Succession that really stand out. One was when you're practicing, you're kind of doing a soundcheck for your birthday party that you've planned. And it's a very elaborate, really ridiculous party that you've planned that doesn't work out well. Yeah. But you're rehearsing or doing the soundcheck with the Billy Joel song, Honesty.

Yeah. Which was a pitch I made to Jesse. Oh, really? How did you choose that song? And I should mention that you sing it with conviction and earnestness, and everybody in the room is just cringing. Well, you know, the conviction and earnestness part is mine. I'll leave the cringing up to everybody else. But I will say that my, I don't know if it was my nanny or my wife, but they told my kids about these songs. and five and six started to listen to them especially when i'm away which i have to be a lot for work and we have a house in this village in denmark and this sort of fishing village outside of copenhagen with these speakers outside so so if you happen to walk past this house on many days

this summer you might have heard one of those two songs, because I think I know what the other one you're referring to, playing loudly over speakers from my own house, which certainly makes me cringe, but is very sweet because my kids have come to really love them. But why did you choose honesty well for a guy who was throwing that party and was going to dress himself up on a cross with a usb crown of thorns uh it felt i i learned two songs for it i learned honesty and i learned king of pain by the police um And I did both of those songs on the day. And so I think either of them would have worked. King of Pain is also a great song. The song I want to end with is L to the OG. Right, which my kids can now do a pretty good version of.

Good. So if I listen to it any more times so will i be able to okay so this is like the rap that you do at your father's 50th anniversary of his business yeah and i just want to say to that you know it's such an interesting object lesson in how you know these things when you're making them know, it's just you in a room with a couple people. And I was in Glasgow. We were filming. Nick Bertel, who's the composer, called me up in my room.

And he wrote the great theme song to Succession. He wrote the theme song, and he wrote this. And he said, hey, I have this rap. Maybe you could do it at the dinner. We were filming it three days later. And he played it for me on the phone and I have a recording of it in my voice notes and it was roughly what it became. I made up the chorus for it and made up the melody for it and made it up in the car as we were driving

from Glasgow to Dundee. And it's just a pretty ad hoc thing in the final scene? Like the way we made that show was incredibly collaborative. And so that became something that people reference and know about. So just one more question about that. The way you say L to the OG, the way your voice raises on the O-G, it's like a question mark. Usually in hip-hop, there's a lot of assertion, you know, and almost arrogance, you know, like, this is who I am. Sure. So was that a choice to make it sound like a little, like, tentative and insecure, like a question as opposed to like an exclamation? No, it's interesting.

You know, back when I would go to some acting classes, people would always say, oh, I like the choice you made or that's an interesting choice. I never ever experienced anything as a choice. I experience it as an impulse and I've learned to trust those impulses. So that's just when I was trying out things in the car, trying to learn that rap in the back of a sedan on my way on some road in Scotland, that's just ended up feeling like the best way to sing it. And so I just stuck with it because, you know, necessity is the mother of invention. And I had like two days to be able to stand up there and do it. And I didn't want anyone to hear it until the first take.

So one thing I love about that scene is the look on Kieran and Sarah and everybody's faces, which is just like incredible. It was like horror. But that's because they'd never seen me do it until then. Oh, so that was a real reaction in part? Yeah, but that's the thing about film. You want it to be real, or at least I do. That's really funny.

So one more question, and then I will let you go, because I've kept you a long time. How did it feel to end your relationship with Kendall when the series ended? Did you feel liberated from him, or did you miss him? To be honest, I've sort of just put it away. Like I put away all of these things. You know, I have a stack of scripts in my office and it's like this stack of lives that I've had that when they're over, they're over and you just put them away. And I put it away because, you know, I have a life and children and then I moved on to the Ibsen play and that took up all of me. So, you know, I don't feel more of a kinship with that role than I do with any other role that I've ever played, which might sound like a strange

thing because I know it's the thing that I've become known most for. You know, one day maybe I'll watch it all back and sort of take in the magnitude of what it was, but I've probably had to protect myself from that because I don't think that that would serve me uh if that makes any sense you know it's the it's the Rudyard Kipling thing of like you have to treat success and and failure as imposters I find that you do your work you do it on the day, you give it everything, and then that's it. Like, that's all you need to be involved with. So whether it becomes the biggest thing in the world, whether something wins the Academy Award, that's not your concern. Your concern is to be all in when you're doing it. Well, it's just been great to talk with you. I admire your work so much.

Thank you so much for being on our show. Yeah, it's so great to talk to you. And let's end with L to the OG. Okay. So this is Jeremy Strong, who stars as Roy Cohn in the new movie, The Apprentice. And here's L to the OG,

which he sings in succession. Thank you again. Thanks, Terry. Who's claiming power this election? What's happening in battleground states? And why do we still have the Electoral College? All this month, the ThruLine podcast is asking big questions about our democracy and going back in time to answer them. Listen now to the ThruLine podcast from NPR. Do you feel like there's more on your to-do list than you can accomplish?

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