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Exclusive: Jeremy Strong on Succession’s Brutal Finale and Kendall’s Ending

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.

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TV Correspondent

'Succession's Water Symbolism for Kendall Means More Than You Think

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'Outer Range' Deserved Another Season

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Editor's Note: The following contains spoilers for the series finale of Succession. Kendall Roy ( Jeremy Strong ), shellshocked and isolated, wanders Battery Park in New York City after being shut out of his supposed birthright by his own sister . Ever since his father Logan ( Brian Cox ) promised seven-year-old Kendall a leadership position in their family's multimedia conglomerate, Kendall has dedicated his soul to a singular task: filling his father's shoes. However, after being outplayed for the last time, Kendall has lost everything . His siblings have turned against him, he has distanced himself from his estranged wife and children, his one close friend is working for Kendall's usurper, and his final play to take control of Waystar Royco has crashed and burned. So, Kendall returns where he always does: the water.

The final shot of the series depicts Kendall as he stares into the Hudson River's churning waves feeling numb, isolated, and utterly broken. The significance of this shot hearkens back to a repeated language of water motifs associated with Kendall's character, and a closer look reveals the true depths of its meaning.

RELATED: You Didn't Really Think 'Succession' Would End Happily, Did You?

The Water Motif First Appears in Season 1 of 'Succession'

Traditionally, water is used as literary symbolism to represent concepts of rebirth, cleansing, and baptism. Succession , however, takes a different approach with Kendall Roy, using water as a means to reflect his current strength or weakness of spirit. For him, the water signifies his trauma, both generational and experienced firsthand, as well as representing the tumultuous landscape of his business world. In moments of weakness he drowns in the water as it threatens to engulf him entirely, however, in moments of strength, Kendall rises above the waves.

Kendall's first association with a strong water motif comes at the end of Succession's first season. After encouraging a young waiter to help him find drugs, Kendall swerves while driving under the influence and sends their car careening into a nearby lake, drowning the waiter. This foundational incident for Kendall fittingly takes place in a body of water, thus solidifying the motif's status as the crucible of Kendall's soul. In an almost anti-baptism, this event ties Kendall's fate inescapably back to his father Logan , dooming his plot to unseat Logan Roy as CEO.

After Logan discovers his wrongdoing, he sends Kendall to a rehab clinic in Iceland to settle his psychological distress. At the beginning of the second season, Kendall is soaking in a meditative pool, and though the episode takes place only 48 hours after the end of the first season, he is unceremoniously pulled from the water to give a statement at his father's request. As part of the clinic, this is a controlled space in which Kendall is able to safely engage with his pool of trauma, though notably his face is partially submerged. This event clues the audience in on Kendall's mental state and reminds viewers how little regard Logan Roy exhibits for the practical well-being of his children.

The Scenes of Kendall Drowning in the Pool Reflect the Motif

It's difficult to pick the lowest point for Kendall's emotional journey throughout the series, but the end of the third season would stand as a definite contender. Following a brutal corporate battle with his father and siblings in addition to a scathing dinner with Logan, Kendall is openly shunned by his family during his mother's wedding reception in Italy. In the pool at Kendall's villa, we see him from below the surface as he drinks several beers on an inflatable lilo. The bottle slips from his hand, and he lowers his head below the water, beginning to drown. Though appearing to be an incident of attempted suicide, Kendall denies this diagnosis of the event. What is clear, however, is that this is the closest Kendall has ever gotten to being consumed by his circumstances. Overwhelmed by the interpersonal rifts, trauma, and responsibility of his position, he is closest to drowning beneath them.

Water Is Present During Many of the Important Scenes in the Roys' Lives

Though the motif is most repeatedly aligned with Kendall, the curse of water is not unique to him. Bad things happen to the Roy family around bodies of water: Logan and Ewan were silently stranded for days while crossing the Atlantic during World War II, the Roy children learn about Logan's passing while on the open water during Connor's yacht wedding, and their family's corporate original sin involves a series of drownings covered up on their cruise division. By representing the collective baggage of the Roy family this way, it strengthens its significance when threatening to overwhelm Kendall. The writing provides the audience with a central question: Will Kendall drown in this vast ocean of hardship, or can he keep his head above water?

The water in Succession is used as a litmus test for Kendall's fluctuating capacity for adversity, therefore also signifying moments of personal triumph. Following Logan Roy's passing, Kendall steps up to give a monumental shareholder presentation and, despite the doubts of many around him, knocks it out of the park with Living+ . This is one of the shining moments in which Logan seems to breathe again through Kendall, and the Royco heir aptly celebrates his victory by taking a dip in the ocean. Though massive waves begin to buffet against him, Kendall keeps his head above water this time, looking almost at peace in the churning chaos threatening to swallow him whole.

Similarly, in the series finale, Shiv and Roman officially give Kendall their votes of support to crown him CEO while swimming in the ocean water, Kendall laying on a floating deck above them, seemingly conquering what threatens to drown him once and for all.

Until the End, Kendall's Biggest Moments Are Defined by Water

This then brings Kendall to both his final moment at the water and the final moment of the entire series as he approaches the bank of the Hudson River's vast expanse. It's a moment of contemplation, reflection, and broken understanding. Only by watching the waves does the truth become clear: it was always bigger than him. The trauma, the cycle of abuse, and the Machiavellian business world continue, and it does so with or without Kendall. He is now only an observer, removed from both his family and their company, represented by his physical separation from the river.

In an interview, Jeremy Strong revealed that he performed a take in which Kendall did rush to throw himself into the water . Though this would have been an incredibly tragic end to a deeply troubled character, looking through the lens of the water motif reveals a more significant meaning behind this desire. Does Kendall want to die, or does he also desperately want a part in the destiny he was promised? Maybe they're one and the same, but nevertheless, the waves beat on.

• TV Features
• Succession (2018)

Succession Season Two Recap: Who Is the Last Roy Standing?

Two years is a long time to have gone without the hit HBO show—get up to speed here.

Everyone’s favorite messy rich family is back. Succession ’s third season premieres on October 17 after a long two years—and creator Jesse Armstrong has a lot of explaining to do. We left the terrible billionaires on a yacht in the Mediterranean—well, most of them. Kendall was pawned off to combat scandal and act as the Roy’s sacrificial lamb, only to turn on his father in a shocking, live press conference.

Confused? We get it. It feels like an eternity has passed since we last saw the Roys and we’re here to catch you up. Below, refresh your memory on where we left each of the Succession characters before tuning in to season three.

Kendall Roy

The latter half of Succession ’s second season revolved around the now-public controversy in Waystar Royco’s cruise division, resulting in congressional hearings, tanking stock, and general chaos. After a few disastrous testimonies (thanks, Tom), Logan decided that the public needed a “blood sacrifice,” someone high up in the company who could take the fall, staving off frightened shareholders.

In the season finale, Logan decides that Kendall, his issue-riddled, hyper-ambitious son, will take the fall. This comes after a number of smaller incidents between the pair during the finale. Logan advises (i.e. forces) Kendall to send home Naomi Pierce, a woman with whom Kendall’s formed a bond over the past few episodes. There’s also a failed deal with Kendall’s friend Stewy, who notes that shareholders simply care about profit margins, and less about keeping the business in the family.

Kendall acquiesces to Logan’s plan, or seems to, with his father telling him that he’s “not a killer.” The prodigal son returns to New York for a press conference, where he is set to admit to wrongdoing, thus throwing himself under a bus (or cruise ship, if you will) to save his father and the family business. However, in a move that makes all the more sense in the context of Kendall’s prior treachery (season one’s vote of no confidence in Logan and the attempted takeover at Shiv’s wedding), he changes course.

Live on camera, as his family watches from their yacht, Kendall reveals his father’s involvement in the cruise scandal and goes on to condemn Logan in a number of ways. He calls the patriarch “a malignant presence, a bully and a liar.” “I think this is the day his reign ends,” Kendall says.

As Kendall spirals, Roman has been trying to earn his father’s trust, taking a more prominent role in the family business. He seems to have succeeded, saving himself from the cruise scandal chopping block. In episode nine, Roman was almost killed trying to take the company private with a source of independent wealth, which he attempted to secure in eastern Europe. He was held at gunpoint, but received a semblance of a deal. However, despite differing feelings from Logan’s advisors, Roman advocates against taking the money, noting that the deal seemed like too much trouble and too sketchy. As a reward, Logan offers Roman the COO position when Kendall is axed.

Meanwhile, Roman’s intriguing relationship with Gerri, Waystar’s general counsel, continues. He defends her from being sacrificed (“Haven’t we killed enough woman already?”) and the pair continue their sexually explicit (though lacking in touch) trysts. A poster for season three certainly fueled speculation about the continuation of this arrangement.

Shiv is clearly her father’s favorite, though continues to say the wrong thing at the wrong time. She began season two with an offer to succeed her father as CEO, a proposition she lost after advocating for a “dinosaur cull” at the company. Logan fluctuates between feeling proud of his daughter and being, well, sexist. It’s uncertain whether Shiv has done enough (leaving her job in politics, witness intimidation in a congressional trial) to place herself back in the running, but she’s certainly trying. She even offers up her husband, Tom, as the “blood sacrifice,” much to his dismay.

In terms of Tom, the season ends with Shiv’s marriage on the rocks. Tom is finally able to confront his wife about their “arrangement” for an open marriage, which she proposed on their wedding night. As the pair get some alone time in a cove, Tom tells Shiv, “I wonder, if the sad I’d be without you would be less than the sad I’d be being with you.”

Arguably, the Roy child the most off his rocker, Connor continues to act as comic relief. He’s hemorrhaging money from his paid escort-turned girlfriend Willa’s Broadway show and attempts to run for president in a distinctly Trumpy manner. Connor needs money and asks Logan for a loan—just, you know, $100 million. Logan concedes, provided that Connor abandons his presidential ambitions.

Cousin Greg

Greg Hirsch (aka Cousin Greg aka Greg the Egg) spent season two strategizing which side in the family war he should take. All the while, he gives up his own inheritance, fully buying into his future in Waystar. Greg was also involved in the cruise ship scandal early on, as Tom ordered him to destroy documents detailing the events. For his own security, Greg kept a few crucial pages, which he parlayed into Roy family capital on various occasions. However, Greg also becomes embroiled in the scandal, testifying (hilariously) before Congress; Roman also nominates him to take some of the blame (did someone say “Greg sprinkles?”).

Though he doesn’t end up getting axed, Greg sides with Kendall, giving him access to the incriminating documents. It is these papers that give Kendall the ammunition he needs to take the shot at his father. Kendall drives away from the presser, Greg in tow.

Of course, there’s still Logan. And, if two seasons of Succession have taught us anything, it’s that he is not to be underestimated. However, after helicoptering onto the yacht to run his version of Survivor , Logan can't make the decision on his own and asks his family and advisors to make the hard choice for him. Of course, his own suggestion to step down is purely performative. When he eventually picks Kendall (mind you, at Shiv’s suggestion), it’s all just seems a tad too easy.

Logan’s relationship is also strained. After he names Rhea (with whom he had an affair) successor to the CEO seat, Logan’s marriage with his third wife, Marcia, fractures. Even after the deal with Rhea explodes, Marcia is nowhere to be found and Logan sleeps alone in the finale.

Season two ended with Logan and the rest of the Roys watching Kendall’s press conference. As Kendall betrays him, Logan watches the scene unfold, wearing a slight smile that just, almost, looks a little like pride.

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Kendall Roy

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Kendall Logan Roy is the main protagonist of the series as the heir-apparent, second-eldest son of Logan Roy . He is portrayed by Jeremy Strong .

• 1 Personality
• 2.1 Early life
• 2.2 Season 1
• 2.3 Season 2
• 3.1 Rava Roy and children
• 3.2 Logan Roy
• 3.3 Siblings
• 3.4 Naomi Pierce
• 3.5 Stewy Hosseini
• 6 Appearances
• 8 References

Personality [ ]

Kendall Roy has spent his life priming to be his father's heir; however, he's yet to convince Logan of his worth. Despite his assertiveness and outward confidence, Kendall is anxious and riddled with doubt at his core, often abusing substances and engaging in erratic behavior for comfort. He juggles resentment towards his father with hopes to adopt his ruthlessness, manifesting in his many attempts to overthrow him. Due to his addiction, he's recently become estranged from his wife and children.

Kendall is notably quite boyish, with his love for hip-hop music, distinct sense of style, and frequent use of dated lingo. He seemingly enjoys flaunting his wealth, donning expensive jewelry and riding around on motorcycles, as well as hosting grandiose parties.

History [ ]

Early life [ ].

Kendall is the first born of Logan's second marriage, Roman and Shiv being his younger siblings and Connor his older half-brother. His mother is Caroline Collingwood .

Kendall went to the Buckley School and Harvard University alongside his friend Stewy , where they partied and did cocaine together. [2] [3] He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree and a MSc in Business Administration from Harvard. [4] Kendall says that he was on the Harvard Lampoon business staff. [5] He also spent time in Shanghai learning the fundamentals of business with Nate Sofrelli .

At some point, he married Rava Roy , but has since separated from him due to his drug problems and his lack of good parenting to their two children: Sophie and Iverson . Kendall spent time in rehab, which Logan refers to as the "nuthouse", prior to the events of the show. [6]

In the series finale , Kendall reveals that at 7 years old, Logan told him that he would one day be CEO. Although Kendall admits that it was wrong of Logan to tell a child, it's shaped the way he's felt about the position all his life, and he believes that he is truly the only one fit for it.

Season 1 [ ]

Kendall arrives early at Waystar Royco to finalize the deal with Lawrence Yee , although upon arriving, Lawrence refuses to sign the papers. Kendall runs after him, hoping he'll reconsider, but Lawrence stands firm in his distaste for Waystar. Kendall, however, remains unconvinced and decides to increase the offer. His father, Logan, confirms that Kendall is still set to be announced as his successor later that night.

Logan arrives to have Kendall sign some last-minute "housekeeping", which Kendall signs without having read.

Kendall arrives at Logan's 80th birthday party and speaks to his wife Rava, who previously left him due to his substance abuse issues. He persistently attempts to reconcile with her, but she politely declines.

Logan calls for a meeting with his children and presents them with the same papers from earlier, stating that if they sign, Marcia will be entrusted with the company in the event of his death. He also announces he will not be stepping down from his position of CEO. Logan allows the other children time to consider it, while Kendall is upset with his father for lying to him. Fights break out between the siblings, but Marcia calls them to dinner and quiet ensues. Kendall then privately confronts his father, but Logan stands his ground and admits that he doesn't believe Kendall is ready for the position. Kendall then goes to the bathroom and breaks down, even breaking things before quickly trying to fix them.

While at the family's traditional game of softball, Kendall proposes to Shiv and Roman that he become CEO and the two of them be appointed to co-COO, but they immediately decline. Kendall, upset, leaves the game and has one of his connections spread word of Logan's decline in health.

Kendall meets with Lawrence once again, and the two seemingly come to an agreement. [6]

Kendall arrives at the hospital in a panic to see his father , having received the news of his stroke from Lawrence. The Roy children question the medical staff and Kendall demands as many answers as possible, aggravating Shiv. They're then escorted out of the ICU and brought to a waiting area.

Kendall asks Roman what triggered the stroke when Roman blames Shiv's hardball tactics. Everyone at Waystar is already preparing for Logan's death, even drafting an obituary at ATN, and the boys are in charge of damage control. Gerri and Karl arrive and pull Kendall aside to inform him that he will be CEO in Logan's absence, and that Roman had just been promoted to COO. Kendall informs Shiv and Roman that he will be taking over, but Shiv shuts down the conversation entirely. Kendall then calls Lawrence and angers him, which causes Lawrence to run negative press about the family. Frank declines coming back as COO per Kendall's request, and Gerri declines stepping up as CEO per Shiv and Roman's request.

Now four in the morning, Rava arrives at the hospital. He confides in her about all that's happened and she comforts him. Kendall gets an erection while Rava hugs him, then apologizes and claims he is just happy to see her.

Kendall and Roman come to an agreement of CEO and COO respectively, leaving Shiv out. This decision is confirmed.

Gerri then takes Kendall to the roof and reveals that the company is $3 billion in debt. She tells him that in 1985, Logan took out a loan for their expansion into parks. The company had already been in considerable debt prior to the loan. She explains that the debt is secured against Waystar's stock, and once the stock hits 130, the bank can pursue repayment in full. If the bank decided to do this, it would eviscerate the company. Gerri jokingly tells Kendall to not jump off the building. [7]

Gerri informs Kendall that the company's stock is plunging to dangerous lows. Kendall calls his wife Rava, but she is busy with their children and doesn't want to engage. She reminds him that he has parental responsibilities as well. Kendall then calls the bank but cannot control his temper while speaking to the manager, causing the bank to decline further negotiating. Roman and Gerri are both displeased with Kendall. Kendall meets with Lawrence and other division heads to discuss the stock situation.

Kendall meets privately with competitor Sandy Furness , who wishes him good luck and offers any advice if needed. He then goes to visit Logan, but Marcia turns him away, having done the same to Shiv earlier.

Later, Kendall contacts his old friend Stewy , who agrees to a minority stake in the company with voting stock in return. The Roy family would maintain control, and Stewy would also have a board seat, and in return keep word of the debt out of the news. Unfortunately for Kendall, the company still falls below 130 points. However, with this new deal, Waystar doesn't free-fall as forcefully.

Kendall has dinner with Rava and the two go back to his apartment. They have sex, but Rava's stance on their marriage has not changed. The next morning, Rava informs Kendall that she is already in touch with a divorce lawyer. Marcia then calls Kendall and tells him that Logan wishes to see him. When Kendall arrives, Logan is out of bed and watching the news. Kendall informs him of the stock situation, but that he's come up with a solution. Logan, unimpressed, insults his son by calling him an idiot. Kendall then leaves the room, hurt. [2]

Kendall then arrives back in New York and calls Rava, who declines his invitation to the annual foundation gala. Jess , Kendall's assistant, greets him with coffee and informs him that his father waits for him in his office. Logan confronts him about selling part of Waystar, but Kendall stands his ground, arguing the debt caused by his father.

Kendall reveals that he'd like to attend the gala with ATN broadcast personality, Anna. Logan is made aware that Kendall will be announcing Logan's retirement at the gala, which upsets him even further. Logan then wanders into Kendall's office and urinates on the floor. At the gala, Connor informs Kendall that Logan will be speaking instead, and in a panic Kendall consults with Gerri . Kendall is worried Logan may make a fool of himself, but Gerri insists that he'll do fine.

