Jeremy Strong
Appearances
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
you know held down and subverted and thwarted uh but with a great need and desire to do the thing he feels that he is born to do that's something that that vector it was very alive for me
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
Did I know I was going to climb over the barrier?
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
You, I think, learn over a lifetime to obey your deepest instincts. And, you know, it's that thing of better to ask forgiveness than to ask permission. I was obeying a deep impulse.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
I mean, my feeling and strong conviction was and is, but it's Jesse's show at the end of the day, and by the way, it makes me so happy to hear his voice, was that this was an extinction-level event for Kendall and that there was no coming back from it. And at this point, he had lost everything. He had lost his father... He had lost his siblings. He had lost his ex-wife. He had lost his children.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
He had lost his putative reason for being. And also remember he was an addict. So I just did not believe that he was coming back from that.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
It's not radical at all. I mean, over seven years, I was as much involved in what happened on the show or what happened in any given scene, and I was as much an authority and had as much ownership over my character... as the director and the writers did. So it was always a collaboration.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
At the end of the day, it's in the edit that Jesse and Mark Mylod's sort of authorial decisions take precedence over mine. But they always welcomed my impulses and often used them. You know, the moment, I think, that Jesse chose is extremely... powerful and he's sort of frozen in a kind of inner scream. Um, and I love that he chose that.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
The moment that I attempted to search for, I'd had no idea what would happen, um, was equally truthful to, to what we had done so far.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
Yeah. Yeah, you know, Jamaica Plain, which has now become quite gentrified, was different in the late 70s and early 80s. And I went to school in West Roxbury, and sort of that was where I grew up. And it was certainly more urban than where I'd later moved to. It was really diverse. It was really... My father worked in juvenile justice and ran these...
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
essentially jails for the Department of Youth Services. My mother was a hospice nurse. They're both sort of givers. You know, they're both empaths and I think really courageous people. And, you know, I started doing plays in the basement of a church down at the bottom of the hill from the street I grew up on, Jamaica Street. And, you know, that was kind of it. I don't even really remember...
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
But it's been an obsession of mine since I was maybe five years old. Acting has been an obsession. Yeah.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
Yeah, but much more benevolent than that and much more loved than what you think of as a warden. You know, these were facilities for minors, but kids who had been locked up for very serious offenses, gang and murder and rape and heavy, heavy stuff. But my father really believed in the –
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
rehabilitative potential and redemptive potential of these kids and I would go visit him at these places and some of them would make you know things for me in in woodshop and you know and that that was his world but Yeah, I was like a street kid. And then when I was 10, we moved out to an affluent suburb that was just a different world.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
You know, I'd never seen homes like that or I don't think I'd ever seen a Mercedes-Benz before. And we rented a house there. And, you know, I think I felt like an outsider there.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
No, I think they actually really shielded my brother and I from that and protected us from any of that heaviness or drama. But I did sort of grok as a young person how important and how much their work mattered to them. That had an effect on me. And... I'm sure I sound incredibly self-serious in this conversation, which I don't mean to.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
But I, you know, I don't take any of this sort of frivolously because these are lives. These are people's lives that essentially I'm playing with. And, you know, someone like Roy Cohn, so, you know, it's not a game for me. And I do think there was something about... how central my parents' work was to their lives and how much they gave of themselves to it that imprinted itself on me.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
Sure. I mean, acting and the impulse to do this was initially an escape and wanting to escape from where I lived, from the heaviness that I felt from the sort of frayed, strained financial situation and struggles that my parents had. You know, it's a bit of a sort of Houdini act, you know, because you can enter into an imaginary world and be free of all of that.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
Be free of your circumstances and yeah, and be free of yourself, you know, because self, as we all, I think, know, can be a kind of prison. So acting is a liberative process because you can just immediately be free from the prison of self and from your environment and circumstances. At least you feel that.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
Yeah. Well, you know, I grew up so far away from any of this. And I had such a yearning to do it and to be part of the world of it. I still feel that yearning. And those were three of my greatest heroes and still are. So I worked as an intern on Looking for Richard, which was a documentary that Pacino made about Richard III, which is really incredible. And I stayed at some family friend's
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
Yeah, about Richard III, the play. And, you know, was very, very, very peripherally involved in anything. I think I was 14 or 15. But, you know, I still have a Dog Day Afternoon poster on my wall. And Al has seen... And, of course, Al played Roy Cohn in a definitive way and was very kind to me about it, which, as you can imagine, meant the world to me.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
But, yeah, so I worked on that and sort of got to... observe that and observe him a bit and learn about Shakespeare and, uh, you know, just soaked it all up. And, uh, and I, and I'd heard that the crucible was going to be filmed in Massachusetts. And so, you know, you just kind of by hook or by crook, I wrote letters and dozens and dozens of letters.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
