INTO THE HEART OF DARKNESS

Jeremy Strong tackles another morally complex character, playing the power broker behind Donald Trump's rise

- ELIANA DOCKTERMAN

JEREMY STRONG IS NOT KNOWN FOR HIS SENSE OF humor. When getting dressed, he favors brown for its "monastic" connotation. He famously thought that Succession, the HBO show that shot him to stardom, was a straight drama when his co-stars believed it to be a comedy. When he sits down for our Zoom conversation in September-in a brown shirt, of course-he recites poetry and quotes Stella Adler, the godmother of Method acting. He describes Succession as reflecting "the Emersonian notion of the institution as the shadow of a man."

But when I suggest that he could have capitalized on that show's success by earning a hefty paycheck from a superhero movie-as many in his position have done-he cracks a self-aware smile. The notion that he, an actor who insists on disposing of his own personality in order to fully inhabit a character, would implement that extreme approach to play a spandex-wearing hero is, indeed, funny.

Strong, once an eager upstart, has arguably grown into the pretentiousness he's been accused of in the past. Before answering a question, he tends to lean back in his chair, look up at the ceiling, and actually consider his words rather than rattling off a canned quote. He has let himself go a bit gray, the effect closer to thoughtful professor than Succession's hapless nepo baby Kendall Roy.

After four seasons of rapturous acclaim and accolades for that role-not to mention a Best Actor Tony for a recent run of Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People on BroadwayStrong had his pick of films. "There's a lot of, like, financebro projects coming my way," he says. "You know, the son of a dynastic fill-in-the-blank." It's the type of pigeonholing some actors would readily build a career upon, but he dismissed those offers. Instead, this fall he is playing-to riff on Emerson a man who overshadows the institution that is Donald Trump's Republican Party: Roy Cohn.