A perverse tyranny peculiar to our modern world requires people in public positions to be relatable. The measure of a politician’s electability is whether you’d want to have a beer with him (the metric skews heavily male), but likeability is only part of it. It’s also considered bad form to imply that your success in a chosen field might be the result of years of single-minded effort. And woe betide the public figure who dares acknowledge the fact that their life differs in many respects from the ones the rest of us lead.
This pseudo-democratic affectation only serves to add to the layers of simulation, dishonesty and control freakery that characterise the modern celebrity-industrial complex. And it offers an opportunity for certain straw-haired demagogues to rise to power without displaying even the most rudimentary governing skills. “The most important thing is sincerity," as the old adage goes. “Once you can fake that, everything else is easy.”
Nobody could deny that warm, empathetic, likeable human beings can be great at their jobs. But so can cold, narcissistic, repellent misanthropes. This is particularly true of artists and performers, who often find odd, circuitous or downright annoying ways to unlock their inner demons as part of their creative process. That has often been used as an excuse to justify behaviour – bullying, harassment and worse – which should never be acceptable. There is a danger, though, that applying contemporary HR rules to artistic projects risks sucking the vitality out of them. This stuff is difficult to do and sometimes it’s upsetting for those who do it.
Hagiographic norms
So it's interesting when the mask slips, as happened with this month's New Yorker magazine profile of Jeremy Strong, who plays rebellious son Kendall Roy in billionaire satire Succession. Despite being granted extensive access to Strong over several months, including flying with him to his house in Denmark, the writer, Michael Schulman, failed to conform to the hagiographic norms of the genre. Headlined "On Succession, Jeremy Strong Doesn't Get the Joke", the article paints Strong as a humourless, slightly ludicrous figure whose behaviour on set can be infuriating for his fellow actors.
Most attention focused on Schulman's depiction of Strong’s working practices, which owe much to the long tradition of immersive performance codified somewhat simplistically in the public consciousness as “method acting”. The most famous exponent recently has been Daniel Day-Lewis, who, in Schulman’s telling, hovers alongside Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman in the background of the Strong profile like a trio of absurd guardian angels.
“Strong, who is now 42, has the hangdog face of someone who wasn’t destined for stardom,” writes Schulman. “But his mild appearance belies a relentless, sometimes preening intensity. He speaks with a slow, deliberate cadence, especially when talking about acting, which he does with a monk-like solemnity. ‘To me, the stakes are life and death,’ he told me, about playing Kendall. ‘I take him as seriously as I take my own life.’ He does not find the character funny, which is probably why he’s so funny in the role.”
There has been furious reaction to the profile from industry bigwigs. Aaron Sorkin, who directed Strong as Jerry Rubin in last year’s The Trial of the Chicago Seven, claims Schulman selectively quoted him in the piece, misrepresenting his view of the actor to present “a distorted picture of Jeremy that asks us to roll our eyes at his acting process”.
Self-doubt vs braggadocio
“Don’t believe everything you read folks,” tweeted Jessica Chastain. “Snark sells but maybe it’s time we move beyond it.”
Snark is definitely to be found in the New Yorker article. Not unlike Kendall Roy, Strong comes across as insecure, needy, humourless and oscillating between self-doubt and braggadocio. But the piece also gives a sense of how he came to acting from an untypical lower-middle-class background, struggled through setback after setback throughout his 20s and most of his 30s, and has only established himself as an in-demand character actor in the last few years, largely due to Succession. In other words, it is a fairly rounded portrait of an interesting performer who is finally achieving the goals he has struggled for all his life.
It is, I suppose, possible that every actor currently working at the top of the profession is a rounded human being with no notable personality defects. If that is the case, it must make it very difficult to cast dramas such as Succession, in which each character is more duplicitous, venal and loathsome than the next. From where do these performers find their motivation? The achievement of Schulman’s sardonic piece about what is a very sardonic show is that it gives some genuine insight into the mysterious, embarrassing, squirmingly difficult space where Jeremy Strong ends and Kendall Roy begins.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Jeremy Strong played Abbie Hoffman in The Trial of the Chicago 7.
