Spoilers for episode 3 of Succession ahead
Episode three is easily one of the most heart-breaking episodes of Succession so far: stuck on their brother Connor’s wedding boat, the Roy siblings learn via phone that their father, Logan, is seriously unwell and likely to die.
As the hour unfolds, we watch them grapple with the news: Roman refuses to believe it; Shiv runs back into the arms of her ex-husband Tom Wambsgans and Kendall tries to keep it together for his siblings (not his top skill). It’s television at its finest, and for creator Jesse Armstrong, the fact that the big event takes place almost entirely at one remove – by phone, via Tom, who is on the private jet with Logan – was vital.
“We didn’t really have a death scene for Logan and that was obviously intentional,” Armstrong says in a short film released to accompany the episode. “We wanted to capture a feeling of death that people experience in the modern era; of separation, of communication over phone and email.
“There’s a couple of factors that play into where Logan’s death falls in our narrative trajectory. One is sort of a base one of, ‘ooh, maybe it will surprise people’,” he says. “I think much more prominent was the feeling that if we’re going to do this, we don’t just want to see people crying and then have a funeral and be done with the show. We want to see how a death of someone significant rebounds around the family.”
It’s an ambitious leap to take, and that’s reflected in the shooting of the episode itself – Armstrong describes it as “high risk”.
“It felt like the most exciting episode we’d shot, because it moves in real time,” says Kieran Culkin, who plays Roman; that is, from the moment the siblings get that fateful phone call, to them leaving the boat almost half an hour later.
According to executive producer Mark Mylod, the camera had to be focusing on the siblings at all times, giving the episode an air of being “sadistically voyeuristic.”
“Every time we cut away from the siblings, it seemed to let them off the hook,” he adds.
The result was a 27 minute long scene where three separate cameras were set up to make sure that not a minute of the action was lost.
Given that the Succession team shoot on film – which limits takes to ten minutes – that meant hiding rolls of film around the sets, as well as employing a third camera person to speedily reload the cameras.
“It was us doing a one-act play on a boat,” says Culkin, “in several rooms with background actors, with lighting everywhere, with three cameras, and it was unlike anything I’d done before, and it was extremely exciting.”
Even more impressively, the team only ended up doing one take of most of the scenes, most of which, as Mylod says, ended up in the final cut.
“You are trying to live with and embody the death of a parent,” says Jeremy Strong (Kendall). “One of the things about this show, time and time again, [is] I’ll be given something that I think, ‘This is the limit of what I’m capable of as an actor. This is my wall.’ But you have no choice but to go through that. This episode was one of those.”