Kendall accuses his date of being cold and distant, when she informs that that she only agreed to accompany him in order to keep her job, to which he apologizes and allows her to leave. Everyone heads home, Kendall being alone. [5]

Frank calls Kendall, who grabs Roman , into their father's office. Logan has been discussing acquiring local TV stations with Karl and Gerri , but the boys are avidly against the idea of "local news." Later, Roman is exercising with his private trainer when he informs Kendall of the coffee incident. Roman suggests that, with Thanksgiving come up, they do their "family tradition" of destroying Logan. Kendall begins plotting a vote of no confidence against Logan. Later at dinner, Kendall informs Logan's brother Ewan of the vote. Kendall is shocked to hear that Ewan, despite their tumultuous relationship, will still back his brother on the matter.

Marcia later suggests that the family play a memory game called "I Went to Market". During Logan's turn, he goes blank and cannot remember what to say. Logan tries once more, but Iverson, Kendall's son, insists that Logan has lost and his turn is over, while trying to pry the can of cranberry sauce out of Logan's hands. Logan becomes enraged. Whether accidental or not, Logan hits Iverson in the face with the cranberry sauce to the horror of his parents and the dinner party as a whole. Kendall immediately snaps and screams at Logan, while still trying to comfort his son.

Later, Kendall is out on the balcony when Gerri approaches him. She assures him that if he truly plans on moving against his father, she will not assist him in doing so. [8]

With the vote of no confidence against their father approaching, Kendall and Roman must ensure that everything is set for them to win the vote. Roman attempts to sway a neutral board member, Lawrence .

Per the request of Marcia , Kendall and his father have dinner before the night of the big vote, and the two eat burgers while watching TV. The next morning, Kendall flies out to Long Island to meet with board-member Ilona Shinoy. He secures her vote, but is unable to return back to the city due to being on lockdown and in a no-fly zone. Kendall desperately tries to make it back in time for the vote via car, but is stuck in traffic with no cell service. He eventually gets out of the car and begins running towards Waystar .

As Kendall rushes to the building, Frank calls the board meeting and asks Logan to leave the room. Frank attempts to stall the vote until Kendall can arrive. Logan refuses to leave the room, and instead berates numerous board members, including Roman, into voting in his favor. Lawrence and Stewy abstain from the vote, while Ewan sides with his brother. Frank and several others vote in favor of Kendall, but the majority goes to Logan. Kendall finally arrives at the boardroom but Logan immediately fires him, along with everyone else who voted against him, including Frank. Kendall is then escorted out of the building by security, not even being allowed time to gather his things. [9]

Kendall has cut off communication with his family and plans to sue his father, as well as his brother Roman , following his expulsion from Waystar . Over the phone, Rava confronts him about his alleged relapse and Kendall insists that is sober, despite what the tabloids say.

Kendall is invited to a weekend-long family therapy session at Austerlitz, Connor 's ranch in New Mexico, but initially refuses to attend. He later arrives in New Mexico, but first meets some locals at a pub, drinks, and joins them for a cocaine and methamphetamine binge. Kendall is then picked up by a concerned Roman who takes him to the ranch, where they find their family in a heated argument. Kendall, still intoxicated, begins picking fights and insults Willa , who then leaves and is followed by Connor. Kendall and Logan nearly have a physical altercation after Logan admits to planting the stories about his son's drug use, but Marcia separates them. [3]

Kendall and Frank meet two young artists, once of which, Angela, has an idea for a new app that would find and promote small artists to people with larger pockets. Though they are in it for their love of art and helping people, Kendall is clearly in to make money.

He then arrives to Tom's underground bachelor party late and on drugs. Kendall is informed by Frank that Angela has decided to work with someone else, which angers Kendall. He spots her at the same party and decide\s to confront her. Angela then insults Kendall, and admits that due to his family name and ruthless ego, they were never going to agree to sign with him. Kendall attempts to explain himself but Angela angrily rebuffs him. Greg, keeping close watch, finds Kendall about to snort four more lines of cocaine. Kendall taunts Greg that he may overdose, and Greg feels pressured to snort the last two lines. Never having done cocaine before, he becomes paranoid and thinks he may die. Kendall runs into his old buddy Stewy and they begin talking about business. Stewy mentions his boss Sandy Furness , who is willing to buy Kendall's portion of the company for $250 million; Kendall is interested but only if he can meet with Sandy personally.

The next morning, Kendall calls Fred to spread word on the artists who dropped him, claiming that they are "sluts" who "shoot capital into their veins." He then meets up with Sandy and Stewy to work on the takeover. [10]

Kendall meets with Stewy inside an old English pub to finalize their discussions about overthrowing Waystar .

While at Tom and Shiv's wedding, Kendall runs into Rava . She politely offers an ear if he ever needs one, but also encourages him to nudge his lawyers along about the divorce. Kendall, who had just snorted some coke in the bathroom, becomes irate. Before he can berate her further, Rava leaves. Kendall then becomes paranoid that Frank and Gerri are gossiping about him, although they were only having an innocent conversation. Kendall quickly excuses himself.

Kendall is informed by Stewy and Sandy that the hostile takeover will now take place tomorrow during the wedding, as it's the perfect time with Logan away. Kendall begs them to reconsider, claiming they don't have enough time to prepare. Though unsaid, he likely doesn't want to ruin his sister's wedding. [11]

At the wedding, Kendall has quarantined himself away with Stewy and his assistant, Jess . The three are printing the final documents regarding the takeover. Unfortunately, Jess isn't sure where they were sent, and everyone quickly starts looking for them. Stewy and Kendall then do some coke.

Stewy insists that Kendall inform his father of the takeover, to which he reluctantly agrees. Logan asks if this is a bear hug , which Kendall confirms. Furious, Logan kicks him out. Logan then subtly migrates all his children into one room after having informed them of Kendall's plan to take over. All three siblings are angry with their brother, and after a couple of minutes, Logan walks in. He confirms that everything is true, then informs them of his battle plan.

After being berated by his siblings, Kendall rejoins his friend Stewy. He asks for more cocaine but Stewy declines as they'll be speaking publicly in two hours. Kendall persists, but this time Stewy says he ran out. Kendall, however, knows he's lying.

Kendall rugs into Greg while both are having a smoke. Greg says he is proud of Kendall and wishes him good luck. He then asks him if he has anything like cocaine on him, but Greg says he doesn't. Greg confesses that Tom had him destroy evidence regarding the cruise line mishaps, but he kept copies of all the major important documents. In return for them, Greg only asks for a better position at work. Kendall agrees.

Kendall runs into Andrew Dodds , the caterer his father fired earlier, outside. They talk about his being fired while sharing a joint, Ken then asking for some "powder." The two then go to a car, where Andrew snorts a line of ketamine. Kendall asks for cocaine instead but Andrew doesn't have any. He claims he knows a guy who does not far away and can take him there, but is too high to drive. Kendall decides to drive. On the drive, Kendall talks about his family's riches and the kid jokes that he should kidnap him. Kendall is distracted trying to work with the stick-shift when Andrew sees a deer ahead of them. He grabs for the wheel, causing the car to swerve and go off the side of the bridge, into a pond. The car immediately sinks but Kendall is able to make it out. He makes multiple attempts to save the kid before giving up. Stunned, he begins walking and once back to his room, realizes he has lost his key and breaks in. He showers off and changes clothes, then returns to the party as if nothing's happened. He makes sure to greet and speak with everyone individually.

The next morning at breakfast, Kendall is called into his father's library to speak about the accident. Kendall pretends to be ignorant regarding the situation, only having just been informed by Greg. Logan reveals that they found Kendall's key card near the site of the accident. Marcia and Logan suggest that maybe the waiter broke into Kendall's room and took the card and he plays along, not saying much and seemingly a bit nervous. Logan then asks for the others to leave, so he can be with Kendall privately. Logan reveals that he knows the truth and Kendall begins to cry, and Logan insists that Kendall drop out of his previous plan and go to rehab. They both know that if anything were to come out, Kendall's career and life would be destroyed. Logan then promises to have everything covered up. Kendall cries in his father's arms, but obliges. [12]

Season 2 [ ]

Just after Tom and Shiv 's wedding, Kendall goes to a rehab facility in Iceland to cope with recent events and stress. Kendall is then whisked away and told that he must return to New York and appear on television for an interview. Kendall is being asked to revoke the claims made against his father and suspend the takeover attempt. Karolina prepares him for the appearance, giving him the go-to line: "I saw their plan, but my father's were better."

Kendall then sits down with his father and Karl . Logan wishes to know what information the rival team has and how they plan to use it. Karl excuses himself from the room, allowing them more privacy. Kendall admits that he told Stewy and Sandy of his father's medications and more personal incidences, such as his father peeing on the floor and over-pouring his coffee. Logan excuses his son and tells him he has an office ready for him. Kendall then asks for Jess 's whereabouts, being that she usually acquires his drugs for him.

Greg arrives at Kendall's apartment to supply him with some cocaine. Kendall's upset to learn that Greg, instead of Ken's normal dealer, purchased the drug from a stranger in the park.

Logan leaves with Kendall to go from the Hamptons back to New York. They have a meeting with Stewy and Sandy , but Logan abandons the meeting and leaves Kendall in charge. Kendall asks if there's any way the two sides could come together, but they decline. Kendall tells them that his father will bury them and ruin their lives if they do not go through with their plans. [13]

Kendall informs Lawrence that he, alongside his brother, must perform a routine check of Vaulter for their father. In attempt to halt his investigation, Lawrence gives Kendall an overwhelming amount of company material to work through. Kendall and Roman attend a meeting with their father, regarding the results of their routine check of Vaulter. Kendall claims that Vaulter shows potential and he believes they should keep it. Roman, however, offers a contrasting opinion. He cites his discovery of systemic low-productivity, in addition to efforts underway by the workforce to unionize; an action that, in his opinion, would only reinforce the existing negative behaviors exhibited by the employees. Ultimately, Logan commits to Roman’s suggestion, and moves forward with his decision to dissolve Vaulter. Kendall is tasked with shutting it down, and reluctantly complies.

The next morning, Kendall meets with Lawrence and attempts to convince him not to unionize, arguing that it would save his company, although Lawrence denies and Kendall is unsuccessful.

Greg searches for a new apartment and realizes that he will likely be living in a compact studio. He is then invited to an apartment recently purchased by Kendall. He casually informs Greg that the apartment could be his temporarily, under the condition that Greg must host a party there that night. Greg obliges, although the party swiftly escalates. Kendall becomes heavily intoxicated and Greg is unable to sleep due to his bedroom being occupied by Kendall's acquaintances.

Kendall then hires a team to secretly install Wi-Fi blockers at Vaulter. The next morning, he arrives to inform everyone that they have been terminated and the building must be vacant in 15 minutes. Lawrence demands to know why, but Kendall’s response is simply "because my dad told me to." Logan is satisfied with him and involves him in the proxy war, irritating Roman. Later, Kendall makes a quick stop at a bodega, stealing a pack of batteries on his way out, only to immediately toss them in the garbage can outside. [14]

Greg and Kendall meet and Greg appears to give him cocaine, per Kendall's orders. Karolina informs Logan that Michelle Pantsil has a source from his inner circle. Logan first accuses Kendall, who quickly denies it. Kendall and Roman later discuss the book agreement. Kendall confides that he got a call from Pantsil as well, and considered talking. [15]

Kendall arrives early to Waystar and heads up to the roof, seeing that part of the building is under construction. He calls Rhea Jarrell , having gotten her number from mutual family-friend Frank, to introduce himself before their upcoming meeting.

Gerri then admits that Kendall has been shoplifting, and they are running damage control. Kendall enters the room, and Shiv acts differently around her brother. Trying to ignore her, Kendall makes his way down to the parking lot with Jess where they meet Rhea in private. She comments on the protesters out front, before they make their way upstairs to have a private meeting with just the two of them and Logan. She informs them that the Pierce Family is not interested in selling their company to him.

After wandering the building and property, Kendall is eventually ushered into the private safe room with his father and Shiv. Rhea exclaims that she is finding it increasingly difficult to explain why she has to keep canceling appointments and meetings. Ken, Rhea, and Logan then delve into the real reason why PMG won't sell their company. Kendall begins to sweeten the deal with more money before an unofficial deal is made and confirmed.

The next morning Kendall again finds himself standing on the balcony, as he had during the shooting. Only this time there is glass, 10 feet high, stopping any potential employees from jumping, but especially Kendall. [16]

Kendall and Naomi are sitting close to each other and are mildly flirting, after having briefly touched on their shared drug problems. While everyone else is stargazing, Kendall and Naomi sneak off to do some illegal drugs. They then take some alcohol and hop inside one of the family helicopters. Kendall is playing with some buttons and accidentally starts the helicopter, but quickly turns it off. After a bit more discussion, the two make out. The next morning, Kendall wakes up naked and alone, seemingly having defecated the bed. [17]

Logan demands more, better information about the Pierce family settlement. Kendall agrees to go in and scold them.

They are interrupted as Colin ushers Logan, Gerri , and Kendall into another room. They are informed that a magazine has been tipped off about the cruise-line scandal and plans to publish an exposé within 36 to 48 hours. They get on a conference call with Shiv and begin discussing a course of action. Kendall suggests they go at them hard and fast, threatening legal action. Shiv thinks they should opt for a much less aggressive approach and cooperate with the magazine instead. Logan decides to go with Kendall's idea, and the two agree that all contracts with the Pierce family contracts must be wrapped up soon, rather than later.

Kendall makes a quick visit with his old friend Stewy and tells him to distance himself from Waystar Royco , as something "big" will soon happen.

Nan and Rhea finally arrive and have breakfast with Logan and Kendall. They subtly try to rush the agreement by informing the ladies of papers to be signed in the other room, but Nan persistently pushes it off. Unfortunately, Kendall finds out the story has broken, and the two quickly make their exits to do re-con. The family then debates who will be on the panel regarding the allegations and ultimately decide on Kendall and Roman, Shiv later joining.

Kendall bumps into Stewy, who has some rude words for Kendall.

Later while on stage, Shiv and Kendall dominating the conversation, while Logan and Marcia watch in the audience. Shiv acknowledges that while the allegations should be taken seriously, they also happened a lot time ago. Kendall states that the accusations are horrible and they will be dealing with them swiftly. Shiv then makes a joke about the company having "dinosaur" attitudes and values. After the conference, everyone begins fighting. Shiv is being cornered for her dinosaur comment, everyone agreeing that she was over the line. Roman makes another smart-aleck comment only to be struck in the face by his dad, knocking out a tooth. Kendall immediately stands up for his brother, yelling at his father to never do that again. Roman brushes it off by saying "it's just a tooth." [18]

Kendall sneaks away to the bathroom to talk to Naomi Pierce on the phone. She suggests he send her a dick-pic, to which he awkwardly complies.

Logan and Kendall arrive at the Dodds family home. They are greeted by a single photographer, as well as Andrew's uncle, while his parents wait inside. Logan insists Kendall come in the house with him but allows him to wait outside the room. Logan wraps up matters with the family, apologizing that his political rivals have dragged their son's name through the mud. They confirmed he was always an addict drug user and say they don't place any blame on Logan himself. Logan and Kendal then leave together in silence. Later that night, Kendall returns to drop cash into the mail-slot.

Kendall arrives at his mother's place and confirms that she'll be seeing them again for Christmas. Kendall attempts to open up to his mother about his situation, telling here there's a heavy topic weighing on him. She asks if they can discuss it in the morning over breakfast, and he agrees although a bit disappointed. The next morning, Caroline had woken up even earlier than Kendall and left a note, apologizing she had to leave to run errands. Both her sons are left alone in the house. [19]

Everyone is gathered in upper East New York to watch the opening night of Willa's half-baked play, where Kendall seduces the lead actress, Jennifer. The family has gathered in Dundee, Scotland to celebrate Logan's 50th anniversary. Kendall has Jennifer flown out to Dundee despite Connor's protests, as Willa needs her for her play.

While on a tour of Logan's print building, Kendall tells Rhea that he's just along for the ride rather than genuinely working against her. She tells him she believes when things are over, Logan will give Kendall the company.

Kendall is showing off some artwork to Jennifer, who confronts him that he talks about his father a lot. Ken laughs it off and decides to introduce her to his father. Kendall then takes stage for his speech, yet surprises everyone with a rap, revealing a jersey underneath his dress jacket, arousing enthusiasm from the crowd. Kendall then meets with Jennifer outside of the party, and sends her away for using the word 'awesome' too much while speaking to his father. [20]

Kendall arrives on the family's yacht with Greg and girlfriend Naomi Pierce. Logan later asks Kendall to make Naomi leave, claiming that she enables his drug abuse. Naomi is disappointed that Kendall won't leave with her, but complies.

At breakfast the next morning, Logan is taking suggestions for who should be sacrificed following the cruise-line scandals. Several people, including Shiv, agree that Tom is the most viable option, although Kendall adds that he might not be "big enough". Logan then leaves to reflect, before he and Kendall travel to a Greek island in attempt to enlist financial aid from Stewy , who denies them.

After learning that her marriage is in jeopardy, Shiv goes to speak with her father. She does not initially reveal her intentions of speaking to him, but soon begins begging him not to get rid of Tom. Shiv is then asked to choose between her husband and her brother Kendall, and although pained by it, motions for Kendall to speak with their father. Logan informs Kendall that he will be the blood sacrifice. Kendall suggests that he deserves punishment for what happened to Andrew Dodds , which Logan dismisses as a case of "No Real Person Involved", but not this. Kendall, disappointed, asks if he was ever considered for the position of CEO. Logan admits that he wasn't, saying "You're not a killer. You have to be a killer." Kendall kisses Logan on the cheek and the two leave to inform the others of the decision.

The next morning, Kendall and Greg leave for a press conference back in New York, Jess and Karolina joining them upon arrival. Logan watches the conference from the yacht, with Shiv by his side. Kendall, in front of the press, begins to explain his role as scapegoat, but suddenly deviates and begins blaming Logan. He states that his father is a "malignant presence, a bully, and a liar" and has been aware of the events for many years but made efforts to cover them up. Additionally, he informs the reporters that he has brought documents proving his father's guilt, which Greg seemingly has on hand. The speech shocks the reporters, Karolina, and the rest of the Roy family except for Logan, who bears a faint smile. [21]

Relationships [ ]

Rava roy and children [ ].

Kendall, Rava, Sophie, and Iverson dancing ( credit )

Kendall and Rava were previously married and have two children, Sophie and Iverson [n 1] ; however, sometime before the events of the series begin, Rava and the children become estranged from Kendall due to his substance abuse issues. In the beginning, it is clear that Kendall still loves Rava and wishes to repair their broken relationship, though Rava expresses no interest beyond sexual hookups. Eventually, the two of them begin seeing other people while attempting to co-parent their children. Kendall is a relatively absent father but makes several attempts at speaking to or seeing them, often failing or being denied by Rava. He instead shows his affection through grand, rather indirect gestures. In the midst of his fight for the position of CEO, Kendall claims that his children are the "reason" for everything that he does.