I don't really remember. You know, for The Crucible, it was just, I'm this kid and, you know, I'll take off from school, I'll work for free, I'll do anything. And I ended up working in the greens department as an intern, an unpaid intern, like hanging leaves on trees on a place called Hog Island outside of Ipswich, Massachusetts. And you know, just getting to be a fly on a magnificent wall.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
You know, it was Daniel and Joan Allen and Paul Schofield and Nicholas Heitner directed it and, you know, as a young person who's never been on a film set or has never been in the presence of what you consider to be real actors, it's just priceless to be able to witness some of it and some of the texture of what it actually is.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
No, not then. I mean, observe, sure, from a distance. And, you know, later, much later, I worked for Daniel on a film and then we made a film together 10 years after that. So, you know, he's someone that I admire immeasurably.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
Thank you, Terry. I'm honored to be talking to you. Thanks for having me.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
Well, you know, the conviction and earnestness part is mine. I'll leave the cringing up to everybody else. But I will say that... Um, my, I don't know if it was my nanny or my wife, but they told my kids about these songs and my kids who are three and five and six started to listen to them, especially when I'm away.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
Yeah, you know, I'll just say I haven't watched the film in a while. And hearing that scene back, it's really so charged, isn't it? And Roy, in that scene, encapsulates the playbook, which the film examines the idea that, you know, what Roy Cohn stood for, these principles that he passed on to Donald Trump, always attack, deny everything, and never admit defeat.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
which I have to be a lot for work and we have a house in this village in Denmark in this sort of fishing village outside of Copenhagen with the speakers outside so so if you happen to walk past this house on many days this summer you might have heard one of those two songs because I think I know what the other one you're referring to playing like loudly over speakers from my own house which
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
Certainly makes me cringe, but is very sweet because my kids have come to really love them.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
Well, for a guy who was throwing that party and was going to dress himself up on a cross with a USB crown of thorns, it felt... I learned two songs for it. I learned Honesty and I learned King of Pain by The Police. And I did both of those songs on the day. And so I think either of them would have worked. King of Pain is also a great song.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
Right, which my kids can now do a pretty good version of.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
Yeah. I just want to say to that, you know, it's such an interesting object lesson in how, you know, these things, when you're making them, You know, it's just you in a room with a couple people. And I was in Glasgow. We were filming. Nick Bertel, who's the composer, called me up in my room.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
He wrote the theme song and he wrote this. And he said, hey, I have this rap. Maybe you could do it. at the dinner. We were filming it three days later and he played it for me on the phone and I have a recording of it in my voice notes and it was roughly what it became.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
I made up the chorus for it and made up the melody for it and made it up in the car as we were driving from Glasgow to Dundee and it's just a pretty ad hoc thing in the making of it. You're just kind of throwing something together and you're dancing as fast as you can. And I asked the costume designer, I sketched out a jersey that I thought I could wear.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
And they made it for me and had it three days later. So again, to say a little bit to that question of like, how on earth could I try and do something different in the final scene? Like the way we made that show was incredibly collaborative. And so that became something that people reference and know about.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
No, it's interesting. Back when I would go to some acting classes, people would always say, oh, I like the choice you made, or that's an interesting choice. I never, ever experience anything as a choice. I experience it as an impulse, and I've learned to trust those impulses. So that's just when I was trying out things in the car, trying to learn that rap in the back of a
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
sedan on my way on some road in scotland that's just ended up feeling like the best way to sing it and so so i just stuck with it because you know necessity is the mother of invention and i had
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
like two days to to to be able to stand up there and do it and i didn't want anyone to hear it until the first take so one thing i love about that scene is the look on my on kieran and sarah and everybody's faces which is just like incredible it was like horror but that's because they'd never seen me do it until then oh like so that was a real reaction in part
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
Yeah, but that's the thing about film. You want it to be real, or at least I do.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
To be honest, I've sort of just put it away. Like I put away all of these things. You know, I have a stack of scripts in my office and it's like this stack of lives that I've had that when they're over, they're over. and you just put them away. And I put it away because, you know, I have a life and children and then I moved on to the Ibsen play and that took up all of me.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
They're all kind of the DNA of that scene. It contains all of them. It's a great introduction of a character. But your question about playing historical figures, you know, I've done a fair amount of work playing people who, you know, were either alive or were historical figures. John Nicolay in Lincoln, James Reeb. in Selma, Jerry Rubin in the Charlie Chicago 7, Lee Harvey Oswald.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
So, you know, I don't feel more of a kinship with that role than I do with any other role that I've ever played, which might sound like a strange thing because I know it's the thing that I've become known most for. You know, one day maybe I'll watch it all back and... sort of take in the magnitude of what it was.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
But I've probably had to protect myself from that, because I don't think that that would
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
