Jeremy Strong wants you to know that he is okay. Kendall Roy is less okay, as anyone who has seen Succession’s series finale knows. 

It has been obvious from the start that Kendall is a fragile figure. He’s been in constant oedipal combat with a father who loomed over him, while also wrestling (sometimes literally) with his siblings for control of the Roy empire. By the end of the series, Kendall has shown himself willing to do absolutely anything to rule Waystar Royco: cover up a murder, betray family members, ease a fascist presidential candidate’s path to power. “If I don’t get this, I feel like…I might die,” he tells Shiv and Roman in a last-ditch pitch for their backing. Even so, he winds up losing—and to Tom, of all people.

Strong is an extraordinary actor who manages to rouse complicated feelings for this spoiled scion of a deplorable media mogul—someone who, as Kendall himself admitted, “monetized all the American resentments of class and race.” We could feel sadness and insecurity seeping out of Kendall’s pores in almost every scene. But for a brief moment in the last ever episode, we also saw him smile giddily at the thought that he—Logan’s “number one boy”— might finally triumph. 

The morning after the finale, Strong got on Zoom to talk to VF’s Still Watching about Kendall’s one moment of joy…and everything that happened after.

Vanity Fair: Did you watch the finale last night? 

Jeremy Strong: I saw a cut of it a few weeks ago. Jesse had asked me to participate in the [official Succession] podcast. So I needed to see it before then, and then I sort of hid in the back of a room last night and watched it again. It's difficult for me to watch. It's a disaster in slow motion for him and it’s excruciating for me to see it all unfold the way that it does. I found myself wishing that things would happen differently. 

It seems at various points that things could happen differently.

Yeah, the beauty of that episode in particular—the way in which Jesse brings us all together in  Barbados in that kitchen, and that moment on the dock….You see this character smile, maybe for the first time. I can't really think of another time where there was that kind of genuine unadorned happiness.

It is incredible, that grin on his face. Like it’s the moment of his life, right? 

It is, isn't it? It is the moment of his life. It feels like the thing that his father promised him in the Candy Kitchen in Bridgehampton when he was seven years old, which is both a promise and a kind of death sentence. But his whole life has been spent in pursuit of this elusive thing that they give to him, only 15 pages later to take it away. It's a beautiful moment that I find completely devastating, knowing where it's going. 

Directly after that is the “meal fit for a king” scene, which is so much fun. They’re just siblings playing around.

I love those moments. They teach you a lot about the possibility that they have with each other as a family. There was a scene in season one where we're in a boathouse and we share a joint together in a rowboat. It was just one of my favorite scenes we ever did, because it's like being underneath the waves together in this place of calm and a fleeting togetherness and connectedness. Part of the tragedy of the show, part of what Jesse is writing about, is this co-mingling of holding and hurting—of love and violence. When I hold Roman, that embrace is also—what's the opposite of an embrace?

You're crushing him. 

Yeah, I'm embracing him and I'm crushing him at the same time. Which you could say is part of the love language that they learned in this family. Shiv and Roman can't express love without also expressing a kind of cruelty, and we—all of us—betray our own capacity to love. 

That scene you just mentioned where Kendall's crushing Roman until he bleeds… I wondered if that cruelty is kind of what Logan was looking for in Kendall all along.

I think so. Part of what I felt was so incredible about the writing in this episode, in this moment — here we are in the middle of this writer's strike, and we're nothing without the writers. Nothing. There's nothing meaningful without these writers. … It’s the writing that took this character where we've seen him— brought to the precipice—so many times. At this point, he's just lost everything. His access to his children. He's lost his marriage. He's lost his father, and actually, he's lost his brother and sister. He's lost the only thing he ever wanted in his life, which is to be CEO and to follow in his father's footsteps.

And he's also in a terrible, irrevocable way, lost his moral compass and moral core. We've seen that slowly eroded over time. But to me, the moment in episode eight where he says, “Menken”— the way that they brought the character to this moment of moral jeopardy, and in a poof he just loses his soul. 