Logan Roy [ ]

Siblings [ ], naomi pierce [ ].

Kendall and Naomi , the cousin of Nan Pierce and a board member of PGM , begin a romance in the midst of the Waystar-PGM deal. Initially, the two bonded over their shared family troubles and substance abuse issues. Logan detested this relationship, not only because Kendall was "sleeping with the enemy" but because he believed Naomi enabled his addiction; Naomi, however, insists that Logan is only prohibiting him from being happy. Kendall nonetheless finds a friend in Naomi, looking to her in times of stress, both in his personal life and career. When the Roy siblings decide to pursue a deal with PGM without their father, this relationship, though now broken, proves to be beneficial.

Stewy Hosseini [ ]

Kendall and Stewy sharing a hug ( credit )

Kendall and Stewy —a private-equity investor and business partner of Sandy Furness , enemy of Waystar Royco—have been close friends since they both attended the Buckley School, a California prep school. They also attended and roomed together at Harvard University, where they partied and did cocaine. They seemingly had a falling out before the events of the series begin, though Stewy quickly agrees to place their odds aside and assist Kendall in betraying his father. Kendall often looks to Stewy for drugs and comfort, while Stewy often chooses money and business opportunities over their friendship; nonetheless, Stewy proves to be one of the few people who truly supports Kendall on his road to CEO.

• Jeremy Strong has stated that he used the famous Michael Corleone from The Godfather as inspiration when building Kendall's character. [22] Strong has also said that, in regards to Kendall, "To me, the stakes are life and death, I take him as seriously as I take my own life." [23]

Gallery [ ]

Appearances [ ]

• ↑ Sophie is seemingly adopted, while it is implied that Iverson is not Kendall's biological child and is instead "half Rava, half some filing cabinet guy."

References [ ]

• ↑ See this image
• ↑ 2.0 2.1 Lifeboats
• ↑ 3.0 3.1 Austerlitz
• ↑ 5.0 5.1 Sad Sack Wasp Trap
• ↑ 6.0 6.1 Celebration
• ↑ Sh*t Show at the F**k Factory
• ↑ I Went to Market
• ↑ Which Side Are You On?
• ↑ Pre-Nuptial
• ↑ Nobody Is Ever Missing
• ↑ The Summer Palace
• ↑ Vaulter (episode)
• ↑ Safe Room
• ↑ Tern Haven
• ↑ This Is Not for Tears
• ↑ ‘Succession’ Finale: Jeremy Strong on Kendall’s Struggles and What Comes Next (nytimes.com, archived by web.archive.org)
• ↑ On “Succession,” Jeremy Strong Doesn’t Get the Joke (thenewyorker.com)
• 1 Logan Roy
• 2 Kendall Roy
• 3 Siobhan Roy

The Succession Series Finale Brought Kendall's Enduring Motif Full Circle

This post contains spoilers for the series finale of "Succession."

It was always going to end with water. The story of Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong) began as a tragedy five years ago, and ended as a tragedy tonight. Kendall has been the raw nerve of "Succession" practically since its beginning, but his true woes began in the show's season 1 finale, when, on a drug-and-drink fueled bender, he and a waiter crashed a car into a lake during Shiv's wedding. Kendall walked away, but the waiter didn't , and it feels like that water left a dark stain on Kendall's soul that never really went away. If the poison drips through, the water does, too.

Water has come up again and again in Kendall's storylines, and it's often felt dangerous. The motif has recurred enough that when he finally took a triumphant swim earlier this season after nailing the Living+ presentation , a snippet of the scene in the show's trailer left fans worried it would mark his demise. There's plenty of historical and literary precedent for water as a bad omen, especially when it comes to the works of William Shakespeare. From the story of Ophelia dying by suicide by drowning after the death of her father in "Hamlet," to the water that won't wash murderous hands clean in "Macbeth," the author whose works "Succession" regularly calls to mind has a knack for using water as a symbol — and often a grim one.

Kendall takes a swim

The use of water in Kendall's plotline has never felt incidental. In the episode after the waiter's death, we see him submerged in water at the rehab center where his stay is cruelly cut short at his dad's insistence. Water can be, after all, a symbol of rebirth, but in this case, it's a baptism that doesn't have time to take. By season's end, he's swimming on the yacht where his father decides to pin the company's failings on him; in one shot we see him floating in a crucifiction pose in a pool a few feet from the ocean — on the verge of drowning, symbolically, twice over. Then, of course, there's his suicide attempt from season 3, when we see him half-submerged on a pool floatie during one of the lowest points of his life.

Dark poeticism aside, "Succession" has brought this theme up enough times that even casual fans know the deal: if we see Kendall near water, we should be nervous. That made the series finale's detour to Barbados ominous, especially when the Roy siblings — in the midst of a day-long fight about what to do with the company — head down to the ocean's edge. The water is dark and roiling, so much so that Roman (Kieran Culkin) looks like a cat being forced into a bath as he stalks along the beach. Kendall, though, has no reservations: he jumps in, and while Roman and Shiv (Sarah Snook) debate on shore, we lose sight of him for a while.

A tension-soaked finale

If this were the first or second time we'd seen Kendall in water, it would feel like a typical scene in which three siblings go swimming. Yet after two near-death experiences, the scene feels like one last tension-filled fake-out. When Shiv and Roman speak, I found myself begging for the camera to return to Kendall, to show us that he's okay and hasn't been swept away by an undercurrent — or by the sudden urge to drown himself. When we see him emerge on a floating dock and lay there, relaxed, the tension breaks. When Shiv and Roman joke about murdering him, then float over to share their proclamation ("We anoint you!"), it's suddenly clear: this time, water isn't death, but rebirth.

Any other show would've stopped there, but "Succession" is among the most nimbly written, expertly crafted highwire acts on television, and to keep its symbolism simple at this point would go against the unrelenting narrative complexity it's built up for four seasons. The rollicking waves, then, make one last appearance, after the Gojo deal goes through. Again, we lose sight of Kendall, but this time his absence feels more dire. We see him push a button in an elevator, and when he doesn't reappear, the darkest part of me half-expected to see his body falling in the background of all those full-wall boardroom windows.

Of course, it ends with water

Kendall isn't dead, it turns out, but he's still drawn to death. During that last, family-breaking fight with his siblings, he says that the death of the waiter didn't really happen. No Real Person Involved, as Logan would say. He also reveals the truth we've always understood thanks to Strong's phenomenal performance — that if Kendall doesn't get the CEO job, he might actually die. The series finale's quietly painful last scene bears that out, as Kendall finds himself wandering towards the water once more — and looking at the waves of the Hudson River with something like longing in his eyes. This time, though, he has a security guard in tow, and as he sits on a bench, he's the spitting image of his father.

This scene is awash in death. There's the death of the waiter, a moment that no denial can take away, and one that surely bubbles up in Kendall's mind as he sits with the fact that he has nothing left to lose. There's the death of Kendall himself, the foreshadowed yet never-realized truth of the motif that's followed him for years. The death of Logan has loomed large over much of the final season, but the last nail in his coffin seems to settle in this scene, as Kendall comes to grips with the fact that the company his dad built is about to be scrapped for parts. Waystar Royco is dead now too, and its king with it — in spirit if not reality.

Kendall sits quietly as the end credits roll. The water rages on, but by now, it feels like something more than death. It's powerful, all-consuming, and dangerously indifferent, just like the Roys at their worst.

If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline​ by dialing 988 or by calling 1-800-273-TALK (8255)​.

Succession S4 Episode 6: Kendall's Beach Scene Holds A Deeper Meaning

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Succession Season 4, Episode 6 — "Living+."

Part of what makes HBO's "Succession" such a unique and refreshing appointment viewing experience week-to-week is how little it relies on twists, hidden details, or even plot. Rather, the series draws its audience in with an attention to character and relationships, having spent three and half seasons crafting them so carefully that it can mine unmatchably engaging dramatic tension just by placing any two of its characters in a confined space — or by giving just one of them enough privacy to reveal who they truly are.

Case in point, the most impactful moment this week was arguably not the digital resurrection (or subsequent corruption) of Waystar Royco founder Logan Roy ( Brian Cox ), Karl's (David Rasche) surprising show of force, or even Roman's ( Kieran Culkin ) unceremonious firing of his general counsel and ex-lover, Gerri (J. Smith Cameron).

No, what is really sure to provoke "Succession" fans after tonight's episode — either by virtue of its subtle richness or merely its placement as the final image — is Kendall's (Jeremy Strong) haunting swim in the ocean. While its meaning is somewhat up to individual interpretation, looking to the series' past can shed more light on the scene's meaning — namely, via its use of water. If this sequence remains consistent with the rest of the series, it means that Kendall is finally at peace with everything he's ever done — though he won't be for long.

Water is Succession's guilt made manifest

Water is one of the most prevalent and important dramatic symbols used throughout "Succession," though the series never puts too fine a point on the nature of the weight it holds. With the waiter's tragic drowning at Shiv's (Sarah Snook) wedding in Season 1, water seems to embody death; however, in Logan's private swim at Austerlitz a few episodes earlier, it seems to embody past trauma. While both of these conclusions are certainly well founded, neither feels unanimously effective regarding the series' complete use of this visual motif. What all of these scenes feel truly united by is guilt.

Kendall is dripping with it at the wedding reception and begins Season 2 submerged in it at the cold rehab facility; the children are trapped by it at Connor's (Alan Ruck) wedding as they listen helplessly to their father's dying breaths at sea; and the Roys and the Waystar C-Suite are surrounded by it on Logan's yacht as they try to assign blame for one of "Succession's" original sins — the disaster at cruises.

On your first watch, Logan's "Austerlitz" scene may not seem to be about him emerging from guilt with scars of his own. Yet, viewing it after hearing his brother Ewan ( James Cromwell ) mention their late sister Rose a season later, it becomes clear that Logan's childhood memories are completely engulfed by guilt. It's also worth noting that "Austerlitz" as an episode is almost entirely about how Logan's upbringing prevents him from being able to take responsibility for the emotional harm he's done to his children.

However, Kendall's swim in the ocean is more complicated in this context. If we accept that water is connected to overwhelming waves of guilt, what exactly does it mean if Kendall dives into those waves head first — and what does that mean for his impending fate?

Kendall Roy can't survive without approval

To answer this question beyond the surface level, we need to agree on one thing — Kendall's primary motivation throughout the series is his desperate need for external validation. From his negotiations with Vaulter's Lawrence Yee (Rob Yang) in the pilot to this disastrous Living+ presentation, Kendall is consistently self-conscious about how others perceive him.

In the first two seasons, this need for validation usually manifests itself in fruitless ploys for his father's approval — or, conversely, the schemes he'll involve himself in when he is denied it. Season 3, however, explored if Kendall could possibly fill the void of familial love with outside affection from Naomi (Annabelle Dexter-Jones), his defense and PR teams, and the general public — until he finally realized in "Too Much Birthday" that, as future-President Gil Eavis (Eric Bogosian) once said, "if family isn't right, nothing feels right."

Kendall is isolated from approval by guilt

If Kendall's ideal goal is to be in perfect harmony with his ex-wife, children, siblings, and father, his reality is the complete opposite — and it's built entirely on ineffectual remorse from past actions. At different points throughout the series, "Succession" paints this causality overtly.

As early as the pilot episode, "Celebration," Kendall's ex-wife, Rava (Natalie Gold) strongly implies that the primary reason for their divorce was his drug addiction, the mere mention of which immediately sends Kendall into a somber defensive frenzy. His actions at the end of both Seasons 1 and 2 alienate him from his siblings, and their relationship as a unit isn't resolved until the Season 3 finale, in which Kendall confesses to what he did at Shiv's wedding. Finally, when his father dies in Season 4, his mind almost immediately jumps to the notion of forgiveness — while he may be denying that to Logan on his deathbed, this is arguably a psychological projection as Kendall tries to deflect the realization that his constant betrayals have permanently destroyed his relationship with his father.

That last moment directly leads to what will surely be remembered as Kendall's final turning point in the series: the bathroom scene in Season 4, Episode 4, "Honeymoon States." Directly mirroring his embarrassing bathroom tantrum in the pilot, Kendall calmly examines the paper from his father with his name on it . We may never know Logan Roy's true inner workings, but he is probably not a man who underlines names for emphasis — especially not Kendall's. And nobody is more aware of that fact than the not-so-prodigal son himself.

Kendall is trying to let go of his guilt through brute force

When Kendall finally emerges to give Hugo (Fisher Stevens) the go-ahead to kill his dad's reputation, it's the first sign that he is finally moving on from needing Logan's approval. Even if he wasn't sure about his father's last wishes for him, it's clear he no longer wants to care. Sure, he excuses himself by saying his father would have done the same thing, but "Honeymoon States" showed numerous times that the children were starting to understand that they'd never know who their father really was or what he wanted.

This scene can either be read as Kendall callously acting on his own accord or semi-consciously deluding himself into thinking he knew his father better than he did — either way, this act serves as his first step toward forcibly burying the guilt he carries for what he did to his father, and how his actions caused their relationship to end. Understanding this is the key to understanding the real reason why Kendall desperately needs to stay afloat as CEO.

The CEO title is vital to his existence

At the beginning of this week's episode, Kendall asks his team to replay a damaging clip of Logan disparaging his children over and over, as if forcing himself to accept his father's animosity toward him will absolve him of how their relationship ended. The end of the episode proves that it finally worked.

As he floats in the ocean, it's clear that he no longer carries the burdens of his numerous previous betrayals, the harm he caused professional contacts like Lawrence Yee, or even the death of the English waiter. This season, Kendall is learning that he can live with his guilt so long as he buries it underneath a mountain of professional achievements.

He can live with going behind Karl's back, lying to the public, and even the firing of Gerri, so long as he retains his seat as CEO — ultimately, that's the real reason why he's so desperately trying to hold onto power despite the Lukas Matsson deal. It isn't just about power itself — it's about maintaining the one thing that keeps him from having to confront the reality of his father's death.

It's only a matter of time until he drowns...

As both Shiv and Roman have already seen, however, Kendall's success has not translated to true, lasting inner peace. He may be able to convince himself that the gentle rocking of the waves is relaxing, but the moment he starts to feel that current pull, he will panic. He will flail helplessly, his head whipping about as he sees nothing but water — the sheer vastness of everything he's done to get to where he is.

At the beginning of Season 4, Jeremy Strong ominously had this to say about Kendall's final, Shakespearian arc: "[Series creator Jesse Armstrong and I] talked about 'Richard III' before this season, which is a play about the tragedy of a person who gets what they want, but ... by the time Richard III sits on that throne, he has mortgaged off himself spiritually and crossed every emotional and ethical moral line, so that the leakage of his soul is complete by the time he arrives there. There's very little left of him to put the crown on..." (via The Hollywood Reporter ).

Kendall's "mortgaging" of his soul feels eerily similar to someone frantically casting off everything heavy they're wearing before leaping into the ocean — to be as weightless as possible, so that they may float instead of drown. And yet, he can only give up so much before he finds himself naked and stranded in an endless sea of his own making. It is there, guilty and estranged from his surviving family by his own actions, that Kendall will likely meet a tragic end.

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In praise of Kendall Roy

Where do you go after accidentally killing a waiter? If you’re the lead in Succession you’ve got options, but “downtime” happens to be in Iceland where Kendall Roy, original heir to the Waystar Royco throne, attends, minimally, before being escorted out of a lagoon to issue a press release backing his father’s position in the proxy fight.

Series two looked set up to be Kendall’s Albatross – broken at the realisation of killing a man and subsequently becoming his father’s gilet-clad henchman.

Continuously repressing his instincts, after being let down as successor and attempting to overthrow his dad in series one, in series two the (battle) lines were clearly drawn and the white (Hermès) handkerchief was out from Kendall’s side (nothing shows how low Logan is willing to go to keep his son in line quite like making Kendall attend the family home of the boy he accidentally killed).

Kendall’s judgement has always been questionable: dick pics to Naomi Pearce, drugs in a helicopter he jokingly almost flies and the most questionable of all – a rap tribute to his father in the style of a young Louis Theroux (“L to the O, G / Dude be the OG / Ay, and he playin’ / Playin’ like a pro”).

The most questionable in Logan’s eyes is in DC when Kendall goes off piste, firing back accusatory Fox News-style lines to Bernie Sanders’ impersonator Senator Eavis, rattling the stakeholders who want someone, in Logan’s words, more “ vegetarian ”. Kendall is praised by all except for Logan, who kisses him on the cheek (an early sign that he’s a goner).

In the series finale, an equal parts Call Me By Your Name (luxurious pastel water scenes and crisp linen) to equal parts Red Wedding (blood sacrifices), Logan manipulates his family and colleagues into suggesting their lamb for the slaughter. The one who will claim total responsibility for the cruise scandal cover-ups.

The underlying choice always points to Kendall – who appears early on in the scene floating like a sacrificial Christ in the swimming pool on their mega yacht – but to the inside group, Tom is the obvious candidate to be “shit-canned” as Roman Roy puts it.

“Does Tom work?” asks Logan.

“Honestly, I don’t think Tom’s a big enough skull,” Kendall responds, in front of Tom.

“What about Tom with some Greg sprinkles?” asks Roman.

Greg, Geri, Carl, Shiv, Roman and the rest of the breakfast table are thrown under the bus, except for Kendall. Later when Shiv asks Logan to protect Tom, it’s clear there’s never been another option. Logan hangs Kendall out to dry in his palatial cabin – the only question Kendall has for his dad is whether he ever believed his son could be CEO.

“I don’t know, maybe,” says Logan. Although “good and smart”, he’s “not a killer. You have to be a killer.”

Kendall claims he deserves it, ending the conversation by kissing Logan on the cheek.

Mirroring the first episode where a ruined Kendall is led by an aide from Iceland to a press conference at the bidding of his father, this time Kendall strides ahead to the press conference on wrongdoing at Waystar Royco.

Logan, who watches on screen notes “it had to be done”. Kendall, briefed and ready to take the flack, goes rogue (finally and thankfully), calling his dad a bully and a liar, before finishing on the almighty “this is the day his reign ends”. Kendall calmly walks out to mass “fucks” from a panicked Waystar Royco team while, still watching on TV, a small sliver of a smiles breaks out on Logan’s face.

Kendall Roy isn’t a killer after all, he’s a stone-cold assassin.

Every question we have after watching the finale of Succession, answered by the show’s writer

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Kendall Roy's 13 Best Outfits of All Time, Ranked

The most defeated character in Succession has undefeated style.

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Plain Margiela T-shirts that cost almost as much as your rent, if not more. Suits for the price of a car. Baseball caps and sneakers and sunglasses, completely logo-less, that look so basic, they could be any affordable essential—only, they aren't. This is the wardrobe of television's one and only Kendall Roy, maybe-heir to Waystar Royco in Succession , definite style icon in my books.

