REUTERS/Stephane Mahe
Jeremy Strong, star of HBO’s hit show Succession, has become something of a cult favorite among the coastal city intelligentsia for his performance as Kendall Roy, a well-moneyed failson-slash-rapper, as well as for his delightfully rambling interviews. His latest is no exception; in an interview with GQ published on Tuesday, the Yale-educated thespian reveals his feelings regarding the fallout from a particularly infamous New Yorker profile that exposed his method acting techniques.
In said profile, which was published in 2021 and titled “Jeremy Strong Doesn’t Get the Joke,” the actor is painted as a somewhat desperate, sullen, lifelong background player whose seriousness about his portrayal of Kendall renders him laughable, as well as an irritant to his fellow cast members. “I just feel that he just has to be kinder to himself, and therefore has to be a bit kinder to everybody else,” his Succession co-star Brian Cox told New Yorker writer Michael Schulman.
Now, Strong is describing the widespread mockery that the profile triggered as his “15 minutes of shame, with a long tail.” He told GQ, “I hadn’t felt judged like that in a very long time.”