And then the kicker really being in that scene during the vote, when Shiv says that he'd killed someone so he can't do it. His ability to lie, to say and do whatever it takes to achieve what he wants. …We see him become his father. [There’s] that moment when Logan says on the boat in Croatia about the waiter who died,  “No real person involved.” Jesse brought Kendall to that same moment, when I say: “I wasn't even there. I never got in the car.” It's tantamount to me saying, “no real person involved.” I'm able to just erase this thing, as if it didn't happen. And in that moment, I think the character loses whatever is left of an ethical, moral core. There's no coming back from it.

That reminds me of the scene in the previous episode with Kendall and Rava. He says “everything is fine.”

He needs to believe that. He's so desperately clinging to whatever detritus is left floating in the water, like a life raft. That was a terrible scene. It continued. I followed them to the intersection, and I opened the door to where my kids were, and then I tried to get them out. And Natalie Gold, the brilliant actress who plays Rava, came out, and we got into full on physical fight in the intersection. It was just awful. 

For me—not necessarily for Jesse or for anyone else—this show could have been called The Death of Kendall Roy. The slow, inexorable death of Kendall Roy, over four seasons mirrors, in a way, the death of a system and a country. We see the dying of the light in this person. And in tandem, we see the collapse and dying of a light in late stage capitalism, and in this country at this moment. To have that embodied in a character is just a staggering achievement by Jesse Armstrong and these writers.

It was interesting that the election episode was not the show’s ending. 

It could have been. Jesse wrote something in the stage directions in episode three when, when our father dies, I'm on the upper deck of the boat, outside on the phone with Frank. I ask him, is he gone? And Jesse wrote after I hang up the phone, that there is Kendall basically standing at the crossroads of history, at the sharp tip of Manhattan—looking at the financial district and Wall Street and the Statue of Liberty, at the crosshairs of this moment in history. The worst thing has happened, and he's still there. Like, the world is off axis, but he's okay, and he feels as if he could either be a wraith or a super being.

For the rest of the season, I was mainly leaning into the super being Kendall… and then in the end, maybe even in the last three minutes of the show, he becomes a wraith, which is really always what's underneath. When Roman says “we're nothing,” I guess that's always the fear underneath a lot of great ambitions. 

You mentioned that moment of Kendall on the boat. I was thinking about how water is a leitmotif in the show—cruise ships, the drowned waiter, Kendall’s near-death in the pool, and then this final moment sitting by the East River. Tell me about that last scene. 

That day, we were shooting down in Battery Park, and it was the coldest day in like, a century in New York. One of those days in February that they'd closed schools. I'd never been so cold in my whole life.…I found myself thinking about the ninth circle of hell, which in Dante's Inferno is a frozen lake. The worst part of hell is ice cold, and so that scene became about that. It was so cold. It was almost burning. 

As scripted, it was meant to end with an aerial shot where we see Kendall walking, and we see Colin following him. I begged [Armstrong and director Mark Mylod], “Can we go to the water? I want to keep walking.” We ended up at the bitter end of Battery Park, facing the water. I'd never seen waves like that in the East River. It felt biblical. And there was this terrible clanging on some scaffolding nearby. We didn't know what we were looking for, but something profound happened. We only had about eight minutes to shoot that piece at the end because the sun was going down. The water was calling to me. It felt right to all of us. 

Listen to the John Berryman poem that Jesse has named these finales after. John Berryman himself died by suicide, jumping into the frozen river. I tried to go into the water after we cut—I got up from that bench and went as fast as I could over the barrier and onto the pilings, and the actor playing Colin raced over. I didn't know I was gonna do that, and he didn't know, but he raced over and stopped me. I don't know whether in that moment I felt that Kendall just wanted to die—I think he did—or if he wanted to be saved by essentially a proxy of his father. 