Viewers (and, at this rate, probably non-viewers too) of Succession know that the billionaires on the show are all about understated luxury—"stealth wealth," if you will. No branding. No logos. Insanely expensive, nonetheless. I'm talking cashmere baseball caps that are a few hundred dollars, suede moccasins that I'd be afraid to step outside in.

There's a certain lowkey flex to the ultra-wealthy not needing to slap flashy prints and designs and monograms on their staple pieces: they may look like basics, but everyone knows they're not spending less than a few hundred on a single garment. Those who do enter the circle of the Roys with flashy designer branding are ridiculed for their tastes, ostentatious and tacky in the face of such understated luxury—RIP, Ludicrously Capacious Bag Girl. The beauty of Kendall Roy is that, as far as Succession characters go, he has a definitive style. He's not Roman Roy , with an ever-present, barely-ironed button-down and trousers, nor is he Cousin Greg, bumbling around in awkwardly-fitting formalwear. Kendall's suits are always sharp and sleek. He loves a beige knit and a gold chain and some fresh kicks. His casual wear can best be described as hypebeast-adjacent, elevated streetwear that doesn't contain a single item under, oh, $400? And that's just for the T-shirts. Kendall has the wardrobe of a billionaire, sure, but one who still has personal style. He's not boring. He's a cool guy who wears cool clothes—but subtly.

Four seasons into Succession, and we've seen plenty of iconic Kendall style moments, from his most dressed-up to his most dressed-down. There's the fit he wore when he was having a mental breakdown on the yacht, for instance. Then there's the fit he wore when he was having a mental breakdown at his mother's wedding. And we can't forget the fit he wore while having a mental breakdown at his own birthday party! Oh, Kendall. Maybe luxury is best paired with a panic attack? Either way—these are the very best of the best of Kendall Roy's outfits, ranked.

#13. Sad boy hours (on a yacht)

I love this picture of Kendall so much, it's my profile photo on Slack. Look at him—pathetic! He's brooding in solitude on his family's yacht, so naturally, he needs to brood with expensive headphones and almost-as expensive sunglasses on. The chunky headphones are definitely a major vibe, when we know this guy owns something smaller, like, say, AirPods. But he's leaning into the manic pixie dreamboy thing and going the retro route, of course. And leaving the sunglasses on adds to the sullen look, contrasting his pale pink button-down. It's giving drama!

Beyerdynamic Amiron Wireless High-End Stereo Headphone

Oliver Peoples Oliver Sun Sunglasses

#12. Impromptu bachelor party dressing 101

This is one of my favorite Kendall outfits, because he just looks fucking cool. He's wearing a graphic tee by Enfants Riches Déprimés that depicts an orgy (and is now sold out everywhere). He's thrown on a sharp blazer atop it. This is Kendall at his prime, Kendall on top of the world, Kendall not saturated in very sad shades of beige or over-the-top designer fits (we'll get to those in a minute).

Enfants Riches Déprimés White Bath House Orgy T-Shirt

#11. Kendall after hours

What does a billionaire ousted from his company wear when he's plotting a new company that's best described as "Substack meets MasterClass meets The Economist meets The New Yorker "? If he's Kendall Roy, the answer is a lot of beige, and a lot of chic, ready-to-wear designer pieces. I'm talking full Tom Ford on the torso, with Gucci sneakers that have monogramed soles. The styling here is on point: Kendall certainly knows how to layer up, if nothing else, and looks cool and casual (but not inexpensive) while doing it.

Tom Ford Light Suede Track Bomber

Tom Ford Lyocell Cotton Crew T-Shirt

Gucci Run Sneaker

#10. "Hey, Buddha, nice Tom Fords."

Roman may have been quipping at Kendall when he said "Nice Tom Fords," but he wasn't lying, really. They are! The suede sneakers might run you up about a band, but, hey—take a page from Kendall's book and pair them with a matching Tom Ford hoodie that costs even more. Real Buddha behavior.

Tom Ford Suede and Neoprene Jago Sneaker

#9. Working hard at hardly working

What do you wear to pray on your family's downfall? If you're Kendall Roy, it's a suit-and-baseball-hat combo. In "The Disruption," an estranged Kendall stormed Waystar Royco ready to kill and wreak havoc, and he obviously had to find a balance between businesswear and incognito attire to do that. He did, too, with a Loro Piana baseball cap to match his navy suit. Casual(ish) but still cashmere, this is the baseball cap for billionaires looking to cause a disruption. Plus, he looks almost like a classic, Season 1 Kendall here: suited up, ready to make some noise. This is even better, though, because Season 1 Kendall wouldn't wear a baseball cap to work. He's edgy! He's free! And it's sure as hell reflected in his clothing choices.

Loro Piana Storm System Cashmere Baseball Hat

#8. Weddingcore, or, perhaps, funeralcore

Leave it to Kendall to show up to his brother's wedding in a suit way more expensive than the one the groom himself is wearing . While Connor looked elegant for under $1000, Kendall looked ready to kill in a sleek, sharp Brioni suit that costs a whopping $11,500. Yeah, you read that right. This is perhaps the most put-together Kendall's looked in years, which is ironic, considering what happens next in this episode. It's a good thing he brought his Jacques Marie Mage Zephirin sunnies—they do good at hiding tears when you find out at the wedding that your father died. Yikes.

Brioni Midnight Blue Virgin Wool Brunico Suit

Jacques Marie Mage Zephrin Keyhole Bridge Oval Sunglasses

#7. At brunch, in denial, still serving

In the season finale of Season 3, Kendall is at an all-time low. Guilt is getting to him. He spent the last few seconds of the previous episode face-down in a swimming pool, beer in hand. And when confronted with his almost-drowning, the man is in pure denial—he doesn't need an intervention! Look at the rest of the Roys! There's a lot going wrong for Ken in this episode, but one thing going absolutely right is the $25,000 gold pendant he pairs with a plain Maison Margiela T-shirt and Jacques Marie Mage sunglasses (the pendant also made an appearance in "Too Much Birthday"). He looks like a man who has lost everything, at this point, except his taste in fashion. You know things can't be that bad if Ken is still bringing out the gold chain, after all.

Maison Margiela Crewneck T-Shirt

Jacques Marie Mage Molino Sunglasses

Liz Works x Rashid Johnson Gold Pendant

#6. CEO-chic

One thing about Kendall Roy: he's gonna go big. I'm talking, like, gets-a-custom-jacket-made-for-his-investor-day-speech kind of big. Most CEOs probably would have gone for something classic here, like, I don't know, a suit. Not Kendall, though! He wears a jacket—supposedly dreamed up by Jeremy Strong himself upon reading the script—with custom patches all over it, advertising himself as the CEO of Waystar Royco. Our man is nothing if not out there, and this is probably as close to logomania as a show like Succession will ever get.

Alpha Industries Heritage Bomber Jacket

#5. Fitted up at father's funeral

Even though Roman joked about Kendall wearing sunglasses to Logan's funeral so that no one could see his tears...Kendall, you nailed this look, babe. Shades: on. Shoes: shiny. Collar of your sick as hell Loro Piana herringbone coat : standing tall. It takes serious swag to look this good yet this morose, but, hey—if there's a time and place to look your best, it's at your dad's star-studded funeral the day after you may or may not have inducted a fascist regime into the White House. Talk about a power look.

Loro Piana Savile Cashmere-Blend Overcoat

#4. Not enough birthday

This was a great episode for Kendall's style, from planning his party to rehearsing for it to actually being at the birthday party. And though the birthday itself didn't go as planned—at least Kendall looked good the whole time. While rehearsing his musical number with Naomi, Kendall did not come to play, wearing head-to-toe, flashy designer: a Gucci bomber, Prada geometric turtleneck, and Gucci Ultrapace Low-Top Sneakers. Stealth wealth is nothing in the face of a man with unlimited money and a bit of birthday excitement, clearly.

Gucci Ultrapace Low-Top Sneakers

#3. Confessions of a killer

If you have to confess to killing a kid at your sister's wedding, you better do it decked out in Loro Piana at your mother's wedding. For all his faults, Kendall knows how to do drama in style. He leans into the Tuscan look with a full Loro Piana suit, complete with suede moccasin loafers and a billowy linen shirt. He looks like a man on vacation! A man at a wedding! He looks a lot more chill than he feels, and is absolutely acing summer wedding style. Nothing is less than a few hundred dollars, obviously. But there's a price to pay for everything—unintentional murder's costs about as much as Loro Piana does.

Loro Piana Andre Arizona Linen Shirt

Loro Piana Summer Walk Suede Loafers

#2. The performance of a lifetime

Everyone remembers the iconic L to the OG performance. Even Frank Ocean does . This is quintessential Kendall: fully out-there, at a high, not giving a fuck about what anyone thinks. For better, or for worse.

Succession L to the OG Pinstripe Baseball Jersey

#1. The ultimate party-planning drip

One thing about Kendall Roy—he's gonna dress for the occasion. Even before his actual birthday party, Kendall was in Gucci drip (with a chain on! Iconic!) for the planning sesh with his buddies, blunt in one hand and iPad in the other (those aren't part of the outfit, but they certainly add to the aesthetic). The Billionaire Birthday Boy looked cool as hell in a green cashmere turtleneck from Gucci, which is no longer available, but a similar option is. This is, admittedly, a hard look to pull off, but Kendall Roy does it as he does very few things: with ease and elegance.

Gucci Cashmere Knit Turtleneck Sweater

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'Succession' filming locations: Inside the world of Waystar Royco

From NYC skyscrapers to luxe Italian villas, here's your 'Succession' filming locations field guide as we get stuck into season 4

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Hurrah—the Roys are back with more family drama, insane wealth, and opulent Succession filming locations! Season four of the hit HBO show is currently airing, and while we've all been pretty pre-occupied with *that* plot development in episode 3, the transatlantic series once again sees the scheming employees of Waystar Royco, and the Roy family themselves, traversing the world—from iconic New York City settings, to vast California estates.

Across the four seasons, the series has used IRL locations (only a few scenes are filmed on studio sets) to accurately flaunt the billionaire lifestyle of the Roy clan, a ruthless family tree that owns and runs one of the world’s leading media and entertainment companies. The Roys and their employees never usually stay in one place for too long, travelling the world for business deals, family events, and lavish parties. So where exactly are the main Succession filming locations across all four seasons?

If you want to step into the gilded world of Waystar yourself, here's a field guide to Succession' s filming locations—from flashing city enclaves, to country retreats.

*Warning: Spoilers for all Succession seasons (including season 4) below!*

Succession filming locations: A field guide

1. New York City

The Roy family and their Waystar Royco media empire are based out of New York City in the show ( if you know what Succession based on , this won't come as a surprise). So naturally, the bulk of filming does actually take place in good ol' Gotham. Main filming locations include the headquarters of Waystar, which were set at the World Trade Center in seasons one and two, but moved to the 28 Liberty Street skyscraper for seasons three and four. Then, there's Logan Roy's expansive Fifth Avenue apartment, which—as fans who are caught up with season 4 will know—features heavily in episode 3.

Logan's apartment (or is it now Connor's?!) is actually filmed on a set, meaning that sadly the beautiful location doesn't exist in real life. However, the lobby of the building is real, and is filmed at the American Irish Historical Society.

We've also had multiple glimpses into Kendall's NY apartment—and the impressive penthouse is real, spanning three floors. It's located on 180 East 88th Street.

Over the four seasons, NYC production has bounced all over the boroughs, from the highbrow hotels of midtown like The Pierre and The Plaza, to the East New York Freight Tunnel in Brooklyn where Tom's bachelor party takes place. We're looking forward to seeing what other New York spots the Roys hit up next.

2. California

Season 4 of Succession kicks off with three of the four Roy siblings ( Shiv , Roman, and Kendall), masterminding a new start-up—'The Hundred'—at a palatial Los Angeles home, high up in the hills.

The property couldn't really get much slicker, with an expansive outdoor pool, all-glass walls, and a panoramic view of the city. And it turns out that the property is real; and just as expensive as you might have guessed.

This scene was filmed at a real home in Pacific Palisades, which was recently bought by a young tech billionaire for an eye-watering $83 million. With approximately 20,000 square feet of space, six bedrooms, 18 (?!) bathrooms, an outdoor sauna, and a kitchen design by Nobu, it's certainly a location fitting for the Roy family. And when it comes to Succession filming locations, it doesn't get much pricier.

And that's not the only Californian location in season 4 so far. When the Roy kids make a hurried dash to Nan Pierce's estate to close the deal on buying Pierce Global Media, in actuality, it was just a short drive to Santa Barbara, about an hour and a half from the center of Los Angeles. 

It's thought that the Peabody Estate provided the setting of the fictional Pierce Estate. And interestingly, its real life owner isn't too far off its fictional owner. It's reported that the property was bought by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt for $30.8 million, in 2020.

3. United Kingdom

Like Brian Cox, the actor playing him, Logan Roy was born in Dundee, Scotland, a locale we get to see for ourselves in season two when the Roy patriarch visits his birthplace to celebrate his 50th anniversary as CEO of Waystar Royco. 

The UK also served as the setting for Shiv and Tom's wedding at the end of season one, which was held at her mother's family estate in England and was shot at Eastnor Castle in Herefordshire. 

3. Long Island, NY

Although the majority of the action happens in New York City proper, the moneyed, eastern edges of New York also see some Roy shenanigans throughout the series. Oheka Castle in Huntington, NY, stood in for the Roys' Hungarian hunting lodge, the setting of the infamous "Boar on the Floor" scene from season two. 

Fans got to see Logan Roy's Hamptons home in the beginning of season two. The actual home is the 1960 Henry Ford Estate in Mecox Bay, Southampton, chosen to signify Logan's "new money" sensibilities, reports Vulture . The show's production designer Stephen Carter told the outlet: “Given the age of the character, he would have been forming his impressions of what trendy style would be in the sixties.”

Season two opened in the Land of Fire and Ice, where Kendall Roy was holed up in a swanky rehab clinic following the tragic accident that took place at the end of the first season. 

Speaking to Filmmaker magazine, Carter said of the Icelandic setting: "With about a week to go, we were locationless, which was a little bit scary. I’d been a big fan of Black Mirror and remembered a house I’d seen on an episode, which I knew was in Iceland. It happened to be available, and we jumped all over that. It was a fantastically stark location."

5. New Mexico

The season one episode "Austerlitz" sees the whole Roy clan head to Connor Roy's sprawling New Mexico estate for a publicized family therapy session. Playing the part of the southwestern home is Rancho Alegre, a Santa Fe private house/museum with panoramic views of the Ortiz and Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

The Succession New Mexico ranch has 11 bedrooms, a wine cellar, a media room, and is sat on 190 acres—and amazingly, you can actually stay there yourself (if you've got the cash, of course). The home can be booked for private stays—with seven nights minimum booking preferred), or private events. 

6. The Adriatic Sea

The finale of season two sees the Roy family and their closest Waystar cohorts lounging and backstabbing on an 85-meter super-yacht off the coast of Croatia. 

Filming took place in the picturesque shores of Cavtat, Korčula, Mljet and Šipan, aboard the rather majestic super-yacht SOLANDGE, which measures in at a whopping 279ft and has accommodation for up to 12 guests.

7. Tuscany, Italy

While the Succession season 2 finale capped in Croatia, season three finished off in typically glam fashion in Tuscany. One of the most stunning Succession locations so far, Villa Cetinale, a 17th-century villa and gardens in Sovicille, served as the wedding location of Caroline Collingwood, Shiv, Kendall, and Roman's mother.

Plenty of other scenes were filmed across the region too, with the Italian filming locations in season three including Villa La Cassinella in Lake Como, which serves as the backdrop for GoJo founder Lukas Matsson's home, while a tense discussion between Shiv and husband Tom Wambsgans took place in the the hamlet and village of Bagno Vignoni, located in the commune of San Quirico d'Orcia.

Finally, Caroline's bachelor party, which sees her and Shiv partake in an awkward heart-to-heart, was filmed in the town of Cortona, in the Arezzo province. 

Season 4 of Succession is currently airing on HBO in the US and Sky Atlantic and NOW in the UK. Want to watch shows like Succession once the series comes to an end? Look no further than our guide.

Christina Izzo is the Deputy Editor of My Imperfect Life. 

More generally, she is a writer-editor covering food and drink, travel, lifestyle and culture in New York City. She was previously the Features Editor at Rachael Ray In Season and Reveal , as well as the Food & Drink Editor and chief restaurant critic at Time Out New York . 

When she’s not doing all that, she can probably be found eating cheese somewhere. 

As a self-proclaimed blush connoisseur, I swear by ILIA's cheek and lip stick and hopefully, when my work is done, you will too.

By Naomi Jamieson Published 28 September 23

If you've been looking for a new, signature hair look for fall, Emma Chamberlain may have just come *through* for you...

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Succession Season 2: Kendall Roy Proves He Was a Killer All Along

Kendall shows why you shouldn't kick a man while he's down in the incredible Succession Season 2 finale.

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Obscenely rich and richly obscene, the Roy family of HBO’s darkly comedic family drama  Succession  is back for Season 2, and more deplorable than ever. Why do we love watching awful people behave badly on television? If you encountered a family as awful as the Roys live in person, you’d be appalled by their sniping, vulgarity, and general lack of regard for anything other than their massive egos and bank accounts, but somehow this band of contemptable buffoons has us enthralled. It’s the guiltiest of TV pleasures, like bingeing on ortolan every Sunday night.

After a failed coup, a Chappaquiddick-like incident, and an ill-advised marriage, the Roys enter  Succession  Season 2  more strained, yet dependent on one another to stave off the slings and arrows of their many powerful adversaries. Follow along with  Den of Geek  this season as we chart who’s leading the line of succession, determine who’s behaving the worst, and sing the praises of the series’ one pure soul, Cousin Greg.

This is the Keeping Up With the Roys for  Succession  Season 2 Episode 10: This is Not For Tears.

Kendall Roy

Kendall is like a circus lion. He proved in Season One that he could be very dangerous, but after his Chappaquiddick-incident, he’s been subservient, feeding off scraps, forced to jump through hoops and take whatever abuse his master, in this case Logan, dishes out. But just like a circus lion, if you push him past his breaking point, embarrass and kick him too many times, that beast is going to snap and maul you. That’s what happened at the end of “This is Not For Tears.” With a sea of microphones and cameras in front of him, Kendall throws Logan under the bus for the cruises scandal after previously agreeing to be the fall guy. It’s Logan’s own fault; after accepting that he would be thrown to the wolves, Kendall point blank asks his father whether or not he was ever going to be chosen as CEO. For once, Logan gives a straight answer and says no, chalking it up to Kendall not being a killer (despite him, you know, actually being a literal killer). Kendall then promptly makes Logan pay for that observation, but is this secretly what he wanted the entire time? Logan begins the episode getting clear instructions that he’s going to have to take the bullet to appease the board members, and ends the episode smiling at Kendall’s play.

