‘Succession’ is cringey but addictive
Emmy-nominated show is about the inner workings of a rich and powerful family
If you’ve watched Succession, HBO’s drama about an obscenely wealthy media dynasty, chances are Tom Wamsgans, the striving Midwesterner played by Matthew Macfadyen, has done something so pathetic, so mortifying, so desperately ingratiating it made you want to grab a shovel, dig a hole to the centre of the earth, and bury yourself there. All while laughing out loud and maybe even feeling sorry for the poor sap.
Perhaps it was the time he joked about the cost of the Patek Philippe watch he’d just given his billionaire future father-in-law as an 80th-birthday present. Or when he squealed with pleasure as his fiancee, Shiv Roy (Sarah Snook), handed him a pre-nuptial agreement. Or the episode in which he dragged a naive relative into a potentially criminal cover-up to keep his hands clean. Macfadyen cringed right along with you.
The moment that still makes him wince is when Tom, obsequious as ever, does an awkward robot dance after his fiancee’s brother, Kendall (Jeremy Strong), orders him to be the C3PO to his Darth Vader.
“That was excruciating. If I have to do something really horrifying, there is a sort of [expletive]-clenching where you think, ‘God almighty. Thank God I’m only doing this on set,’” Macfadyen said with a sigh, followed by an aftershock of anxious laughter. The setting was apt: a slick conference room inside HBO’s new headquarters at Hudson Yards, the lavish real-estate development and billionaire enclave on Manhattan’s far west side.
Though technically a supporting character, Tom is central to the queasy appeal of Succession, which has returned for a second season. Created by Jesse Armstrong, a British writer previously best known for the cult comedy Peep
Show, Succession is a viciously funny drama about the 1 per cent — make that .01 per cent — that invites sympathy and stirs repulsion in equal measure.
It’s a departure for Macfadyen, perhaps best known in the US for playing the brooding Mr Darcy in Joe Wright’s
2005 adaptation of Pride & Prejudice. (Tom, a weasel through and through, has more in common with the sycophantic Mr Collins.)
More recently, Macfadyen has played other characters with “a lot British reserve,” such as Victorian detective Edmund Reid in the BBC America series Ripper Street and the starchy Henry Wilcox in an underappreciated adaptation of Howards End for Starz.
A SERIES OF FIRSTS
Starring in Succession is “like sweeping out the cupboard,” he said.
In fact, Tom is the first American Macfadyen’s played on television, and the actor, 44, seems delighted to leave the stiff upper lips behind. His natural speaking voice is deep and velvety, with a crisp private school accent. But when he switches into an exaggerated version of Tom’s nasal register, sounding like someone who’s just inhaled helium from a balloon, his whole bearing changes: His face lights up, his eyebrows lift and he chuckles giddily.
“Americans sort of say every word, you know,” he said. “So it’s kind of liberating, because you’re on the front foot as opposed to the back foot. It’s totally different, and it’s really energising. Which is why Americans are kind of wonderful, because they’re just in the room. Hi. What’s going on? As opposed to” — he affects a posh lockjaw — “Isn’t Brexit awful?”
Succession is also firmly of the moment. Recently nominated for a drama series Emmy, it follows the Roy family, headed by patriarch Logan (Brian Cox), founder of Waystar Royco — a vast media and entertainment conglomerate whose holdings include a rightleaning cable news network, a film studio, newspapers, cruise lines and amusement parks. When Logan is hospitalised after a debilitating brain haemorrhage, his adult children scramble for control of the company.
While the Roys are clearly inspired by a certain Australian clan with a conservative news empire, they also bear a resemblance to a number of infamous American dynasties.
Season one ends on a tragic note reminiscent of the Kennedys, and the dynamics among the Roy children — despite her superficially liberal politics, Shiv
“Tom [Macfayden’s character] sort of flips between being spineless to quite plausible; really, really vile to quite sweet and sympathetic.” MATTHEW MACFAYDEN| Actor
is her father’s favourite — are distinctly Trumpian.
Succession shares some creative DNA with Veep, and like that recently concluded political satire, it’s most brutally effective when skewering those in tantalising proximity to power as they go to humiliating lengths to acquire it.
From an average family in Minnesota, Tom is an outsider economically and culturally — “a corn-fed basic from Hockeytown,” as a rival memorably puts it. Even his last name — pronounced “wommzganz” — is clumsy.
But Tom is learning the Roy way. In season one, he helps bury evidence of rampant sexual abuse aboard the company’s cruises by manipulating Shiv’s dopey cousin, Greg (Nicholas Braun), into destroying incriminating documents. Their scenes together are some of the funniest — and most damning — in the series. Tom sees himself in Greg, the “tryhard dork,” Macfadyen said, and doesn’t like it.
Tom is also a cuckold: Shiv is cheating on him with her ex Nate (Ashley Zukerman), a floppy-haired political operative. Tom is smart enough to figure out the deception eventually but is either too in love with Shiv or too enamoured with the lifestyle she enables to fight back. He also knows that he is, as Shiv’s mother devastatingly puts it, a “plausible” partner for her, and, therefore, useful.
Macfadyen has “done a brilliant job of creating this hard, calloused protection for someone who is quite a softie,” Snook said. “I don’t know if I’ve ever met someone who is so different from their character.”
Season two further explores the relationship between Tom and Shiv, now married. “We discover the bully is often the bullied,” she added.
“Tom knows that he’s punching above his weight a bit with her. But he knows he makes her feel safe and unthreatened,” said Macfadyen, who is married to actress Keeley Hawes. “So he takes on the infidelity, he takes on the [expletive]eating and takes it out on Greg and the various office minions. There’s a lot of that in this series.”
But Macfadyen is reluctant to pass judgement on Tom. “He’s very quickly a different person with whoever he’s with, which we all do to varying degrees. Tom sort of flips between being spineless to quite plausible; really, really vile to quite sweet and sympathetic. And he really is all those things. That’s what we all do however much we think, ‘No, I’m me, and this is how I am.’ We’re all just sort of muddling through.”
If there’s a downside to his breakthrough role on Succession — other than all the cringing, that is — it’s the danger he’ll be asked to play “lots of dorky, embarrassing Americans, which is the last thing I want to do, because it won’t be as good as this. And as an actor, you know, there’s lots of different people jumping about inside you.”