Jeremy Strong has finally broken his silence on that infamous 2021 New Yorker profile.
In a new interview with Vanity Fair from the Telluride Film Festival, where Strong is promoting his role in director James Gray’s “Armaggedon Time,” the “Succession” star didn’t hold back when discussing his feelings on the newsmaking profile, telling VF it amounted to a “pretty profound betrayal of trust” on the part of the publication and the article’s writer, Michael Schulman.
The profile, published in December of last year, went viral due to its in-depth look at the actor’s eccentric methods, leading to public ridicule and social-media backlash regarding Strong’s behavior, which some readers perceived as pretentious and self-centered. (Not helping matters was the article’s rather damning headline: “On ‘Succession,’ Jeremy Strong Doesn’t Get the Joke.”)
Strong continued that the profile “maybe ultimately said more about the person writing it and their perspective, which is a valid perspective than it did about who I feel I am and what I’m about. The noise and the fog after it: I think it’s something that, I guess, what I care about ultimately is trying to feel as free as possible as an actor. Part of that is trying to insulate yourself from all of that and what people might say about you or think about you. You have to free yourself from that. It was painful. I felt foolish. As an actor, one of the most vital secret weapons that you can have is the ability to tolerate feeling foolish.”
The actor went on to offer a seeming defense of the all-encompassing Method acting style that resulted in the backlash, adding: “Any day you walk onto a set, if you’re not in a place where you’re not risking that and you’re not wagering enough, I’m always feeling like I might be making a big, giant fucking fool of myself—with James’s film, with the show. That’s part of the price of admission to doing good work, which involves risk and which involves getting yourself out there. I guess I’d say that it’s all fine. Acting is something that’s hard to talk about without sounding self-serious, but it is something that I feel very seriously about and care about and have devoted my life to.”
Later in the interview, Strong took a moment to discuss “Succession” Season 4, which is currently in production, praising showrunner Jesse Armstrong and saying the new season is “taking me to places I haven’t been before as an actor. Places that feel—here we are in Telluride, but it feels like a double-black diamond again. Somehow. As long as there’s a double black diamond to go down, I feel excited and challenged.”
As for “Armageddon Time,” the film premiered at this year’s Cannes to generally strong critical notices, with The Playlist’s own Rodrigo Perez calling the drama “a clear-eyed and emotionally intelligent work of great empathy” in his review. Also starring Anne Hathaway, Anthony Hopkins, and Banks Repeta, the film opens in limited release in North America on Oct. 28 before expanding wide on Nov. 4.