Jeremy Strong’s working methods have been the subject of much discussion, and the debate has been reignited once more with the impending arrival of Succession season 4 at the end of March. Strong has given a couple of new interviews in which he describes the “torturous process” he goes through to bring Kendall Roy to the screen.
In an interview with GQ, the journalist spoke to Strong’s co-stars about working with the actor, as well as with Strong himself. Nicholas Braun recalled an instance while they were working on season four when, to get his co-stars in the mood for a scene, Strong “found a YouTube video of horrible crashes and destruction from, maybe, Transformers, and he had the sound department play it loud on the speakers so that we could hear it.”
Braun continued; “I think that’s the mentality: why not try something to see if it does change the energy in the room and in a performance?” Creator/showrunner Jesse Armstrong recalled a memory from the first season of the drama series, when Strong showed up on set with his wife during one of his off days.
“I didn’t recognise him,” Armstrong said. “The way that he’d been carrying himself for the preceding weeks as he played Kendall in the dark place meant that his whole physicality was completely different.”
An interview that Strong gave to The New Yorker in December 2021 sparked much internet discourse about method acting, with much argument over what The Method actually is. The Method is usually linked with two main names – Konstantin Stanislavski and Lee Strasberg. Strasberg, along with Stella Adler and Elia Kazan, taught actors such as Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, and Marilyn Monroe at The Actors Studio in New York during the 50s. Later, actors such as Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino would train under the same method.
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