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Perhaps this was some master manipulation. Instead of choosing his heir, Logan put all of his kids in the position to grab it: Roman had the opportunity to secure private money, and despite doing well and coming away with a potential deal in place, his own indecision and fear of failure, no matter how rightful it is, gets in his way and Shiv proves she’s human by refusing to let her father destroy her husband’s job and reputation. Kendall is the only one who goes in for the kill. After a season serving as a human punching bag, Kendall scores a K.O.

Siobhan Roy

The Death Cruise is just excruciating for all parties involved. Sure, you’re floating on a luxury yacht in the Mediterranean, complete with a full staff, jet skis, and a goddamn water slide, but you’re also sitting around waiting to see which one of your family members or co-workers is going to be sacrificed for the good of the company. Not a scenario conducive for rest and relaxation. However, it certainly makes for great TV. There was a part of me that hoped the boat would capsize and the entire cast would be stranded on a desert island, turning Succession into a Survivor meets Lord of the Flies situation. A boy can dream.

Anyway, the yacht vacation is perhaps the worst for Shiv, who tries to set up a threesome scenario to help ease Tom’s feelings regarding their open marriage situation, which only exacerbates things further. It doesn’t help that in a round of Who Should Fall on the Sword, Shiv does nothing to defend Tom and even suggests that he’d be a prime candidate to take the heat. It’s only after Tom hints at wanting a divorce that Shiv very calmly asks her father to spare Tom, but there’s a good chance that the damage has already been done. Shiv has spent the entire season compromising her personal beliefs and jeopardizing her relationship in pursuit of a job that she was probably never going to receive. She finally shows a heart and not only is it likely too late, it probably cost her the CEO position too.

Roman returns from his intense hostage hotel situation a changed man. He’s not quippy or comparing Kendall to a coked-out Transformer or whatever. He’s handing out genuine compliments and asking his siblings if they can have honest conversations about their feelings without draping everything in ten coats of irony or vitriol, and he’s immediately mocked for it. Despite the scary circumstances, Roman actually did well in his effort to secure private funds, it’s just that he’s now not so sure if these are the people his family should be doing business with. Roman has genuine concerns, but he also knows that if this foreign backer backs out at the last moment, the family will lose the company and it will all be his fault. That’s a risk Roman is not willing to take. He spends the entirety of the cruise in a funk, at least until it comes time to nominate someone to throw under the bus, where he takes great pleasure in trying to rid of perpetual adversary Frank and dunking on Tom and Greg. He passionately defends Gerri, even coming up with a good reason to spare her other than mentioning his weird little degradation fantasy. Before Kendall goes nuclear, he’s even named as the next COO of Waystar, but the reality of that promotion sets in quickly and Roman looks to be overwhelmed. I’m sure Kendall’s big move will reignite a fire in our favorite rich sociopath.

Connor is so delighted to be a meme, but that’s really the only good thing he’s got going for him. Willa’s play is an absolute train wreck, getting savaged by critics and if Connor’s going to recoup the losses and keep his Presidential campaign alive, he’s going to need oh, a measly $100 million from dear old dad to keep the lights on. Some good reviews for Willa’s play from some of Logan’s papers would be nice too. Logan can’t help on the sham review front, but he agrees to help his son with cash, but only if Connor agrees to end his campaign immediately. The Con-Heads will be crushed, but not as crushed as Connor hearing his dad call him a joke and an embarrassment. Connor is such a joke that his dad doesn’t even consider him good enough to take the fall for the cruise scandal despite the fact that Connor is volunteering. Connor taking the fall would mean admitting that the eldest Roy child was pulling strings behind the scenes at Waystar for years, and come on, no one is going to believe that.

Rounding Out the Family 

Tom wambsgans.

Sorry Tom, but no matter how hard you try to make the point, no one is going to believe that you were “dead catting.” That’s not a thing. But, you certainly didn’t act like a dead cat while on the yacht from hell! Tom finally stands up for himself, telling Shiv that he’s unhappy with their marriage, how the fact that she proposed an open marriage on their wedding night was complete bullshit, and that maybe the unhappy that he would be without Shiv might be less than the unhappy that he is with her. Our guy found a spine! He then proceeds to take his new spine and eat Logan’s chicken right off his plate, which may have been the episode’s funniest moment. Tom probably was the most logical choice to take the fall for the cruise scandal, but after kissing Logan’s boots and doing everything the company asked of him, eating shit from Congress and the Pierce family alike, it would have been brutal if Logan took advantage of his loyalty. Tom’s marriage may be in shambles, but he’s still on the Waystar corporate ladder. You win some, you lose some.

Cousin Greg

GREGORY’S GOT THE RECEIPTS! The prospect of Greg being used as sprinkles on a Tom sundae to serve up to congress was entirely heartbreaking. Greg had just gotten used to the sweet life. He has champagne preferences! Giant yachts don’t impress him that much! After surrendering his inheritance, the Roys using him as a scapegoat would have been a tragic conclusion to our sweet boy’s story. However, Greg gets pulled into Kendall’s plan to usurp his father, using the documents he rescued from Tom to help seal Logan’s fate. Turns out my boy is way more than a benign fungus! GREG THE MUH FUCKIN’ EGG! 

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Nick Harley is a tortured Cleveland sports fan, thinks Douglas Sirk would have made a killer Batman movie, Spider-Man should be a big-budget HBO series, and Wes Anderson and Paul Thomas Anderson should direct a script written by one another. For more thoughts like these, read Nick’s work here at  Den of Geek  or follow him on  Twitter .

Nick Harley | @mick_marley

Nick Harley is an entertainment journalist and alumnus of Ohio University's E.W. Scripps School of Journalism. Nick also works as a Senior Content Specialist for the…

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‘Succession’: Jeremy Strong on Kendall’s ‘Catastrophic’ Ending

Strong reflected on Kendall Roy’s place in his life and in the culture. “Kendall is seen as a try-hard,” he said. “I guess that’s become something to judge or deride.”

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By Alexis Soloski

When filming on the final season of “Succession” wrapped this winter, the actor Jeremy Strong flew to the Danish fishing village where he and his wife have a home. Alone, he went for a walk on the beach.

“I watched the sunset and tried to say goodbye to a character I’m sure will always be with me, will always be part of me,” he said.

For Strong, who began filming the HBO drama seven years ago and won an Emmy for playing Kendall Roy, this was a happy ending. An actor of unusual commitment, he works to give himself over to a role entirely. And with Kendall, the wounded son of Logan Roy (Brian Cox), a brutally successful media mogul, he felt that he had.

But for the character, “Succession,” created by Jesse Armstrong, concluded on bleaker terms. Kendall began Sunday night’s finale episode believing that he would emerge as the chief executive of a giant conglomerate. But the final scene, which also took place at the water’s edge, also at sunset, left Kendall numb, friendless, bereft.

“Somebody once said that actors are emotional athletes,” Strong said on Monday. “And this show has been like a decathlon for me.”

He has since recovered. And from a flashy Manhattan hotel room, Strong, dressed in a very un-Kendall trucker hat, T-shirt and chain and possessed of some very un-Kendall-like equanimity, joined a video call to discuss tragedy, vulnerability and sad Kendall memes. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Should Kendall have been made the chief executive?

He certainly was equipped. I watched it last night and wanted so desperately for it to unfold differently. Do I think he would have been good for the company and the country? I mean, we’ve seen him cross every moral and ethical line. He’s demonstrated a ruthless pragmatism. He’s become what his father wanted, which is being able to dominate and having the moral callousness and flexibility to do whatever it takes. I feel like he’s ready to become the C.E.O., in the tragic math of that.

Was his great tragedy being Logan Roy’s son? Would it have been better if he had been able to forge his own path?

In a way, that’s all of the Roys’ tragedies, that they were born into this. Jesse and I created this memory of a moment where my father said, “It will be you one day, you’ll have the job that I have.” It is like a death sentence to give a 7-year-old that promise. It puts Kendall on this trajectory, never with a sense of having earned it himself.

These characters have all the trappings of power, but nothing in their lives or upbringing installed in them any sense of personal power. If anything, their father and mother took that away from them and left them feeling powerless, which explains this need for Kendall to overcompensate and try too hard and overshoot the mark. He needs this to happen for his life to be OK, or to make any sense. And I found it just unbearably excruciating, the way that it then goes. He’s lost his moral compass. He’s lost his integrity. He’s lost everything. My seven years of working on this have been the slow inexorable death of Kendall Roy.

Is that what the final scene at the edge of the river suggests?

We happened to shoot that scene in Battery Park back in February. I’ve never been so cold in my life. What was happening was like the ninth circle of hell, which is frozen. I couldn’t feel anything. I did try and go in the water. We’ve seen Kendall lose again and again and again, but this feels catastrophic.

I don’t think there’s any coming back from it. Jesse felt like once he can get past this moment, maybe there is a future for him. I felt a loss of all hope. So I got up and climbed over that barrier and walked out onto the pilings. The actor playing Colin [Kendall’s bodyguard, played by Scott Nicholson] ran and stopped me. I don’t know if Kendall wanted to die or if he wanted to be saved.

Water has always held such significance for Kendall.

He’s always in a place where he might lift off out of it, or he might be submerged and drown in it. He’s treading water for his life.

Kendall is the favored son of a very powerful man. Why has he always seen himself as an underdog, an outsider?

I know a lot of people who come from extreme privilege and who have not internalized some commensurate sense of self that you’d think would accompany that. This character has never been comfortable in his own skin. That unease and that lack has been part of his addiction and his ambition.

The finale also included some Barbados-set scenes, which emphasized the bonds and affection among the younger Roy siblings. How did you and the other actors work to feel like a family?

It’s just the amount of road we’ve traveled, 40 hours of story over seven years. The relationship we all have with each other — it’s easy to access all sides of it. There’s deep love and affection and connectedness and then also, friction and enmity. All of it. I love those people. The writing usually demanded that we meet in a place of discord and enmity, but I loved the times where we got to put our dukes down and enjoy each other’s company. That was the last scene we filmed in the whole series, the “meal fit for a king.” It was a really wonderful way to finish.

And you drank that “meal fit for a king” smoothie?

Yes, I had to. For me, if I don’t drink that smoothie, I am not invested enough in how much Kendall wants to be C.E.O. He has to drink it, ergo I have to drink it, otherwise the whole thing is just a performance. So I would drink it and go outside and retch and jump in the ocean and go back for another take. We only needed to do a few, thankfully.

People often confuse actors with their characters. What were the points of convergence between you and Kendall and which were the differences?

I have had a singularity of wanting similar to Kendall; I’ve always only wanted to be an actor. I feel pretty strongly that I am a cog built to fit one particular machine: My life only makes sense to me if I’m doing this work. As opposed to Kendall, I’ve gotten to do that.

But I understood the stakes of what that is for him. I can’t really imagine, had I not gotten the chance to practice and do this work, how unlived my life would feel. Kendall is seen as a try-hard. I guess that’s become something to judge or deride, but I’ve always had to try hard and work hard. I think there’s value in that, and I wouldn’t have known how to do it any other way.

The differences, though, are many. I’ve got three little kids and most of my life is just reading “Room on the Broom” and being a dad and a husband and a friend, just an entirely non-Kendall existence.

Kendall quickly became a fan favorite and inspired a torrent of memes — sad Kendall , babygirl Kendall . Did fans misunderstand the character?

I’ve managed to avoid all that because I’m really not online and I’m not on social media. I see people walking around with tote bags and T-shirts now and it’s wild, the way people project all kinds of things onto the character. The character is a bit of a litmus test. Some people use the word “cringe,” and then others find him incredibly sympathetic. Do I think any of that’s misunderstood? I don’t know. There’s something about this character, about this kind of boy-man — there is a lot of male vulnerability, which is something that always affected me growing up when I saw it in storytelling. In this moment in our culture, people either respond to that in a derisive way or in an empathic way. It’s not my job to tell anyone how to respond to it, but there is something about vulnerability that is polarizing.

You’ve said that your goal as an artist is to leave everything on the field. Did you do that here?

Yeah, I did. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A friend of mine texted me, saying, you may as well move out to the desert and die.

That’s a funny way of saying congratulations.

This once in my life and hopefully, many more times — I want to do this until I die — I felt fully expressed through a piece of work.

Did you do anything to say goodbye to this character and this world? Any ritual?

This has been obviously a monolithic experience for me in so many ways, as an artist and as a person. I had three children while doing this show, it changed my life in so many ways. The ritual, I guess, was just investing utterly. When it was happening, it was all that mattered in the world for me. When it’s over, it’s really gone. I gave as much as I could give to this, but I can’t hold on to it, I can’t possess it. I don’t feel like it belongs to me.

Alexis Soloski has written for The Times since 2006. As a culture reporter, she covers television, theater, movies, podcasts and new media. More about Alexis Soloski

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Kendall’s Water Symbolism in Succession, Explained

HBO’s ‘ Succession ‘ heavily focuses on Kendall Roy as it explores the power struggle among the Roy family. Throughout his quest to challenge his father’s authority and erase his past sins, Kendall is constantly associated with the recurring motif of water in the series. The water scenes come at crucial moments in Kendall’s story, particularly ones that highlight his inability to change. As a result of Kendall’s constant and recurring connection with water, viewers must be looking to understand the subtle nuance behind the scenes. SPOILERS AHEAD!

The Meaning and Symbolism Behind Kendall’s Water Scenes

‘Succession’ is a complex story of power accentuated by trauma that explores the lives of the Roy family members. Among them, the story of Kendall has a particularly Shakespearean nature as it is closely associated with the common literary motif of water. However, a lot of Kendall’s storyline deals with him wrestling his personal demons, including his substance abuse issue and relationship with his father, Logan Roy. The water symbolism seemingly combines both aspects to highlight Kendall’s state .

In the series, the motif first occurs evidently shortly after Kendall gets into a car accident. In the season 1 finale, titled ‘Nobody Is Ever Missing,’ Kendall does drugs with a waiter at a wedding. The two drive off searching for cocaine but almost run into a deer. However, Kendall swerves the car, and it lands in the water. In the accident, the waiter is killed, and Kendall flees the scene. The accident coincides with Kendall’s earlier attempt to challenge his father’s authority. Ultimately, Kendall is forced to turn to Logan for help, getting away with the waiter’s death. However, the waiter’s death and his involvement in the accident continue to affect Kendall.

Over the show’s four seasons, there are several instances of Kendall completely or partially drowning in water, which metaphorically represents his state of mind. In different cultures, water symbolizes purity and rebirth. Thus, the most obvious implication of Kendall’s water motif is his attempt to erase his past sins, including the waiter’s death. In the second and third seasons, these attempts become particularly evident as Kendall attempts to portray his virtuous side, marking his attempt at rebirth. However, Kendall’s attempts fail miserably, leading him back to his submerged state, as seen after his birthday party in season.

An alternative interpretation of Kendall’s recurring motif suggests the water represents Kendall’s relationship with Logan. After the waiter’s death, Kendall is inadvertently forced to be under his father’s thumb, as we see in the second season premiere. The water seems to be the weight of Logan’s expectations for his son. Moreover, it could also display Kendall’s desire to reinvent himself outside his father’s shadow or be free-flowing like the water. However, Kendall cannot achieve either state, resulting in the constant depiction of him in submerged poses.

The seventh episode of the final season, titled ‘Living+,’ seems to support the latter interpretation of the water motif. In the episode, Kendall champions the Lving+ housing and creates an inventive pitch for it during the launch event. Since the project was Logan’s last before his untimely death, it holds great significance for Kendall and the company. While everyone expects Kendall to crack under pressure, he succeeds in creating positive buzz about the project. Later, we see Kendall swim in the sea during the episode’s final moments. As Kendall freely swims in the water, it could mean he is finally free from Logan’s control over him and the weight of his father’s expectations.

The first interpretation of Kendall’s recurring motif could also be connected to the final scene of episode 7, as it could signify Kendall finally succeeding at his attempted rebirth. Although it is hard to argue how Kendall proving himself capable of carrying Logan’s legacy could erase his past sins, it is easy to see Kendall’s achievement in the episode as he finds himself worthy despite his mistake. Ultimately, the heart of Kendall’s character arc resides in the tragedy he is, and defining his recurring motif with a singular interpretation dilutes the Shakespearean nature of the show’s complex and nuanced storytelling elements.

Read More: Logan Roy’s Net Woerth in Succession

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Succession recaps

Roy, oh roy: that 'succession' finale was a trip.

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Jeremy Strong as Kendall Roy and Brian Cox as Logan Roy in the season finale of HBO's Succession . Graeme Hunter/HBO hide caption

Jeremy Strong as Kendall Roy and Brian Cox as Logan Roy in the season finale of HBO's Succession .

It is hopefully clear that a review and discussion of the Succession season two finale is not suitable for people who do not want to be spoiled regarding the Succession season two finale. If it is not clear: You will know what happened on this episode by the time you're finished reading this piece. Choose wisely.

We began this season of Succession with Kendall Roy half-submerged in what was supposed to be a relaxing spa soak but was more like a very wet metaphor. And he didn't get his head above water until the last 30 seconds of the second-season finale.

There were times when this season looked like it might be about Kendall's sister, Shiv (Sarah Snook) — her father, Logan (Brian Cox), dangled the "top job" at the company, as he calls it, in front of her face, then refused to give it to her. Shiv's restlessness seemed like perhaps it was the biggest threat to Logan.

There were times when it seemed like it might be about Kendall smoothly transitioning into being his father's traumatized but functional right hand. After ending last season in the weakest possible position , needing to be rescued from the father he had been trying to overthrow, Kendall became unfailingly loyal. When he put on a good performance at the congressional hearings, it suggested we could be headed for a conclusion where Kendall finally became his father's favorite — something he wants so desperately that it drips from Jeremy Strong's performance almost as much as sweat so often seems to.

But no. No, Logan decided it was time for a "blood sacrifice," as he put it — someone who could be thrown to the wolves and blamed for the devastating revelations about Waystar Royco's cruise division. Someone who would satisfy the shareholders that the problem was being taken seriously; someone who would give those shareholders, as one told Logan on the phone, "cover." So Logan gathered the family and the top lieutenants — Kendall, Shiv and Tom, Roman (Kieran Culkin), even Greg — on the Roy yacht and watched each one try to respectfully, gently argue that the person sacrificed should emphatically not be them, no offense to whomever they suggested it should be.

