It’s a joy to play a real human grease stain
HIT DRAMA SUCCESSION IS BACK ON OUR SCREENS. DANIELLE DE WOLFE SPEAKS TO STARS BRIAN COX AND MATTHEW MACFADYEN
PITTING fathers against sons, siblings against siblings, and morals (or lack thereof) against cold hard cash, the Bafta and Emmy Award-winning TV drama Succession is positively Shakespearean in its scale and ambition.
Centred around a Murdoch-style empire run by faltering mogul Logan Roy
(Brian Cox), season three picks up after son Kendall (Jeremy
Strong) publicly turned on his father and the remaining siblings are battling to take charge of the beleaguered family-run company.
A boiling pot of dysfunction, Succession serves up one of the most perplexing family dynamics on television.
Bafta Award-winning Brit Matthew Macfadyen, plays Logan’s son-in-law Tom Wambsgans who schemes with wife Shiv (Sarah Snook) to try and manoeuvre her into the position of CEO of the business.
“There’s a wonderful TS Eliot line in Prufrock where he says ‘you prepare the face to meet the faces that
you meet’ – and Tom is a good example of that,” says Matthew, 47, of his character.
“He’s constantly changing who he is, depending on the status of the person he’s with – which again, we all do to varying degrees. So for an actor, that’s just heaven.”
Describing it as “a joy” to play “a real human grease stain”, Matthew says the primary draw of the show is that the Roy family are “so relatable” despite being “from another planet”.
“They’re so wealthy, there’s a sort of chemical change after a certain amount of noughts – they don’t even think about money in the way most ordinary people do. Sometimes I think it’s not really about the wealth. It’s the power, it’s corrosive, and also the absence of love is corrosive.”
With Succession one of the first projects hit hard by the production shutdowns that followed the onset of Covid, the prolonged wait for season three was as drawn out for the show’s cast as it was for the fans – unless you’re Emmy and Baftanominated actor Brian Cox, that is.
The man charged with bringing the domineering persona of Logan
Roy to life, Brian met Succession writer Brit
Jesse Armstrong (Peep Show/Fresh Meat) the day prior to the first full national lockdown for what turned out to be a rather revealing chat.
“He normally doesn’t expose the show to the actors, but he did on this occasion,” reveals Dundee-born Brian, 75.
“This was just before lockdown 2020; I met him literally the day before everybody was locked down in March. I’d done Desert Island Discs that day... And then Jesse said, ‘Come in, we’ll talk’.
Describing how the writer filled the actor in on “the shape of season three”, Brian recalls how his overriding feeling was “should you be telling me this? Isn’t it best to keep me in my sublime ignorance?”.
“I felt very privileged and honoured that he actually did fill me in on how it was going to end.”
However, “sublime ignorance” appears to be the favoured position of Matthew, who is married to fellow actor Keeley Hawes.
“I don’t always want to know, you know, because you can’t play the end at the beginning,” says the actor best known for his roles in Pride & Prejudice and Ripper Street, of the show’s scripts.
“It’s quite nice just guessing – and we get the episodes quite late. We get them sometimes at two in the morning before the table read, the day of. So yeah, that’s quite fun.”
Crafting characters so distinctly dislikable they see internet forums awash with debate following each and every episode, Succession’s writers consistently dapple the show’s central figures with just enough humanity to ensure audiences hang on their every word.
With Brian describing his character’s son Kendall – a man initially lined up to take control of Waystar Royco – as “a bit of a pillock”, the actor says on more than one occasion he found himself thinking “’you know Kendall, you cannot take over the job, you’re not fit!’ I mean, both as Brian Cox and as Logan Roy I think that”.
“Logan and I share one thing in common,” reflects Brian, “which is a deep disappointment in the human experiment.”
With Oscar-nominated Jesse at the helm, Succession’s team of scriptwriters has proved pivotal to the show’s success.
Describing how the scriptwriting “does the work for you”, Matthew reveals he often sits on material in order to “let it percolate in my head in the days and weeks before we shoot the scene”.
“The other actors are so brilliant that you just trust in the process and try not to overthink it or over prepare. We don’t rehearse very much for this show and I think we would if we needed to, but we don’t because it’s all there for you.”
Brian adds that Succession’s scriptwriters – including Bafta nominees Lucy Prebble (Secret Diary Of A Call Girl) and Tony Roche (The Thick Of It), as well as Susan Soon He Stanton (Modern Love) and Jon Brown (Veep) –have also “grown” as writers as a result of the show.
“They’re satirists, they’re dramatists,” says Brian, “and this is a unique combination that has come to the writing of British television. Armando Iannucci – what he’s sort of fostered, Jesse’s amazing work on The Thick Of It... Tony Roche’s amazing work.
“It’s very much now part for the course that these writers are infecting things in a way that the writers have not done for a long, long time. It used to be through the medium of the theatre – and it still has the sort of excellence of a small theatre piece that you would find in a pub somewhere. So that’s what I think is so extraordinary.”
The other actors are so brilliant that you just trust in the process and try not to overthink it
Matthew Macfadyen
Succession continues on Sky Atlantic and Now TV