Succession season 3 finale: Kendall Roy and Jeremy Strong are now opposites

Actor Jeremy Strong enjoys a week off Succession Character Kendall Roy was something that only dreams about. And only part of it has to do with what happened on the season 3 finale, ‘All the Bells Say,” after much speculation about his character’s potential death.

[Ed. note: This story contains major spoilers for Succession season 3.]

Succession Season 3, Episode 9 was released after Kendall’s implosion, which saw him floating in a pool. The episode also featured a supernova moment that gave rise to its star. A new New Yorker profile of Strong, alternatively titled “On Succession, Jeremy Strong Doesn’t Get the Joke” and “The Straight Man” paints the actor as one who aggressively gets into character to an extent that even his coworkers find it a little off-putting. The profile set off a moment of drama that, in several ways, accomplishes want Strong has always wanted out of acting: To “elide the line,” as he puts it in the profile, between character and real life.

Among the revelations: Strong missed part of his “wedding-week festivities” to film Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit, hung out with the playwright Wendy Wasserstein’s Irish doorman to learn how to play an Irish alcoholic, often refuses to rehearse, and when shooting to quote Kieran Culkin describing the process as Strong told him “you get in the ring, you do the scene, and at the end each actor goes to their corner.” It’s not a strategy that Culkin particularly endorses. “I’m, like, This isn’t a battle. This is a dance,” he says in the New Yorker feature, reflecting on his costar.

“It’s the cost to himself that worries me,” Brian Cox says in the profile, after the piece describes a series of injuries Strong has had on the not particularly action-packed set of the show about a family of bickering moguls, of whom Cox is the cruel patriarch. “I just feel that he just has to be kinder to himself, and therefore has to be a bit kinder to everybody else.”

Strong’s approach is not so different than how Kendall started Succession Season 3 is constantly viral on Twitter. One difference between the two is that Kendall Roy feels increasingly alone, while Jeremy Strong still has friends who stand by him. In the seventh season 3 episode, “Too Much Birthday,” partygoers are promised a trip into the world of Kendall Roy at a beyond-lavish birthday at The Shed at Hudson Yards, a venue which critics have called a meeting point of “touristic commerce and capitalist worship.”

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It’s a perfect venue for Kendall, who rides ravishing highs in the episode only to be met with crushing lows. By far the most powerful of these is his quixotic search for his son’s birthday present, with the only clue being bunny wrapping paper. He struggles through the mountain of gifts, with his small army of helpers failing him. What about a motorcycle? Why should he care? His girlfriend gave him a watch. One already exists. He collapses at his own peril.

It’s a scene that plays into the classical influences often brought up around SuccessionStrong included. He uses both Chekhov and Dostoevsky in his profile. One example it called to mind for me was Leo Tolstoy’s 1866 short story “How Much Land Does A Man Need?” in which a peasant named Pahom who makes a deal with the devil for more and more land, before learning that all a man really needs is six feet for a grave.

Tolstoy’s parable bares striking similarities with Kendall, who, struck out against his father in the penultimate episode in hopes of proving better and smarter. And now, in the season 3 finale, he’s anything but dead, confessing for his manslaughter incident in season 1 and teaming up with his siblings (“for the first time since they were teenagers,” noted director Mark Mylod in the post-show feature) to prevent further action from Logan Roy.

After episode 9, creator Jeremy Strong said that some people might be see Kendell, Shiv, and Roman’s team up as growth. “I’m on the fence about human beings, and people certainly change what they do,” Strong went on, “but in my view, people’s essential selves do not change. In a way that’s what makes drama and choices interesting.”

Fans will find out the future of Kendell. Succession The fourth season was released by HBO. Strong’s immediate reaction to the profile scandal has led to some big names coming out in support of him. On Instagram, pal Anne Hathway also stood up for Strong’s choices as an actor, saying, “I deeply value his qualities of thoughtfulness, sincerity, authenticity, sweetness, depth, kindness, generosity, as well as his powerful intelligence and extraordinary sensitivity.” And Aaron Sorkin, via a letter posted to Twitter by Jessica Chastain, put it bluntly: “Jeremy’s not a nut.” Arguing that the profile “asks us to roll our eyes at his acting process,” Sorkin compares Strong to Dustin Hoffman, who comes up repeatedly in the profile — Schulman notes that Strong had a Rain Man A poster that Sorkin hung on his wall when he was a teenager. Ultimately, Sorkin says, “there isn’t a writer, producer, or director on Earth who wouldn’t grab at the chance to cast him.”

That’s probably true, if for no other reason than he’s the starring in one of television’s hottest shows. But if Strong’s process seems to be an inherently isolating one — one non-famous member of a production said Strong “was an annoying gnat”— than at least he has one thing that Kendall Roy has never had, even with all the money in the world: people who care about him.