It’s war among the Roys as HBO’s ‘Succession’ returns for Season 3

Battle lines are drawn in and around the dysfunctional Roy family in the wake of a bombshell press conference as HBO’s “Succession” returns for its third season.

Premiering Sunday, Oct. 17, the nine-episode round opens with family patriarch and Waystar RoyCo chief Logan Roy (Brian Cox), the target of rebellious son Kendall’s (Jeremy Strong) press conference ambush at the end of Season 2, scrambling to secure familial, political and financial alliances as a bitter corporate battle threatens to spill over into all-out family civil war.

Which forces virtually all to choose sides, among them daughter Shiv (Sarah Snook), her husband Tom (Matthew Macfadyen), sons Connor and Roman (Alan Ruck, Kieran Culkin), greatnephew Greg (Nicholas Braun) and Waystar general counsel Gerri Kellman (J. Smith-Cameron).

And at the center of it is Kendall, who at the opening of Sunday’s premiere appears to be trying to come to grips with what he has wrought.

“I felt that after the press conference it was as if I’d sat under the Bodhi tree and achieved a moment of clarity and what feels for Kendall like enlightenment and liberation,” Strong explains. “And so I think we see a sort of airborne Kendall at the beginning of the season, someone who feels like he’s finally wrested himself free from the chains that have been binding him. And, yeah, there’s an airborne quality to it.

“And Jesse (Armstrong, the series’ creator, writer and showrunner) did say to me it was as if Napoleon is sacking Moscow and everyone has left the city so it’s sort of a pyrrhic victory, which I think is part of what we explore in Season 3. I’ve done the thing, but if I don’t have support in a coalition, what is the value of it?”