The obvious answer was Tom (Matthew Macfadyen), Shiv's husband. He had been in charge of cruises; he had a logical connection to the crimes committed, even if they predated his leadership. After all, one of the things someone needed to take responsibility for was the cover-up, and Tom carried out key elements of the cover-up. He wouldn't even have been just a figurehead. Tom had the advantage of being both largely expendable to the family and actually guilty , not that they would care. Particularly if they threw in poor dopey cousin Greg, Tom's assistant, they thought maybe that would be enough.

Sarah Snook brought out Shiv's shocking shrug-it-off energy in the scene — let's just call it the Roy Family Murder Breakfast — in which she seemed to agree with the group that the blood sacrifice should be Tom. Her husband! Her own husband! Sure, why not? Tom was kinda like family, she explained, without actually being family. Which you can translate as "he's close enough for the shareholders to think it really means something for us to hand him over to be sacrificed, when in fact, eh ."

But it was not to be Tom, because once he and Shiv were in private and he made clear how devastated he was by her betrayal — and once that opened other wounds in their marriage to the point where he questioned its status as a going concern — Shiv shifted gears. She went to her father and said it could not be Tom. By then, it appeared that it was likely to be either Tom or Kendall who would suffer, and Shiv took the coward's way out: She chose while refusing to choose, saying she couldn't make the decision ... but it couldn't be Tom. (The degree to which Shiv truly loves Tom has always been an intriguing element of their marriage. Her saving him is a data point, but so was her initially being prepared not to.)

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'succession': back to the pit of vipers for another season of discontent.

'Succession': Mogul Money, Mogul Problems

And so Logan chose Kendall to be sacrificed, breaking the news gently — or what passes for gently in a man whose idea of bedside manner would be leaving you one-third of your ice chips while you're in the hospital and he's at your bedside feeling thirsty. Kendall would have to make a statement that he had known about the misconduct in the cruise division, he had engineered the cover-up, he had done it all, and in Logan's words, it had gone "no higher." Kendall would sacrifice himself to save his father, and ultimately to save the company.

So when did Kendall decide ... not to? When did Kendall decide that instead of falling on his sword, he would stroll into that press conference, whip out a set of note cards and call his father "a malignant presence, a bully and a liar"? When did he decide that even knowing his father could ruin him with the story of the waiter who died after Kendall drove off a bridge, it was over? When did he decide that instead of reciting "I saw their plan; my dad's plan was better" over and over as he did in the first episode of this season, and instead of saying "my dad told me to" the way he did when he destroyed Vaulter, he would not only sacrifice his father as the mover behind the cruises debacle but reveal his father's deceitful, vicious personality?

My money is on the moment in which, referring to the death of the waiter, Logan repeated an abbreviation that came out of the cruise division, used when a migrant worker or a sex worker died on a ship: NRPI. No Real Person Involved . It is shorthand, really, for the idea that only some people matter.

Logan believes in NRPI. Roman believes in it. Shiv just NRPI'd her own husband until he specifically asked her not to. But Kendall is, perhaps ironically given the protection he accepted from his father, not an NRPI kind of person. He agonized over that accident. He hated himself for shutting down Vaulter — an act he proved he could carry out in an NRPI-style manner, provided he didn't pay too much attention to feeling his skin go gray and clammy.

Kendall had already been reminded during the trip that his father doesn't care about his feelings: Logan had forced Kendall to send his girlfriend away in the middle of the trip, a fresh humiliation that increased Kendall's isolation. Things built up. Logan's callous conducting of the Family Murder Breakfast and his announcement that he needed a "skull to wave" showed Kendall how ready his father was to throw away his kids, not to mention faithful lieutenants like Gerri (J. Smith-Cameron), Karl (David Rasche) and Frank (Peter Friedman).

When Logan told Kendall that his was the skull that would be waved, a resigned Kendall asked him a question. Had Logan ever believed that Kendall could do the top job? After the profound cruelty of acting like he'd never really thought about it, Logan came around to an answer: "You're not a killer," he said. "You have to be a killer." Jeremy Strong's performance in this critical scene with Cox looks very different on second viewing. What originally played as agonized resignation to his situation and an understanding that he'd have to be the skull, as it were, looks now like agonized resignation to the fact that he will never have his father's love and approval this way. He'll never get there by trying to be good and loyal and perfect; that's what he was doing all season, and he's still the skull. This family only respects killers. Not the kind who accidentally cause the deaths of waiters, either. Only the kind who kill with ice-cold calculation.

So that's what Kendall did.

Because Kendall, after learning the bad news, wound up on a plane back home with Greg (Nicholas Braun). This was extraordinarily bad luck for Logan, who had no way of knowing Greg had first saved some of the troublesome records Tom told him to get rid of. He had no way of knowing that when Tom found out and insisted on burning what was left, Greg once again reserved a few in case he ever needed them. Greg spent this entire season being Chekhov's knucklehead, and ultimately, like all the things metaphorically rendered unto Chekhov, he mattered a great deal.

In order to preserve the suspense of the ending, in order to create the gasp when Kendall goes to the press conference and says "BUT" between what sounds like it will be an admission of guilt and what becomes a blast of accusations against his father, we didn't see what happened on the plane home. We saw Greg gently tell Kendall he felt bad that Kendall had to be the blood sacrifice. And we've seen a friendship growing between Greg and Kendall, the only family member who's ever shown the kid any kindness.

Presumably, at some point during that flight, they talked. Greg revealed that he was holding on to the evidence Kendall needed to make accusations against Logan stick. Or Kendall opened up about being unable to get his father's love. Or both. The key to Kendall's ability to finally carry out the fully public attack on his father that's been brewing since season one episode one, the key to Kendall's escape from his father's "protection" that's been brewing since season two episode one? It turned out to be Greg. Greg, who saved his secret papers in a folder labeled "SECRET."

HBO's 'Succession' Focuses On Corrosive Weight Of Inherited Wealth

Holly hunter on hbo's 'succession,' she plays rhea jarrell.

This was a season that was enjoyable to watch as it proceeded but that looks far more impressive in light of the finale. It looked at times like they had flattened Kendall's affect too much; perhaps he was too much changed by the accident after Shiv's wedding, too devastated and defanged to maintain the powerful dynamic between himself and his father that drove the first season. The character of Rhea Jarrell never entirely jelled, despite the reliable presence of Holly Hunter. The strange sexual connection between Roman and Gerri was picked up and put down a little abruptly, although the notion that they share some sort of bond flared during the Family Murder Breakfast when Roman rose to her defense. Shiv's waffling about whether she was really prepared to do battle with her father — spoiler alert: She was not — makes more sense as a prelude to her weakness in the finale. It is Shiv, perhaps, who is not a killer.

And now, Kendall's dead eyes all season make narrative sense. The story was going here , to this place where the torment and the misery accumulated, to where Kendall was willing to blow up his family because it was better than all the other choices. Even the embarrassing tribute rap at Logan's party is now, in context, just one of the last gasps of his desperate attempt to earn his father's approval. Now, that rap is just more evidence that Kendall may have looked cold in the old peepers, but in fact he was doing everything he could think of. He played a relatively non-flashy role in the now-infamous "Boar on the Floor" sequence in the episode "Hunting," precisely because he was keeping out of as much of the drama as he could. In fact, his role in "Hunting" and at several other points during the season was to do his father's dirty work without complaint — to inform, to obey, to expose. He was the good son.

The last bit of business to deal with is Logan's tiny hint of a smile as he watches his son accuse him of being a monster. Is he a little impressed that Kendall is more of a killer than he thought? Does he enjoy a fight? Did he somehow intend for this to happen, so that he himself would wind up being the skull and the company would live on? (That last theory was raised with me by a reader on Twitter, and I must say: I hadn't thought of it, but I don't think Logan would gamble that hard with his company.)

My vote is for some combination of all of it. Logan doesn't mind a fight, and he hates weakness even more than aggressive attack. Some part of him only respects people who come for him. That's not to say he won't attempt to crush them like bugs as I can only assume he will do with Kendall.

There are so many lessons to take away from this episode: It is futile to seek an immoral person's approval if you're not prepared to be immoral yourself. Even if your husband is a goober, you're going to feel bad if you offer to let your father destroy him. When you burn a clutch of secret papers, make sure you see them all go. Don't alienate the tall oddball; you never know what secrets he may be hiding.

And finally: If someone writes you a rap, at least try to look grateful.

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Succession season 3 episode 8 ending explained: is [spoiler] actually dead.

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Warning: Spoilers ahead for Succession season 3, episode 8!

The ending of Succession season 3, episode 8, “Chiantishire,” marked one of the show’s first momentous cliffhangers, leaving off with the possibility of the unthinkable death by drowning of Kendall Roy. So far, Succession has avoided the tropes of killing off major characters to introduce major twists and shock-factor surprises, but the final moments of “Chiantishire” may suggest otherwise. Succession isn’t in the business of ordering literal life-ending hits on enemies like in HBO’s Game of Thrones  or The Sopranos ; the show’s hits are exclusively business-based, but Kendall’s possible death by suicide, as shocking as it is, wouldn’t actually betray Succession ’s version of corporate America’s cut-throat brutality.

Succession season 3’s penultimate episode takes the Roy family to Italy in dreaded anticipation of their mother Caroline’s wedding to the status-climbing Peter Munion. All Roys, cousin Greg included, are in attendance, and the family is in disarray even before the nuptial procession has begun. Roman leaves to meet with Lukas Mattson about a possible dissolution of the GoJo deal, later saving their partnership as a faux “ equal merge ” with the tech mogul. Shiv, meanwhile, is gaslighting Tom about their relationship, Nicholas Braun's cousin Greg is attempting to flirt with an Italian contessa, and Connor proposes to Willa without a definite response. While these make for interesting side-bits in the episode, the crux of Succession ’s drama is focused on Logan refusing to let Kendall cash out and leave the company and the lewd photo between Roman and his psychosexual mentor Gerri.

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The final minutes of Succession season 3’s episode are some of the most tumultuous that the series has ever seen and could change the landscape of HBO’s show forever. In a crucial meeting between Waystar Royco and GoJo, Roman gets a text from Gerri congratulating him for saving the deal. Even though Gerri had just ended her relationship with Roman and their sexting, the young Roy decides to say “ thank you ” by sending a lewd photo in the meeting, only it’s mistakenly sent to Logan. While Logan repulsively berates Roman for being a “ sicko ” and considers firing Gerri, Succession pans back to Kendall lounging in the pool with his kids. When his kids go inside, Kendall is seen dropping his beer in the water and keeping his face under the surface for a prolonged time, with the episode ending on a possible indication of his death. Succession season 3 episode 8’s ending marks a change in scenery for every Roy family member, indicating a profound turning point in the roles and dynamics of Kendall, Roman, and Shiv.

Kendall Is Morbidly Simulating The Waiter’s Season 1 Death

Although Succession ’s season 3 Kendall cliffhanger suggests the series unthinkably killed of its most tragic character, all other signs point to Kendall still being alive. Succession has been building Kendall’s existential dread, depression, and suicidal tendencies throughout season 3, which is why it’s actually believable that Kendall could have died by drowning himself. After turning against his family, Kendall has positioned himself as the Roy martyr that truly indicates his death could soon conclude his character arc. Although Kendall has been lauded as the family’s screw-up for years before the series even began, nothing has haunted his character more than causing the death of a young waiter in Succession ’s season 1 finale . Kendall and Logan reconnect as the elder Roy covers up his son’s crimes, but he doesn’t let Kendall forget about it - as if Kendall could ever forget about it.

In season 3’s “Chiantishire,” Kendall invites Logan to the home he’s staying at, one that Logan thinks may be arranged as a way to poison him. Kendall proposes that Logan allow him to cash out on his shares for $2 billion with no shareholding or board position at the company, simply allowing him control over small assets like podcasting. Logan adamantly refuses and uses the knowledge of Kendall killing the waiter as leverage for why he can’t leave and why Kendall is no worse a man than himself. Knowing he lost, Jeremy Strong's character  is next seen in the pool with his children lounging outside, though they soon both move inside. Kendall is left outside in the pool alone, drunk on a floatie as he sits with the ghost of the worst day of his life. Kendall dips his head underwater, watches his beer bottle slowly float to the bottom, and begins letting air out as he stares down. It’s a morbid moment that seems to suggest Kendall has taken his own life. Still, with all that has been revealed in Succession season 3, episode 8, it’s more likely a situation where Kendall is just recreating the circumstances of the waiter’s death. Logan remarks at their dinner that it had to have only been a few minutes of the waiter being left underwater before he died, and Kendall ran away . The final moment of this episode seems to be Kendall recreating this moment for himself - feeling what the waiter felt as he was left abandoned to die underwater.

While this episode most likely doesn’t signal Kendall actually dying, his actions so forth in season 3 indicate the Roy sibling would still rather be dead, especially now that his options for leaving the company seem slim. Jeremy Strong’s recent Succession profile (via  The New Yorker ) published the same day as the possible death of Kendall on the series coincidentally seemed to hint that this is the end of his time on Succession . Paired with the article and the fact that Kendall was cleverly excluded from any of the promo clips for Succession season 3’s finale episode, the possibility of his death seems more plausible. But, it’s tough to believe this is how Kendall goes out.

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After being told by Comfry that ex- Globe reporters are starting a podcast on the “ curse of the Roys, ” ala the Kennedy curse, Succession sets up Kendall’s story to conclude by exposing the details of his involvement in the waiter’s death on the podcast. It’s no coincidence that the podcasters are comparing the Roys to the Kennedys, especially since Kendall’s involvement in the waiter’s death is eerily reminiscent of Ted Kennedy’s infamous Chappaquiddick incident in which his negligence led to his 28-year-old passenger drowning in the car. Kendall’s story seems to be coming to a close, but drowning himself in a pool with his children nearby won’t be the way Kendall tragically dies in Succession .

Roman’s Lewd Photo Slip-Up Won’t Cost Him His CEO Bid

While Kendall’s death would still be the most surprising moment of Succession ’s episode, Roman’s lewd photo fiasco is a very close second. Roman and Gerri were in the safest places they’ve been in yet, and the photo has just compromised their entire partnership. Gerri will want to maintain her position, which means she’s likely going to have to turn on Roman, especially with Shiv pressuring her to flip to secure her own CEO title. Roman was in the most secure position out of the three Roy children (Connor isn’t even a question) to take over, with Logan continually undermining Shiv and having no trust in Kendall. The inappropriate picture could cost Roman this allocation, even though he just helped secure one of Waystar Royco’s most important acquisitions to date. The problem for Roman after Succession  season 3  is the sexual harassment allegations that will come up from Shiv taking advantage of the situation. Considering Gerri had just told Roman to stop, this is a clear-cut case of sexual harassment.

This would typically be a situation that Logan could help get Roman out of in a second, just as he had with Kendall and the waiter, but this so happens to be following the most significant controversy in Royco’s history dealing with a pattern of sexual harassment. Logan is in the middle of paying off the DOJ to quiet the sexual harassment controversies, but with Roman, one of the top executives at the company, possibly being exposed for the same behavior, it suggests his CEO bid could be thrown away. At the same time, Gerri will use this as leverage for herself. She immediately turned on her lawyer persona once Shiv began questioning her. While the Gerri situation will be Logan’s most difficult task in protecting his children and the family name, Logan will undoubtedly find a way to keep Roman safe. His first reaction to the picture was that Roman was a “ sicko, ” and he wanted to fire Gerri, not that Roman was out. Kendall killed someone and was still in the running for CEO. Logan will find a way to cover it up like he always has; he just has to ensure it doesn’t screw them out of the GoJo deal.

Shiv Blackmailing Gerri Proves She Plays Checkers, Not Chess

While Shiv was initially under the mindset that she was going to become CEO, Succession keeps suggesting she’s not tactically sly or brutal enough for the position. Logan, Roman, Kendall, and Gerri are playing chess in relation to their positions and how to screw over their opponents. They’re always one step ahead while waiting for their enemies to take themselves out before they jump on the offense. Succession having Shiv immediately betray Roman and use the lewd photo fiasco to bring down both her brother and Gerri seems desperate, and it's a move that Logan could see right through. Logan asks Shiv if this has happened before, and she says it’s a pattern and a problem, which is clearly just Shiv trying to regain her favoritism with Logan over Roman, who has most recently held the top spot during the GoJo deal. Logan calls her “Pinkie,” and she thinks she’s back on top, but really, she’s shooting herself in the foot.

Shiv should have just waited for Roman and Gerri to ruin their positions on their own - it was happening either way. By immediately beginning to blackmail Gerri, Shiv is creating another enemy in a game where she’s the underdog. Considering how pissed off Logan is about Roman’s relationship with Gerri and the recent history of sexual harassment fiascos at Royco in Succession season 2 , this was going to hurt Gerri and Roman either way. She should have just waited for them to screw themselves over, but Shiv getting involved just looks like a desperate play at an upper hand.

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The Real C.E.O. of “Succession”

When Jesse Armstrong, the writer and creator of the HBO series “ Succession ,” arrived on set at Amerigo Vespucci Airport, in Florence, one morning in June, he was faced with an extravagant decision. The scene to be shot was from the first episode of Season 3, in which various members of the Roy family—the dysfunctional media dynasty whose power struggles the show acidly chronicles—have just disembarked from the yacht on which, in the Season 2 finale, they bobbed in gilded captivity. Two planes had been positioned together on the tarmac: a Boeing 737, rented at a price of more than a hundred thousand dollars, and a smaller Falcon business jet. Tracks had been laid for a dolly shot. The temperature was already climbing into the eighties, and a crew of more than two hundred people bustled about the runway, perspiring in high-visibility vests.

The scene hinged on a surprise. In the final moments of the previous episode, Logan Roy, the volatile patriarch, was aboard the yacht, watching a live stream of Kendall Roy, one of his four ambitious offspring, at a press conference in New York, where he had been sent to publicly shoulder the consequences of a scandal in the cruise-ship division of Waystar Royco, the family conglomerate. Instead of offering himself up as a sacrifice, however, Kendall had stuck the knife into his father. The new season, which begins airing in October, picks up the story moments later, with Logan, the rest of the family, and Logan’s most loyal executives still in Europe, calculating how to counter Kendall’s move.