To me, what happens at the board vote is an extinction level event for this character. There's no coming back from that. But what I love about the way Jesse chose to end it, it’s a much stronger ending philosophically, and has more integrity to what Jesse's overall very bleak vision is of mankind—which is that fundamentally, people don't really change. They don't do the spectacular, dramatic thing. Instead, there's a kind of doom loop that we're all stuck in, and Kendall is trapped in this sort of silent scream with Colin there as both a bodyguard and a jailer. 

I also don't know if [Kendall] would've had the courage to actually go in that water, because my God, it would've been hard to do. But I think you even feel on a cellular level the intention or the longing to cross that threshold. The way [Armstrong] leaves us with a kind of ambivalence stays true to his vision. 

I feel like if I rewatched the whole series, I would find that longing to cross the threshold at multiple points.

There were many times where the character is drawn to that precipice. And after that scene, I sent Jesse a text from the Berryman poem because there was this, that clanging of the bell [while shooting the scene]—and there's a reference to a chime that Henry in the poem hears in his mind. [He pulls up the poem on his phone and reads from it.] “And there is another thing he has in mind/like a grave Sienese face a thousand years/would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of.  Ghastly,/with open eyes, he attends, blind.”

That face, those open eyes….in a thousand years, he'll never be able to unsee the reproach of that face. And so that's the ending to me. I, as the actor who embodied him for seven years, felt in that moment that all hope had been extinguished, and there was nowhere to go.

In one episode, you go from that moment on the raft where you have everything you wanted to this endpoint at the East River.

It's devastating. He flew really close to the sun, and he almost got there. And then the fall is complete. And Shiv—remember that moment in Of Mice and Men, where he loves these animals but he also has to hurt them? He crushes the thing that he loves. That scene in the, in the glass room after the vote—as an actor, it was unbearable. Because it's right there. And then [Shiv and Roman] have the power to end his life in a sentence.

It’s primal. There's an almost gloating quality in her eyes because she has that power over him.

After living inside Kendall’s skin for so many years, what is it like to be done? 

It was hard for me to watch last night, what he goes through, because he's become very real to me, and in a way is indistinguishable from myself. This, to me, was a life and death thing. And I took it as seriously as I take my own life. 

When you're doing it, the whole world turns on it, and it matters more than anything in the world to me. But then when it's over, it's, it's like vapor. So I feel very detached from it. As an audience member, it feels like I'm watching somebody else.

In the months since you wrapped, have you stayed in touch with the cast? 

I haven't, really. We'll always have, uh, having shared this experience. But the truth is, when you work on movies, you become very close to people and you share something very intimate, and then when it's done, you know, the circus kind of folds up its tents and leaves town, and you're kind of back to your life. I feel connected to everyone, but in a way, my involvement and my work finished on March 1st in Barbados. 

The kitchen scene seems like a fun way to have ended.  

It was, it was! I loved doing that scene, and it's rare that I didn't feel an obligation as an actor to carry a tremendous weight with me into any scene. The characters were at ease, and [Kendall was] enjoying the company of his brother and sister. And my God, they put the nastiest shit you can possibly imagine into that blender! So every take, I had to go outside and retch and then jump in the ocean to reset. But it was fun. 

You actually drank what they put in that blender?

I guess my feeling is, I would not be committed enough to what that character wants in that moment if I didn't drink that thing. She's saying, “we'll give this to you if you drink this thing.” So —yeah, that's just me. Mark [Mylod] knew at a certain point he had to call cut, because if he didn't call cut, I'm gonna do it, you know?

Brian Cox said he gets people on the street coming up to him and saying, “Fuck off.” Do you have people come up to you who are sort of worried about Ken? 

This character invites all kind of responses from people. Some people think he's cringeworthy, and despicable or pitiable because he's quite vulnerable. And then there's other people who I think embrace that vulnerability and fallibility, and care for him. It's a bit of a litmus test, actually—it tells you a lot about how people respond.  I get: “Is he okay? Are you okay?”

