Kendall Roy’s final appearance on Succession almost took a much darker turn, according to actor Jeremy Strong – he tried to throw himself into the sea.
The final scene of the hit TV show Succession sees Kendall standing by himself on a harbourfront, looking out to the ocean after having lost everything in the board vote for control of Waystar Royco.
The show then cuts to black, but as Strong tells it, he then added a little extra, ad-libbed scene of his own.
“The water was calling to me,” he explained in an interview with Vanity Fair. “I tried to go into the water after we cut – I got up from that bench and went as fast as I could over the barrier and on to the pilings, and the actor playing Colin [Scott Nicholson] raced over.
“I didn’t know I was gonna do that, and he didn’t know, but he raced over and stopped me. I don’t know whether in that moment I felt that Kendall just wanted to die – I think he did – or if he wanted to be saved by essentially a proxy of his father.”
He went onto describe the events of the finale as “an extinction-level event” for Kendall, but added that the last shot was a stronger ending, as it left viewers with “a kind of ambivalence” about the character and his fate.
Strong is known for his extreme method acting, especially on the set of Succession. Comedian Bowen Yang recently told podcast Las Culturistas of the time he was filming a show next to the set of Succession.
“At one point, Jeremy walks into the Nora From Queens production office and says, ‘Excuse me, do you know where the bathroom is?’ and then someone in the office is like, ‘Yeah, it’s just down the hall to the left.’ He goes, ‘Thank you so much’ and he leaves,” he said.
A few minutes later, his PA came into the room and explained that Strong had an upcoming scene where he had to ask somebody for the bathroom – he was in fact getting into character.
Strong was also profiled in a now-infamous 2021 interview with the New Yorker, where he explained that to get into character, “you have to go through whatever the ordeal is that the character has to go through.”
For Strong, that involved sometimes refusing to rehearse, as he wanted "every scene to feel like I’m encountering a bear in the woods" – as well as isolating himself from his on-set castmates. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his words drew criticism, especially from Brian Cox, who plays Strong’s on-screen father Logan.
"It’s really a cultural clash," Cox told Variety in March. "I don’t put up with all that American s***. I’m sorry. All that sort of ‘I think, therefore I feel’. Just do the job… Don’t identify."
After the show wrapped, meanwhile, he was shown in a Twitter video shaving off his hair, with the aim of exorcising Kendall entirely. That is, before Kieran Culkin slapped a raw egg on top of his newly-bald head.
