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Matland imagines that Ebba (Eili Harboe) does all of her boss’s shopping for him—just as she does most everything else as GoJo’s head of communications and Mattson’s sometimes-lover. If he needs clothes, he’ll send Ebba and a driver to the shops and she’ll return “with bags and bags of luxury items that look like you could get them at Walmart.” They only finished shooting two weeks before we speak, and I ask Strong how long it takes for him to get Kendall out of his system. “I don’t think he does leave me,” he says. “I don’t really feel like an actor much any more; I feel as if I’m me for half the year and I’m Kendall for half the year. I think when you live with a role for long enough, like Mark Rylance playing Rooster in Jerusalem, then it’s in you.” Within a few more minutes, he’s quoting acting inspiration he gleaned from TS Eliot’s Four Quartets, Hamlet, Cy Twombly, Chekhov and “Dustin Hoffman quoting Jacques Cousteau – I think about this quote all the time: You have to know how far to go to go too far.” (I think this is actually a version of an Eliot quote: “I do not see how anyone can go very far … who is not ready to risk complete failure.” But who am I to argue with Strong, Hoffman and Cousteau?) “I remember things that are instructive. They are like northern lights for me,” Strong says. We've adopted him," Fola, another young female Kendall fan, tells Mashable. "A lot of his tendencies are relatable to young women," the 23-year-old New York City grad student explains. She points to his 40th birthday party as an example, a Season 3 episode in which he meticulously plans the event only to end up crying and miserable. Crying on your birthday is a common trope of disaffected womanhood. It's kind of fun to watch a powerful man have the same sort of demeaning experiences that you've had.
When you have young girls who are entering a society that doesn't want them to win, they see that in Kendall because his dad is never gonna let him have what he wants," Hayley Loftus, a 21-year-old film and marketing student in North Carolina and proud owner of a Kendall t-shirt that says "taking a break from feminism to serve my king," explains to Mashable. The Roy family’s collective wardrobe has been brilliantly thought up by Succession’s costume designer Michelle Matland, with the direct intent of expressing the soft power of the show’s lead characters. Matland’s are clothes that afford the money-motivated weirdos who wear them a subtle potency; the ability to convey status and supremacy without needing to say a word – though, invariably, there's always plenty to say. There have been times when it has felt really hard, but if the character is going through an ordeal, and you want the audience to experience that, then you can’t spare yourself. I have a belief – and this may be a fallacious belief – that it has to cost you something,” he says. Then he adds something that could be both Kendall’s personal mantra and a description of Strong’s work ethic: “I need it to be difficult.”It doesn't end with Kendall's birthday party breakdown: much of Kendall's character resonates with young women. Blazer and shirt, by Geoffrey B Small, from bluemountain.school. Photography: Simon Webb. Styling: Helen Seamons. Fire Specialist: Matt Strange. Grooming: Sam Cooper at Carol Hayes management using Kiehl’s. Photographer’s assistants: Sam Brown and Jake Newell. Stylist’s assistant: Peter Bevan There's just so much in Kendall Roy, that very oddly relates to those extreme highs and lows and strong feelings you have when you're a young girl," Julia Riggieri, a 21-year-old promotions assistant in Massachusetts, tells Mashable.
When Sorkin cast him in The Trial of the Chicago 7 as Jerry Rubin, the countercultural activist, Strong prepared by “taking all these gummies [edible cannabis], going to Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago and listening to the Grateful Dead. It was a palate cleanser after Kendall.” During the courtroom scene, in which Rubin, fellow activist Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen) and others were accused of crossing state lines to incite anti-Vietnam riots, Strong, in the spirit of Rubin, brought an “assortment of period noisemakers” to disrupt proceedings. After Sorkin irritably asked him to please stop clanging his cowbell, he slipped a fart machine on the chair of Judge Julius Hoffman, played by Frank Langella, who was less than amused when he sat on it.I ask him if it’s possible that he does too much for his work. Does he really have to take on all of a drug addict’s pain to play a drug addict? The way Kendall is posted about in these circles is similar to the way in which online culture has fixated on certain discontent, complex, female characters like Fleabag, Sally Rooney protagonists, and the narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, among others. When Smart-Denson watched the pilot episode, in which Kendall has a silent, complete meltdown in the bathroom during a family lunch, she was sold. Naomi Pierce (Annabelle Dexter-Jones) is Succession’s “It” girl. She is the show’s most objectively stylish character, with a socialite’s wardrobe full of monochromatic pieces from brands like Tom Ford, The Row, and Proenza Schouler—the latter of whom made this perfect white loungewear set Naomi wears while a spiraling Kendall preps for his doomed 40th birthday bash. (The strapless gold-buttoned top she wears to the actual party is also Proenza.) In an effort to isolate the parts of Kendall they find relatable, young female viewers have created their own version of Kendall decontextualized from the show. They're forcing representation in a place it doesn't exist and consuming Succession in a way it isn't intended to be all in a tongue-in-cheek manner. And it's entertaining and subversive to contort a powerful, fictional man into a teenage girl.
When he’s making Succession, Strong largely stays separate from the other cast members to maintain the dynamic of the show in which Kendall is emotionally disconnected from his family. “It’s not like I stay in character, but you need to believe in what you’re doing and take it seriously. I don’t know how you can do that without going all out. Also, for me, the creative self and social self are entirely separate. I have a lot of armour and anxieties in my social self, and I have to strip all that away to engage my creative self,” he says. I ask if it’s hard for him to maintain a distance from Cox off camera, given how friendly he is in real life. Jeremy Strong wears blazer, by Geoffrey B Small, from bluemountain.school. Jewellery throughout, Jeremy’s own. Main image: suit, paulsmith.com; shirt, by Dries Van Noten, from selfridges.com. Photography: Simon Webb. Styling: Helen SeamonsIt’s easy to forget that when we first meet Shiv (Sarah Snook) in season 1, she was dressing (and behaving) with an entirely different set of motivations. She’s a political advisor for a left-leaning Democratic candidate who, as Matland reminds us, “does not want to be seen as a Roy.” Succession was a show about many things: money, power, destiny. It was also a show about clothes—and namely, how the wealthiest people in the world wear them.
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