Jeremy Strong, one of the stars of the hugely popular show Succession, is acutely aware that he sounds incredibly pretentious when he talks about acting. Oh, I’m sorry, “the craft.” See? It’s annoying, but he knows it. While the role of Kendall Roy has made him famous, it’s the way he looks at acting that really sets him apart.
In a recent GQ deep dive, Strong reveals that he’s aware of how it makes him look. Does that mean he’ll stop? Probably not, but do we want him to stop?
To be fair, it’s not just talking about acting that makes him pretentious. Take a gander at what he says about his sartorial choices.
“My wife told me that somebody said something like, ‘The three things you’re going to be certain of are death, taxes, and that Jeremy Strong will be wearing brown.’ I don’t know, it’s inexplicable,” he said. Honestly, it doesn’t seem inexplicable at all. It just sounds like he likes the color brown.
The fact that he can make something so inane sound so pretentious is part of his charm. Oh, but that’s not all. Look at what he says about his hat: “In a way, it’s a metaphor for the rest of my life. I gravitate towards an extremely narrow band. That’s all that I want and I don’t want anything else.”
A hat is a metaphor for his life? This guy really is one of a kind. He also says he’s “denuded” in his style because “almost anytime I put on any wardrobe, I feel profoundly different from my baseline self.” Baseline self! I bet you won’t hear a construction worker go “Hey Jim, do these boots match my baseline self?”
Strong got a lot of attention back in Dec. of 2021 when he was profiled for a New Yorker article titled “On Succession, Jeremy Strong Doesn’t Get the Joke.” Commenting on that, Strong called the reaction to the article his “15 minutes of shame, with a long tail.”
“I hadn’t felt judged like that in a very long time,” Strong said. “The shadow is the part of ourselves that we don’t want to share with the world and we want to disavow. The part of me that is striving. The part of me that wants what I want. I was less bothered by other actors having feelings or opinions about the way I work. Really, it was just feeling exposed.”
Now that he’s gone through that wringer, Strong was acutely aware of how he comes off in print, prefacing his quotes with “I’m sure I sound like a jackass when I say stuff like that” or “I’m just going to keep quoting shit, because this is who I am.”
Also this: “People have been making fun of me about it for as long as I can remember. I had an old girlfriend who used to call me Kierkegaard. I’m like a walking book of aphorisms.”
All in all, he’s definitely pretentious, but it’s not like he doesn’t know it, and honestly that makes it less bad. Or does it?