“It’s a moment of indecision,” Armstrong said of the tarmac scene, above the drone of idling jet engines. Though the previous season ended with a closeup of an inscrutable smile on Logan’s face, “this is the moment at which you get the sense that Logan is worried.” In the new script, Logan chooses to divide his forces into two camps: one party will return to America while he and others fly elsewhere. Armstrong’s decision that morning involved the placement of the two rented planes, which airport staff had parked close together. As he put it to me, his concern was that having two planes visible at the outset of the scene would preëmpt the story: “I think a viewer’s sense would be: ‘They can all travel together on the big plane. So why is there a second plane?’ ”

An embarrassment of airplanes: a very “Succession” problem. The show, a word-of-mouth hit, is known for its faithful depiction of the bountiful resources and anesthetized habits of the very wealthy. On an excursion from the yacht in Croatia, Logan’s son-in-law, Tom Wambsgans, instructs the pilot of a small boat, “Next cove, please, Julius,” so that he and his wife, Shiv, can be ferried to a sublime coastal spot for the unhappiest picnic ever. Armstrong—whose display of personal indulgence, in spite of his professional success, so far extends only to showing up to the Season 3 writers’ room in an extremely nice blue cashmere sweater—is a good-natured stickler for verisimilitude. The playwright Lucy Prebble, who is one of the show’s writers, recalls “someone coming in and saying, ‘We can’t have two helicopters,’ and noting how many tens of thousands of dollars they cost, and Jesse just saying, in a really relaxed way, ‘I think we probably need two.’ ” “Succession” documents wealth but it does not fetishize it, with the possible exception of a backless wool turtleneck dress worn by Shiv in an episode of Season 2; the garment was so delectably impractical that it inspired a flurry of online shopping. In general, the show makes affluence look vaguely diseased, and emphasizes the ways in which even the very rich cannot be entirely insulated from the drudgery of inconvenience. Mark Mylod, who has directed close to half the episodes of “Succession,” and is also an executive producer, told me, “We try to find situations where the characters cannot control the world, whether the weather’s bad or they are stuck in traffic.” For last season’s finale, Mylod filmed scenes on the yacht in the middle of the day, beneath harsh, overhead sunlight, in order to make the characters seem uncomfortably exposed, physically and emotionally. When, in the same episode, Logan is obliged to conduct a humbling video call with one of his corporation’s major shareholders, it is not from the comfort of his Audi but, rather, from the grim patio of a service station on a busy highway.

At the Florence terminal, the drawbacks of private plane travel—being ferried in cramped vans to wait on a scorching, gritty, noisy airport apron, as opposed to sharing a large, air-conditioned terminal with commercial passengers—were identical to the drawbacks of shooting high-end television in an inhospitable location. The actors clutched their scripts while members of the hair-and-makeup team attended to them, attempting to keep sweat and grime in abeyance. Will Tracy and Tony Roche, two of the show’s writers, hid under a small awning, using their phones to read Armstrong’s script for a forthcoming episode. Given the prevailing discomfort, Armstrong had to weigh how much of a disruption it was going to be creatively, physically, and emotionally to preserve the revelation of a second plane. In consultation with Mylod, who was directing the episode, a decision was reached not to compromise narrative integrity: the Falcon would be towed out of sight. To Armstrong’s relief, a driver on a small white tug had removed the offending plane within fifteen minutes. “I thought it was going to be a huge deal to move a plane,” Armstrong told me, once the Falcon had been shunted aside. He sounded amused, even a little wondering. “But, luckily, it took just one little man.”

The table read of the pilot episode of “Succession” took place in Manhattan on November 8, 2016: Election Day. That evening, the cast and the rest of the team gathered at the home of Adam McKay —an executive producer of the show, and the director of the pilot—for a party that was expected to celebrate the victory of Hillary Clinton . Matthew Macfadyen, the British actor who plays Tom Wambsgans, told me, “We watched the results come in, and everyone wandered off into the night—good for storytelling, bad for humanity.” Armstrong’s most significant memory of the occasion was how quickly attendees accommodated to what initially seemed to be earth-shattering news. “It was such a shock—then five, ten minutes later, everyone’s living in a new reality,” he said. Even in calamity, he observed, many people are “quite oriented towards how it affects them, and what they will do next.”

The first episodes of “Succession,” which aired in the summer of 2018, established an elliptical relationship to contemporary reality: there would be no specific references to Trump . But, with the U.S. government turned over to a leader with a transparently chaotic, transactional, and rapacious nature, the show met the national mood. “Succession” would have been equally entertaining had Hillary Clinton become President, but it wouldn’t have felt so timely if it hadn’t appeared after the election of Trump—a candidacy championed by Fox News , whose core strategy of chasing ratings by spreading fear is not dissimilar to that of ATN, the news organization owned by Waystar Royco. The opening credit sequence of “Succession” includes a cheeky shot of an ATN news ticker; in Season 2, it reads, “ gender fluid illegals may be entering the country ‘twice .’ ”

For some viewers, Armstrong’s thoroughgoing commitment to a curdled view of humanity—as the Roys jockey for position, they trade such endearments as “the cunt of Monte Cristo”—made the show at once intolerable and irresistible. “ I hate everyone on ‘Succession’ and I can’t stop watching, ” a typical headline read. The show is so unsettling, in part, because it offers no vantage points exterior to its scrupulously rendered universe—there is no outsider figure who is easier to identify with than the amoral protagonists. The Roy family’s outsider, Cousin Greg , is as calculating as any member of the clan with whom he seeks to ingratiate himself. Culture critics have popularized the term “wealth porn” to characterize shows, such as “ Billions ” or “ Gossip Girl ,” that lavish attention on the consumption habits of the absurdly wealthy. But, if the shiny surface of “Succession” bears a relation to pornography, it is less because it titillates than because it partakes of pornography’s deadening relentlessness.

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“Succession” also withholds cheap catharsis. Kendall’s backsliding with drugs is only the most overt example of the show’s gothic sensibility: all the Roys have been poisoned by the toxic nature of the family fortune, and Armstrong refuses to impose on them the kind of artificial personal growth that fosters an easy bond with the audience. The closest that “Succession” has come to giving its characters a respite from their crabbed emotional confinement is when Kendall, at a particularly low ebb, begs Shiv for a hug. She awkwardly complies, but only after saying in astonishment, “Give you a hug ?”

Given the care that Armstrong puts into making “Succession” a complex viewing experience, he is reluctant to explicate the show too much, as if it were reducible to a tidy set of themes and intentions. Nevertheless, his ambitions in “Succession” are driven not by a voyeuristic fascination with the rich—or by a righteous desire to expose the perfidies of inequity—but by a wish to tell, through the specific medium of a contemporary media dynasty, a more universal story about power and family relations, and to show how those forces can torque an individual’s humanity. It’s not so much “Billions” as “ Buddenbrooks ,” with more money and less grain. In one of a series of conversations during the making of Season 3, Armstrong told me, “One of the things that strikes me when I’ve read about these families—whether it be the Maxwells or the Redstones or the Julio-Claudians—is that, when you get that combination of money, power, and family relations, things get so complicated that you can justify actions to yourself that are pretty unhealthy to your well-being as a human being. Or you don’t even need to justify them, because the actions are baked into your being.” The infighting can become so darkly satisfying that it consumes one’s life: “For people who come from powerful families, there is nothing in life quite as interesting as being at court.” Indeed, almost nobody in a rich family steps away from the drama. “For these people to be excluded from the flame of money and power, I think, would feel a bit like death,” Armstrong said.

Armstrong’s interest in how human beings work—in what they say, and what they leave unsaid—is combined with a gift for comic dialogue that bounces from the demotic to the lewd to the baroque. Upon arriving at the family’s Hamptons estate, Logan demands that the doors be opened, noting, “It smells like the cheesemonger died and left his dick in the Brie.” When Cousin Greg is grilled at a congressional hearing, he responds to one question by saying, “Uh, if it is to be said, so it be, so it is”—a tortured circumvention of “Yes.” The uneasy simultaneity of comedy and drama that “Succession” depends on is a consequence of Armstrong’s unwillingness to save his characters from themselves. The writer and director Chris Morris, on whose recent movie “The Day Shall Come” Armstrong worked as a writer, told me, “Each of the characters in ‘Succession’ gives you the capacity to hope that they might snap out of the trap of their own existence. Jesse is the perfect sadist, because he is horrible to each one in turn, and yet he offers the audience just enough to hope that the characters might this time not disgrace themselves in the way that we kind of know they will. It is basically like a cat playing with a mouse and not killing it.”

A certain pitilessness, Armstrong told me, is not a bad thing for a work of fiction to have. “How can you be true about human beings?” he said. “That is a preoccupation.” He went on, “Without getting too highfalutin, there’s that quote from Marx, in ‘ The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte ,’ where he says men and women make their own history, but not the circumstances of their own making.” (The original text is less taut: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”) Armstrong continued, “For me, a lot of the art and the work of the show is in that territory between what’s history in the broadest sense, what’s family history, what’s tradition, and what’s the room for one’s own choices, and your own making of your life and your world. And there’s a gap there, which that mysterious thing about human personality fills.”

Whether Armstrong is on set at one of the foreign locales that give “Succession” its glossy atmosphere of sterile, moneyed internationalism or at Silvercup Studios in Queens—where the set of Logan Roy’s Fifth Avenue apartment, modelled on the mansion owned by the Council on Foreign Relations, is maintained—he is “like the mayor of a small town,” Jon Brown, a writer for the show, told me. Brown recalled, “I was in his office one day, and he was trying to write an episode, and someone came in and said, ‘Jesse, the caterers have made an ice sculpture, and they would like you to come and look at it,’ and Jesse had to put his episode down to go and look at it. He has these civic duties to keep everyone happy.”

When Armstrong is not issuing the equivalent of mayoral proclamations, he works in a rented room in a converted department store in Brixton, a neighborhood in South London. The office is spacious and airy but modestly equipped, with a wall of bookshelves and a teakettle on a side table. He keeps a carton of milk on the window ledge outside, like a student. “It feels a bit profligate having a whole fridge just for one pint of milk,” he said when I visited. His desk faces a window that overlooks a commuter railway. When I remarked that the clatter of passing trains must distract him, Armstrong looked surprised, as if he’d never noticed it before. “If you’d asked me if I could hear the trains from my office, I would have told you, ‘I don’t think so,’ ” he said. “I’d be a terrible—or brilliant—estate agent.”

Armstrong, who is fifty, has a scruff of salt-and-pepper beard that comes and goes, intelligent brown eyes that he often closes in concentration when speaking, and a measured voice that is lightly inflected with the accent of Shropshire, in the West Midlands, where he grew up. He is as affable as the characters on “Succession” are disagreeable. Prestige TV is prime territory for assholery, and the writers’ rooms of some of the best shows of recent decades have been arenas for conflict. Matthew Weiner, the creator of “ Mad Men ,” was called “an emotional terrorist” by a former writer on the show. (“I was a very demanding boss,” he later told the New York Times .) When Aaron Sorkin , the creator of “ The West Wing ,” was accused of yelling at a female writer on his HBO series “ The Newsroom ,” he responded that writers’-room arguments are “not only common, they are encouraged.”

This is not Armstrong’s style: he prefers to engender creativity with stability. “I’ve never seen him lose his temper,” Jon Brown told me. The show employs ten staff writers, half of them British and half American, and, unusually for a comedy, there is a roughly equal proportion of men to women. Even when the show has been in production and Armstrong, in addition to his other duties, has been writing the final two episodes of the season, he has remained equanimous. Brown recalled, “When we were in Scotland filming last season, there was a time when he asked me and Tony Roche to stop talking, so he could concentrate. Me and Tony were, like, ‘Fucking hell, someone’s grumpy.’ And then, in an hour, Jesse was, like, ‘You can talk again.’ ”

Francesca Gardiner, one of the writers of Season 3, said of her boss, “He’s sort of cool-dorky.” Armstrong bakes. He’s been a vegetarian—with occasional excursions into fish—since his youth. He met his wife, who works for the National Health Service, when they were in college, at the University of Manchester. They have two children and have lived in the same unflashy part of South London for almost three decades. When I asked if he had plans to upgrade his domestic space, he said, “We might do a new kitchen. So that will be corrupting.” Jeremy Strong, who plays Kendall Roy, told me, “I think it was Flaubert who said, ‘I want to live the quiet, ordered life of the bourgeoisie so that I can be violent and original in my work.’ That’s Jesse.”

Meticulous research goes into making “Succession” feel true to the rarefied world it portrays. What kind of overcoat would Logan Roy wear? A trick question: a mogul being perpetually shuttled from corner suite to climate-controlled limousine to luxury apartment doesn’t need an overcoat, no matter how cold it gets. Each of the staff writers is tasked with exploring a different dimension of the “Succession” world—which is, Armstrong acknowledges, overwhelmingly white and privileged. “We are working to reflect the world as it is, and not as we would wish it to be,” he said. “There’s another sort of show in which edging the world a bit towards what one would want it to be doesn’t hurt the show at all, whereas our show is critical-satirical—we need to portray that very particular and very powerful bit of the world it is concerned with quite precisely.” Last season, it fell to Susan Soon He Stanton to conduct an inquiry into the ministrations provided by the staff of a luxury yacht. She reported back that attendants wipe specks of powder from the rim of a guest’s makeup compact and print out copies of the daily newspapers every morning, as if they had been freshly fetched from a terrestrial newsstand. Jon Brown took a deep, if not hands-on, dive into the kind of élite sex club that serves as the setting for Tom Wambsgans’s bachelor party in Season 1. In an early draft of the scene, Brown incorporated an incident that he’d learned about during his investigations, in which an orgy room’s music speakers failed, making the slapping sound of flesh on flesh wetly audible. “After about one second, someone shouted, ‘Put the fucking music on,’ because even they didn’t want to hear how disgusting it was,” he told me. Armstrong decided to spare Tom that particular degradation, perhaps because he would soon put him through a humiliation that deliberately echoes the kind of sadistic jokes Josef Stalin used to play on party guests. At a dinner at a corporate retreat in Hungary, Logan, determined to stop leaks to the press, invents Boar on the Floor, a game in which executives suspected of betrayal are forced to crawl and chase sausages on the parquetry. “No half-hearted oink!” he demands.

As background for “Succession,” Armstrong and his writers loyally read the Financial Times , and they have plowed through a library’s worth of media biographies. They took a close look at “ Crime and Punishment ,” in order to deepen their depiction of Kendall’s inner turmoil, and consulted histories of ancient Rome in the hope that understanding the relationship between Nero and his freedman Sporus—whom the Emperor commanded be castrated, before undergoing a sham marriage ceremony with him—might illuminate the dynamic between Tom and Cousin Greg. The show has also hired such literary consultants as Gary Shteyngart, the novelist whose 2018 book, “ Lake Success ,” also depicts the lives of the super-rich in New York; among other things, Shteyngart discussed with the “Succession” team the delusionary psychology of hedge funders who are convinced that their wealth will protect them from the consequences of climate change. Tom Holland, the author of wide-lens books about ancient and medieval history, spoke about Caligula and other dissolute Roman leaders.

Last year, Brown told me, Armstrong came into the writers’ room with a big notion about the Epic of Gilgamesh . “I am fucked if I have any idea what the Epic of Gilgamesh is,” Brown said. “But if it makes you feel like you deserve your Emmy a little more, knock yourself out.” Armstrong assured me, “I have not read the Epic of Gilgamesh. I have probably listened to an ‘In Our Time’ podcast about it.” This lapse notwithstanding, Armstrong is a serious reader. Once, when I asked him which books he’d read recently, he mentioned the memoirs of Jack Straw , the Labour Party politician who served as a Member of Parliament and as Lord Chancellor; Robert Draper’s book about the run-up to the Iraq War; “ A Little History of Poetry ,” by John Carey; and the short stories of Jean Stafford.

Armstrong is disciplined not only in his reading. At the outset of writing Season 3, he started taking early-morning swims at Brockwell Lido, an unheated outdoor pool in London; as winter closed in, he updated his collaborators with slightly smug daily reports about the increasingly frigid water temperatures. Certain aspects of Armstrong’s work habits suggest a need to exert control. In the fall of 2019, the writers’ room for Season 3 was set up in a modern office building in Victoria. Dismayed to discover that he could not personally adjust the thermostat, Armstrong drew a picture of one set to 21.5°C—about 70°F—and put it on the wall. “You are meant to have a slightly cooler room for comedy,” he told me. “Standups always like the room cold, and if you’re shooting a sitcom live you want it a little bit chilly for the audience. I don’t know why—you’d have to ask a combination of an evolutionary psychologist and a building-maintenance man.” The room in Victoria also lacked a clock, and so, on a whiteboard featuring charts denoting each character’s development episode by episode, Armstrong drew a clock set to 2:25 p.m. It’s a hopeful time of day for a TV writer, he told me, since the room officially wraps up at 3:30  p.m .: “It’s almost there—not painful, watch-checking time, but nice to be toward the end of the day.”

When the show is in development, Armstrong’s preferred practice is to begin the day with each writer, in turn, giving an account of what she or he did the previous night, a process that can last as long as an hour. Will Tracy told me, “We go round the room clockwise, and everyone says what they ate for dinner, what bad movie they watched on TV, how much sleep they got—the more mundane, the funnier and better. At first, I thought this was very odd, but I immediately noticed that it bonded the writers—we developed a kind of group rapport very quickly.” Tracy went on, “And then all kinds of stuff from those evening recaps weaseled their way into the show. Someone will mention something about a friend who lived on Staten Island and had to commute into New York, and all of a sudden there’s a little line in the script about how Greg is living on Staten Island, and he’s coming in on the ferry every day and it’s a nightmare.” (A sneer from Tom: “Dude, why stop at the ferry? Just come in from Cleveland on the Greyhound.”)

Personal preoccupations, or nuggets of family history, find their way into the scripts, along with the writers’ research. The unfolding disaster of “Sands”—the dreadful play written by Willa Ferreyra, the girlfriend of Logan’s eldest son, Connor Roy—is informed by Armstrong’s impatience with the experience of theatregoing. “I am almost phobic about fearing that I am going to be bored, and in the theatre it’s a bit rude to leave, so I find that increases my anxiety about being bored to high levels,” he told me. The story line is enhanced by the presence in the writers’ room of some acclaimed playwrights, including Lucy Prebble and Susan Soon He Stanton. When, in an episode partially written by Stanton, Shiv meets Logan for a post-theatre supper and asks him how he enjoyed the play, his weary reply is “You know—people pretending to be people.”

When I visited the writers’ room after hours one afternoon in late 2019, I peeked at the whiteboards, along with other visual evidence of the group’s creative discussions, such as photocopied images of paintings, by Goya and Rubens, of Saturn devouring his son. There was a chart documenting a group competition to predict the results of the recent U.K. general election, which had secured Boris Johnson ’s position as the country’s Prime Minister (to the dismay of the liberal intelligentsia of London, among other constituencies). The clear winner was Armstrong, who had predicted a Conservative margin of victory far greater than even the most pessimistic of his collaborators thought possible. “One of the privileges of doing a show like this is that you are able to think about the world with some other smart people,” he told me. “Do you know that W. H. Auden quote—‘Poetry makes nothing happen’? To some extent, poetry can stand in for this kind of work as well. I don’t suppose it is going to have any direct influence on the world. But it is still a way of being in it, and feeling like you are part of it, instead of entirely being acted upon.”

