Jeremy Strong

Jeremy Strong (born December 25, 1978, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.) American actor best known for playing Kendall Roy in Succession (2018–23), the HBO comedy-drama series that showcases a powerful media-mogul patriarch and his adult children’s desperate attempts to win his approval and succeed him atop the family’s media empire. He is also known for his film roles, including as presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in Parkland (2013) and yippie Jerry Rubin in Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020). Strong is notable for his immersive style of acting, in which he throws himself into roles with abandon.

Early life and career

Strong was born to a Russian Jewish father, David, and an Irish mother, Maureen. His father worked in the juvenile incarceration system, and his mother worked as a hospice nurse. Strong grew up in a working-class family in Boston, Massachusetts, before relocating to the suburb of Sudbury after he reached age 10. When he was in fifth grade, Strong started acting in musicals. Starting at the age of 12, he spent summers at his grandfather’s home in Queens, New York, and commuted into Manhattan for auditions. As a teenager, Strong had posters of British actor Daniel Day-Lewis and American actors Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman on his bedroom wall. Strong got a scholarship to Yale University, and in his junior year he arranged for Pacino to visit the school to teach a master class.

After graduating from college in 2001, Strong moved to New York City, living in a small apartment and working as a waiter. During his first year in the city, he did not land any auditions; however, he later worked as an assistant to the playwright Wendy Wasserstein and performed in a one-man play at night. He spent most of his 20s working in various capacities in independent film and in theatre; he was cast in summer productions at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts in 2002 and 2004, served as Daniel Day-Lewis’s personal assistant during the production of The Ballad of Jack and Rose (2005), and took roles in the Off-Broadway plays Defiance (2006) and New Jerusalem (2008) and the Broadway production of A Man for All Seasons (2008). In his 30s he was cast in several major films, including Zero Dark Thirty (2012), Lincoln (2012), Selma (2014), and The Big Short (2015). During this time he married Danish-born documentary producer and activist Emma Wall.

Succession and accolades

When American writer and director Adam McKay was working as the executive producer of Succession in 2016, he asked Strong to read the script of the pilot and tell him which character he connected with. Strong did not choose Kendall Roy but rather the character’s bratty, witty, and sarcastic younger brother, Roman. Although the role of Roman went instead to actor Kieran Culkin. Strong won the part of Kendall after playing the elder Roy son with intense focus during his audition.

He took that intensity to the role, and Succession became a huge commercial and critical hit, in large part because of Strong’s portrayal of Kendall Roy as a troubled but tenacious character. Ultimately, because the character lacked the killer business instinct of his father, he would miss out on becoming the CEO of the family empire during the series finale. Strong told Vanity Fair in a 2023 interview that it was hard to watch the last episode because of his close association with, and personal sympathy for, the character. Audiences believed in his convincing portrayal too, and Strong received an Emmy Award for outstanding lead actor in a drama series in 2020 and the Golden Globe Award for best actor in a television drama series in 2022.