All The Wildest Takeaways From Jeremy Strong’s Intense ‘New Yorker’ Profile

Jeremy Strong is at the top of the world right now.

Succession, the critically adored TV series in which he plays the perennially dispirited Kendall Roy, is at the zenith of its popularity. It — and him — are everywhere, soaking through the cultural topsoil and taking over the internet on a weekly basis.

But you wouldn’t be able to tell just what a secure position Strong is in from reading the wild New Yorker profile published about him. Indeed, above everything else, the profile makes Strong seem like the kind of person who forever considers himself to be the hustling underdog, one who lives in perpetual fear that his next hot meal will be swooped away from in front of his nose.

For a start, according to Strong’s co-star Kieran Culkin, the actor doesn’t consider Succession a comedy. “After the first season, he said something to me like, ‘I’m worried that people might think that the show is a comedy,’” Culkin is quoted as saying. “And I said, ‘I think the show is a comedy.’ He thought I was kidding.”

Then there’s this wild quote, more proof of Strong’s absolute, iron-wrought sincerity: “To me, the stakes are life and death. I take [Kendall] as seriously as I take my own life.”

Strong thinks about this deeply, his beliefs guided by the vast volume of books and thinkers whose work he consumes. When trying to untangle why people consider Succession a comedy, he name-drops Chekhov (“In the sense that, like, Chekhov is comedy?”) and confesses to reading everyone from Harold Pinter to Carl Jung to My Struggle‘s Karl Ove Knausgaard.

And if you think that this singular passion is only deployed on the Succession set, you’re wrong. Apparently, behind the scenes of Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago Seven, Strong begged to be blasted with real tear gas. When that wish was not fulfilled, he spent his time trying to unsettle actor Frank Langella, who played that film’s antagonistic judge, by reading from Langella’s memoir in a funny voice.

Oh, and Strong doesn’t switch off when he gets home either. Though his wife, Emma Wall, claims that he manages to find the balance between work and play, Strong corrects her. “It does make me feel like I’m living a double life,” he says. “At the time, I’m not sure which one is more real. Am I committing to the legend at home, where I’m the father and the husband, or the legend at work?”

So how do his co-stars deal with this intensity? In short: not well. “The result that Jeremy gets is always pretty tremendous,” Brian Cox, who plays Logan Roy on Succession says. “I just worry about what he does to himself. I worry about the crises he puts himself through in order to prepare.”

Culkin is even more damning. Of Strong’s method acting tendencies, Culkin says: “That might be something that helps him. I can tell you that it doesn’t help me.”

Above all else, Strong is guided by a series of sayings that he keeps as close to his heart as psalms. “I’m not a religious person, but I think I’ve concocted my own book of hymns,” he says. Those hymns are the lifeblood he needs to get through a battle — a battle with Jeremy Strong. “Now I feel like I’m up against myself in the ring,” he says, solemnly, at the profile’s end.