serve me if that makes any sense you know it's the Rudyard Kipling thing of like you have to treat success and failure as imposters I find that you do your work you do it on the day you give it everything and then that's it like that's all you need to be involved with so whether it becomes the biggest thing in the world or whether something wins the Academy Award, that's not your concern.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
Your concern is to be all in when you're doing it.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
I feel always an enormous sense of responsibility to a kind of historical veracity and accuracy to try and capture and render the essence of these people. And ultimately, it's not an intellectual, you're not writing an essay on someone. So the information is sort of emotional, intuitive, visceral information.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
Absolutely. Yes, I absolutely feel a sort of fidelity to truth with a capital T, which is funny in this case, because Roy Cohn, if he's anything, to me, he's like the progenitor of alternative facts. He's like not someone who really espoused truth with a capital T. He thought truth was a play thing that you could do as you wish with it.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
Well, no, I mean, it's also about Murdoch. But of course, I read that book when I was working on Succession because... You know, during that time.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
You know, I don't. I don't. If I'm honest, I feel that my job is to almost be a sort of vessel which involves kind of clearing myself out. I went on a silent meditation retreat last week, Terry, and the teacher, who's an incredible person, man named John Kabat-Zinn, who's written a lot of great books.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
John talked about a term called anatta, which means no self or not self. And it really resonated with me because I find that that is the place where I tend to be when I'm working, I think, creatively. But your question about whether I felt adjacent to Trump, I guess I don't. I guess I feel like my job is to
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
Be a musician, a first chair musician to play whatever instrument it is that I'm given to play whatever piece of music that I'm given.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
Thank you. You know, I used to, when I was in college, I sort of have held on to old scripts and plays. And when I did, you know, American Buffalo or something, Look Back in Anger in college, I have a million notes and it's sort of notated and annotated. And then at a certain point, I'd stopped writing anything down.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
I guess at a certain point, you develop a trust in your unconscious, intuitive self that if it's properly absorbed something, then it will be there somehow. Now, I think voice is very important to me for any character. And Roy had a very... very particular way of speaking and a very specific pentameter. And the music of that is something that becomes your job to both master and then throw away.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
He writes in Hamlet, Shakespeare says, that use can almost change the stamp of nature. And I feel that actors, especially when you're attempting to do some kind of transformational work, which is the kind of work that I love the most and have been inspired by in my life the most, your job is to kind of change the stamp of your nature.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
And voice is a really key part of that because there's something about a person's voice that is like their eyes. It's such a way in to that person.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
I probably watched this a thousand times.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
I mean, I don't think it's too strong a word. But, you know, you have to really check that at the door as an actor when you approach a role. You have to leave your judgments at the door and try to, in an almost diagnostic way, identify their wounds and their struggle, right? and then fight their fight the way they did.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
I'm simply trying to inhabit him in a fully dimensional way, as you do for any character.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
Yeah. At the end of the day, you know, it was something our director wanted to do and we discussed it and you pick your battles, but that was one of them for me. Yeah, he had this operation, this botched surgery. His mother, Dora, wanted to get his nose fixed because she felt that it was a Semitic nose and she wanted to get it fixed and instead they botched it and
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
And he was stuck with this sort of gash in the middle of his face for his whole life. And it's a sort of, you know, Ali Abbasir, director, who's a brilliant filmmaker, and he essentially has made these sort of monster movies. And so I think he saw this in the same way. And I felt that Roy is enough innately... a monster.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
This is me objectively before I, you know, as I'm approaching the work and making those aesthetic decisions, that we don't need to put a hat on a hat. And I felt that the scar in the middle of my face could be in danger of taking us into, you
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
I was aware. I mean, listen, this movie opens on Friday on 1500 screens. I think it's playing in every state in this country. I personally think it's sort of imperative that people see this movie just to learn and become informed. The movie explores essentially how Trump was made and his philosophical, moral framework. But yeah, no one would touch this movie. The studios were afraid to touch it.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
They were afraid of litigation and they were afraid of repercussions from, you know, a possible Trump administration, I would say.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
Sure. I don't know if I'll remember anything, Terry, but let's try.
Fresh Air
Jeremy Strong Sees Acting As An Escape From Self
You know, my experience as an actor was an experience... of years and years and years of kind of struggling and feeling thwarted and feeling a sense of Being denied a sense of being in a wilderness. So those feelings were accessible to me. The way that Kendall, you know, who begins the series as the incumbent and then is sort of...
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump's Instant Action on Illegal Immigration, CNN Cuts, and Obama Divorce Rumblings, with Ruthless Podcast Hosts | Ep. 990
Listen, Judy, about 100 reporters were crawling up my ass to get this interview, and I gave you the exclusive.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Trump's Instant Action on Illegal Immigration, CNN Cuts, and Obama Divorce Rumblings, with Ruthless Podcast Hosts | Ep. 990
Sorry, Judy. Listen, let's do the rest in person and bring a photographer, okay? Sorry. No, I mean, listen, it's your life. You got a ways to go, but you're learning.