Are you okay?

I am okay. This is just a character. 

There's a thread in the show about masculinity and will to power. Kendall is always trying to find his own version of how to be a man. 

I remember going to the writers’ room in Brixton six years ago or something, and seeing all the note cards on the wall. And at the very top was this question of: can you escape legacy? Does it define you? And by escaping it, are you still defined by it? So I think he is trying to attain a version of manhood or personhood. He's trying to individuate, I think, in a certain way, but he has never been able to escape the tractor beam of his father. I wanted for him so badly to get on that boat with Naomi Pierce and just leave it all. But he couldn't do that.

The funeral oration about, “My God, I hope that it's in me, his life force and his vigor and his terrible energy”—I was gonna say that Kendall doesn't possess it, but I think by the end we see that he has become a version of his father. There is a ruthlessness in him. It is Michael Corleone after he's, you know, lost every last vestige of his humanity.  While Logan had a kind of reptilian brutality and a primitive energy, Kendall is more of a boy-man. He has a sensitivity and a self-awareness that I think his father didn't have, but he also has a potential for tyranny and moral bankruptcy or amorality. I don't know what's more frightening, actually: a Logan Roy, or a Kendall Roy in power?

The problem with this family is that our small corruptions and our failings and shortcomings are scaled up to affect the entire world, and the ramifications of our bad choices or our self-interest has the ability to shape and misshape the world.

Did you ever come across any of the Murdochs along the way?

I'm working with Liz Murdoch. She has a company called Sister Pictures, which is an incredible company, and I'm making a limited series with them for Netflix, about September 11th first responders who worked on the pile and had to fight for their healthcare. So I don't have anything gossipy or salacious to say about that.  Jesse wrote that great piece in The Guardian this weekend about all of the influences, and they are myriad, all of the influences. And I read every book that Jesse read, and so it's an amalgam of so many elements.

Kieran Culkin told one of my colleagues that during season four, Jesse Armstrong seemed to be still considering the possibility of a season five. Would you have wanted to keep going, or had you come to an end with Kendall? 

I was done. I would've loved for them to keep going, because if Jesse decided there was enough in the tank to keep going with them…..But this character's arc had run its course down in Battery Park at that water. I don't think I get up from that bench. I wouldn't have been the actor to get up from that bench and keep going, or go back into the corporate scrum or whatever that would've been. 

You described Kendall stuck in a silent scream. That last image of Shiv with Tom is a different version of the silent scream. 

It’s terrible. The patriarchy has won, and she's sort of there mummified in this life with him. And Roman, that smile that he gives that martini is quite terrifying. On some level, that's what he's really wanted. I don't think he did want to take over. I think he wants to be at that bar, but I worry that that is a moment of the beginning of alcoholism and a descent.

For Kendall, he's just already been there so many times. We've seen him lose so many times. You know, there is an episode in season one, episode six: I leave a failed coup in the boardroom. And it's in a way almost identical to what happens here. I walk out of that room in a daze, having lost with the wind knocked out of me. I said, “this can't be that. This has to be different. This is worse.” Otherwise there's no progression, and there's no growth. And I think Jesse's feeling is: there is no progression. Life is not linear that way. It's cyclical. And that to me is sort of more tragic than anything. 

Looking back, is there one scene or moment that feels the most meaningful to you?

I would say that dirt parking lot [in the 3rd season finale] is probably the scene that was most meaningful. It was a difficult scene, and a very fraught scene between all of us as actors, so it was not a harmonious, joyful thing. But I do feel like we fulfilled that scene. It was just one of the more profound experiences of my life, that scene, where somehow you and the work that you're doing merge, and you experience sort of the extremities of human experience and human suffering. I mean, all my memories are quite painful scenes, but I guess that tells me a lot about what this character's journey has been…. Kendall is the real pain sponge. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.