More than a decade before Armstrong wrote the pilot of “Succession,” he was commissioned to write a documentary-style teleplay set at a family dinner party celebrating Rupert Murdoch ’s eightieth birthday. That project didn’t get far off the ground, but it did come to the attention of Frank Rich, the former New York Times columnist who is now an HBO producer. That and other Armstrong scripts impressed the network enough to green-light “Succession,” which takes inspiration not only from the Murdoch dynasty but also from other media families, including the Maxwells and the Redstones. Among Armstrong’s unmade but most admired projects is a bio-pic of Lee Atwater , the scabrous Republican strategist who helped elect George H. W. Bush to be Ronald Reagan’s successor as President. “It’s morning in America . . . and I tell you what, I have morning fucking wood,” Armstrong’s Atwater announces on page 1. Rich described the script to me as “a history of right-wing politics up to that time, with a comic touch,” adding, “I couldn’t believe this British writer could write such a compelling piece about American politics.”

At first glance, it might seem surprising that “Succession”—a show saturated in knowing detail about Manhattan, even if it is concerned with a global corporate business—was conceived by a British showrunner and is the product of a writers’ room in London. The Roys, though, have British roots: Logan is from a working-class Scottish background, and the mother of the younger Roy children, Caroline, is a frosty English aristocrat. Armstrong told me that in considering Caroline’s class background he had in mind someone like Lady Caroline Blackwood, the author and the daughter of the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, who was married to both Robert Lowell and Lucian Freud. The barb-trading discourse of the family, and also its aversion to the expression of emotion, are recognizable as culturally inherited traits. When Kendall visits his mother and tries to confide in her late one night, she recommends that they wait until morning, so they can talk “over an egg,” then scarpers before he rises. Brian Cox, who plays Logan—and who, like his character, was born in Dundee, Scotland—has an apartment in London, and when I met him at a café in Primrose Hill he told me, “The show has a kind of Swiftian satire. It’s in the vibe of this country.”

The “Succession” scripts are peppered with the type of memorably lurid cursing that another British writer, Armando Iannucci , helped make a hallmark of HBO, with “ Veep .” Armstrong has a rule: an insult “should be at least as expressive of who the character uttering it is as it is eloquent, or ineloquent, about its target.” At one point, Kendall warns Stewy, a onetime school friend turned business rival, “I will come to you at night with a razor blade, and I will cut your fucking dick off”; Stewy airily replies, “And then push it up your cunt until poo-poo pops out of my nose hole.” But the show’s linguistic ingenuity extends well beyond scatology. The characters in “Succession” often employ weirdly original turns of phrase, as if they were generating on the spot the inventive speech of an individual caught between two cultures. When Tom learns that Cousin Greg is driving his grandpa from Canada to New York, he taunts, “Canada? With the health care and the ennui?” When the mischievous Roman Roy returns from a brief corporate posting in the sticks, he gives Logan’s butler an almost Falstaffian greeting: “Hail, my fellow toiler man, I have returned from real America, bearing the gift of sight.”

Will Tracy told me, “Jesse has a very particular kind of phraseology for the way people speak—even particular obscenities or analogies. The characters will use a kind of dialogue that makes me think, I’ve never really heard somebody speak that way. But it feels real, and not like a TV writer writing a line of what feels like dialogue.” Tracy, who is American, recalled that, when he first heard certain phrases in the writers’ room, he assumed that they were Britishisms. “But it turns out they are just Jesse-isms,” he said. “Like, he’ll say, ‘Tom is completely freaking out—he’s completely shit his whack.’ I said, ‘Is that a British thing?’ Jesse said yeah, but Tony and Georgia and Jon said no . Jesse thought that it was a thing.” The phrase will be introduced to the lexicon in an upcoming episode.

Armstrong has been interested in America since he was a teen-ager growing up in Oswestry, a market town on the border with Wales. His father, David, was a high-school English teacher who later turned to writing crime fiction; his mother, Julia, worked at nursery schools. Armstrong told me, “Oswestry’s a bit in the middle of nowhere—quite tough, and quite English, in the way border towns are.” In 2013, he made a short film, “No Kaddish in Carmarthen,” centered on Gwyn, a fifteen-year-old Welsh high schooler with a fascination for Woody Allen , who adopts black-rimmed non-prescription glasses and claims to be Jewish. “Mam’s a Methodist,” Gwyn says. “It’s the same thing—it’s similar.” Armstrong calls the film a “short-story version of an element of my youth.” His parents were gently countercultural, in a health-food-and-alternative-energy kind of way; they were also eager to expose Armstrong and his younger sister, who is now a graphic designer, to the world beyond their provincial town, with family trips to Greece and Tunisia.

In the spring of 1990, Armstrong and a friend took a budget trip to New York City, where they crashed on the couch of some Cooper Union students whom Armstrong had met while backpacking in Europe. “We walked around and had the tops of our heads blown off, just seeing what the city was like,” Armstrong told me. Upon returning home, he matriculated at the University of Manchester, ninety minutes northeast of Oswestry. He chose the university partly because it had an excellent American Studies department, and partly because the city had a vibrant cultural scene, with the celebrated Haçienda night club having hosted such bands as the Smiths and New Order. “When I was choosing where to go to university, we used to try to go to the Haçienda, and we were always turned away,” Armstrong said. “I felt like if I went to the university I could try more frequently, at least.”

As part of his degree, Armstrong spent a year at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Student life there was bracingly political in a way that Manchester at the time was not, and Armstrong contributed to the school’s daily newspaper. But rural Massachusetts felt much less sophisticated. “I’d never before seen people carrying around four cans of beer, like they’d captured some amazing trophy,” he recalled. He drew on the experience of his year abroad for an unrealized dramatic-comedy script in which two friends—a nerdy white guy from UMass and an affluent Black graduate of Amherst College—pool their resources to buy a cocoa plantation in a fictional African country, planning to make bespoke chocolate for American hipsters.

After college, Armstrong worked for two years in Westminster, London’s political district, as an assistant to Doug Henderson, a Member of Parliament and the shadow minister of home affairs for the opposition Labour Party. “We had a weirdly broad brief—everything from the Channel Islands to dangerous dogs to asylum and immigration,” Armstrong recalled. He did not take to the corridors of power; at the 1996 Labour Party conference, held in Blackpool, he so dreaded the prospect of schmoozing at parties that he spent his evenings feeding coins into video games at the amusement arcades on the pier. He was less interested in exercising influence and more interested in noting the quirks of those who held it, such as Ann Widdecombe, a right-wing politician whose office had two posters on display: an anti-abortion image of a fetus, and an image of Garfield, the cartoon cat, bearing the legend “If you want to look thinner, hang out with people fatter than you.” Armstrong told me, “She didn’t mean them to relate to each other, but to see them together was intriguing.” Though he disliked Westminster, the experience helped him as a writer on “The Thick of It,” a profane satire of British politics created by Armando Iannucci.

At the University of Manchester, Armstrong had become close friends with Sam Bain, a classmate from a creative-writing course. Bain, a privately educated Londoner, told me that he was interested by Armstrong’s quite different background. “He wrote one short story that had a character working on a building site,” Bain said. “It took me a while to realize that it was based on his own experience.” After Armstrong abandoned politics, he and Bain began regularly collaborating on comedy scripts. Armstrong discovered that having a writing partner was an amenable way to live. “There’s this third entity, Bain & Armstrong Industries, so, when you stop work and go home, you feel more like you’ve gone home from work than you do when you are working solo,” Armstrong said. “And you have got somebody who is exactly as interested as you are in your career.”

Their first big show, a British reboot of the U.S. sitcom “That ’70s Show,” was a flop. But in 2003 they had a breakout success as the co-creators and principal writers of “Peep Show,” a sitcom about sad-sack flatmates: Mark, a bank-loan officer, and Jeremy, a failed musician. The scripts, instead of featuring snappy dialogue, were anchored by the interior monologues of the two protagonists, from whose perspective scenes were often shot. The show, which ran for nine seasons, is widely considered to be a British comedy classic; Chris Morris told me that Armstrong and Bain became known as “the ultimate word in flawed male psychology.” One celebrated episode is predicated on Armstrong’s aversion to theatre: Mark is drafted to join Jeremy on a double date to a low-budget play, and they endure the experience as if undergoing a dreadful medical experiment. “When do we get to go out?” Jeremy whispers to Mark as they sit between their dates. Mark, looking crucified, replies, “As far as I can make out, we get to go out for a bit in an hour, and then we have to come back for two hours .”

Armstrong’s background in half-hour comedies can be detected in the economy of the “Succession” scripts, and in the premium the show places on keeping things lively. “I still think a half hour of comedy is the most intensive form of writing you can do,” he said. Kieran Culkin, who plays Roman, told me that Armstrong is allergic to shtick: “If it’s just a little bit—half an inch—too far-leaning into something, he’s going to catch it. On any other show, people would be, like, ‘Oh, that’s funny, let’s do that.’ And he’ll always be the voice of reason: ‘Yes, it’s funny, yes, it’s great, but it doesn’t work.’ ”

Armstrong rejects the privileging of drama over comedy, and happily calls “Succession” a satire. But the characters are far more complicated individuals than are likely to be found in a sitcom; their stunted interiority is explored with a combination of empathy and dispassion. Such nuance is possible, in no small part, because of the actors playing these roles. Brian Cox is a Shakespeare veteran, as is Sarah Snook, who told me that playing Shiv had helped her understand the role of Cordelia, in “King Lear,” rather than the other way around. “I felt like I understood the weight of familial responsibility, and the love and compassion a daughter can have for a father and leader, though he may be difficult,” Snook said. Jeremy Strong approaches Kendall with an immersive rigor, not with the audience-pleasing instincts of a standup. Strong told me that, during the filming of the pilot, he asked Armstrong at one point whether they could spend some extra time exploring Kendall’s history. “Jesse said, ‘Let me sit with this for a minute,’ and I went and got some lunch, and then twenty minutes later I got an e-mail entitled ‘Window Rumination.’ It was a fully realized monologue—a memory he’d created of Kendall visiting the office when he was six years old. He was like this little prince in the office, and everyone was adoring of him and smiling, and he kind of wandered off a little too far, and there was this huge guy, a security guard, who didn’t know who he was, and it sort of escalated, and this six-year-old Kendall was powerless and tongue-tied, until his father came and found him. It was a poignant and beautiful piece of writing, and, to me, central to this character’s struggle and experience—being lost in this oceanic moment and being saved by his father’s embrace.” The scene didn’t make it into the pilot, “but it’s all embedded,” Strong told me. “It was an amazing experience of finding this character together.”

Armstrong told me that his ability to empathize with the Roys’ flaws is likely connected to his having reached an age at which “you’re more aware of the tragic things that can happen to yourself, and other people.” He went on, “So-called dark or serious things can still be funny, but, as you get older, more terrible things happen to more people you know. The things you laughed at as a young person—you’d better be careful, because they could happen to you tomorrow. With jokes about old people wearing nappies, or infirmity—what are you laughing at? It’s going to be you, or your mum and dad, tomorrow. There’s nothing funny about that, and, if you think there is, you had better wonder about who is the subject of that joke.”

In early 2020, when it became clear that the filming of Season 3 would not begin that April, as planned, Armstrong hunkered down in South London. Around that time, he wrote me an e-mail that captured the tenor of the city: “Panic buying is still at the embarrassed, English, ‘what, I always buy this many lentils’ stage.” He told me that it remained to be seen whether current events would make it into the show “as a whiff or a stench.” By the spring, the crisis had come into darker focus: Mark Blum, the actor who played the cruise-division executive Bill Lockhart in Seasons 1 and 2, had died from covid -19 in New York City.

Weeks of delays turned into months. HBO executives were telling him to wait, Armstrong reported, “rather than have Logan do a series of Webinars we can put out on HBO Max.” During the course of the next few months, the show’s executive producer, Scott Ferguson, figured out the logistics of layering a covid -19 safety unit on top of the regular production crew, at a cost of millions of extra dollars. Production finally resumed, in New York City, in November. In the end, Armstrong decided not to incorporate the pandemic into the plot. This time, the characters’ habitual jetting around may seem even more exorbitant than usual.

The sequence at the Florence airport was filmed late in the shoot—an aberration. Armstrong prefers to film “Succession” in order. Although he begins the first day of production with a firm idea of where his characters will end up, their precise route is adjusted and refined along the way. In Florence, some dialogue was written on the spot, under the awning.

The dates of the airport shoot were dictated by location choices for the concluding episodes, which were to be set in the Tuscan countryside and around the Northern Italian lakes—landscapes of such loveliness that even the pitiless eye of Mark Mylod would have a hard time remaining jaundiced. At the Florence airport, Ferguson told me, “Quite honestly, I think every season Jesse has wanted to go to Italy. He also wanted a yacht the first season. So last season we got the yacht, and Italy is the second white whale.”

In Italy, Armstrong was showing a tentative degree of confidence that the season would achieve what he had hoped for it. At the airport, we went into a hangar and retired to what he referred to as his “office”: a solitary chair set up by a wall. “With any project, you go through waves of anxiety,” he told me. “I had moments of ‘Fuck, did we ever say that thing that we intended to say?’ ” He went on, “They say sometimes tennis players can see the ball quite big, and they feel like everything feels full of opportunity, and sometimes it will feel small, and nothing’s coming together. Sometimes you feel, ‘Oh, yes, I can do this , and now I can go there , and this sets up this .’ That sense of ‘I think I know what everyone’s thinking—I can see this room is full of all these people, and they all have their own perspectives, and I can feel them all.’ Then it feels full of possibility. I’m just wandering around the party, hearing what Gerri’s saying to Karl. That’s a fun feeling.”

For the scenes shot in Tuscany, Armstrong wanted to play with the E. M. Forster version of the region—or, at least, with the visual fantasies promulgated by the popular Merchant Ivory film adaptation of “ A Room with a View .” He said, “I just felt it was a fun thing that British people do—that relationship to Tuscany, and those British vibrations of quite complicated snobbery about an area that has a certain resonance of cultural value for the British.” Even if American viewers didn’t pick up on all the ways in which “Succession” smuggles observations about British class into the narrative, he said, they would respond to the depiction if it rang true.

Armstrong hadn’t had much time to himself since arriving in Florence, he said, though he had taken a walk from his hotel to visit the Palazzo Vecchio, which in the sixteenth century was the seat of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici. With international tourism all but halted, the exquisite city, marked by monuments to the dynastic powers that held sway five hundred years ago, was quieter and emptier than it had been in decades. Armstrong joked, “It’s a little bit Logan Roy—‘Close Florence, I’m coming through.’ ”

After two days at the airport, the production moved south, to the Val d’Orcia. Hundreds of crew members were scattered around villas and in hotels in various small towns. Armstrong landed in Pienza, a hilltop settlement built according to Renaissance principles of town planning at the order of Pope Pius II, a scion of Sienese nobility. Pienza’s narrow pedestrian streets were scented with jasmine and pecorino, and its museums, former palazzi overlooking the valley, were empty. In the evening, the piping voices of a handful of Italian children playing in the town square echoed against the travertine façade of the cathedral. Then, when the clock struck eleven, a nationwide curfew began, and the town fell as silent as it would have been in the dark of a fifteenth-century night.

The first day in the Tuscan countryside, a scene from the penultimate episode was being shot, featuring Sarah Snook and Matthew Macfadyen as Shiv and Tom. The setting was Bagno Vignoni, an ancient spa settlement, and showed the couple seated at a café, then walking together around a sixteenth-century bathing pool in the center of the village. It was a successor scene, Armstrong told me, to their brutal picnic in the final episode of Season 2, in which Tom confesses to Shiv, “I wonder if the sad I’d be without you would be less than the sad I get from being with you.” Armstrong said, “I saw this as ‘What’s the next accommodation they will come to?’ It’s an intimate scene in which they either are frank with each other or appear to be trying to be frank with each other.” The scene also harked back to the Season 1 finale, set on the couple’s wedding night, in which Shiv belatedly tells Tom that she wants an open marriage, and ventures as close as she ever has to emotional honesty: “Love is, like, twenty-eight different things, and they all get lumped in together in this one sack, and there’s a lot of things in that sack—it needs to get emptied out. There’s fear, and jealousy, and revenge and control, and they all get wrapped up in really nice fucking wrapping paper.”

As the crew arranged the scene, readying extras and setting tables, Armstrong, leaning against a honey-colored wall, said, “That’s what’s interesting about the people in the show—hopefully, they are not incapable of honesty.” He went on, “Shiv is a passionate, driven, smart person, who I think occasionally gets glimpses of the way that her life could be integrated and whole and truthful. But they’re really hard to keep hold of, especially when they brush up against other people. And, like the other characters in the show, she hasn’t got very good facilities for compromise, or for taking into account other people’s feelings.” This was a moment, he said, in which his preferred Marxist lens—men and women make their own histories, but not the terms of their own making—proved useful as a way of situating the personal within the sociological. He observed, “We are all individuals with our own psychological makeup and impulses, and yet we find ourselves in vises of social and economic situations, which means that we are bent in and out of shape—and we’re bent out of shape by the psychologies of our families. So navigating the space between those—that you can act outside of your material interests, but will you?— that is a good area for where the conflict between human beings happens.”

As part of his background research for shooting in the area, Armstrong had been reading “ War in Val d’Orcia ,” the 1947 memoir of Iris Origo, the daughter of an American diplomat and Anglo-Irish aristocrat. Born in 1902, Origo, who became a biographer, was reared by her mother in a Medici palace in Florence, and married a member of the Italian nobility. In the twenties, the couple moved to La Foce, an estate in the Val d’Orcia. Origo’s memoir chronicles, in diary form, the effects on the region of the advent of the Second World War, during which Origo and her husband took in children who had been evacuated from the cities and also housed fifty British prisoners of war.

In reading the book, Armstrong had been struck—just as he had been after the table read of the “Succession” pilot, in November, 2016—by how quickly people adapt to altered conditions: a change in political circumstance; the onset of a pandemic; even the encroaching horrors of war. “There’s a moment when Mussolini is deposed, in 1943, and there’s a sense of hope—the Allies are coming, and it feels like it might be the day after tomorrow. But there’s still two more years of the war to go, and Iris Origo doesn’t know it,” he said. He had momentarily pulled down the face mask that covered his nose and mouth, in order to speak more clearly. “It’s just very human, that thing of adjusting yourself to a new position,” he went on. “Within seconds, the new world feels completely real and vivid, and you’re very quickly accommodated to it.” Then Armstrong raised his mask as he was called back to a video monitor, to watch another take. Snook and Macfadyen artfully interacted, with subtle variations in tone: more or less playful callousness on the part of Shiv, more or less submerged hurt and anger on the part of Tom. The characters moved and adjusted to their opulent constraints, in an evolving struggle whose conclusion—arriving in a future season—Armstrong had imagined but had yet to write. ♦

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