It was the final table read when they all found out it was over. February 2023 had just begun, with the fourth season set to premiere less than two months later, and as they worked through the script, one by one, it dawned on them that they were not reading aloud another season finale cliffhanger. As they turned the final page, they had finally met the end.
Kieran Culkin and Sarah Snook looked at each other with shocked faces, Snook’s a bit more nakedly emotional than Culkin’s. Culkin had heard rumours that this could be where things were headed the previous summer, but just ending it like this? With no warning? It was all very—Succession.
“Listen, the way that we work here is very fly by the seat of your pants, show up on a day and have them go, ‘hey, we got the speech for you. We think you might say this now, instead of any of that stuff. I know we wrote the scene to be in a broom closet, but we didn’t like it. Now it’s going to be in this giant auditorium. We’ve got to shoot it in five minutes, so figure it out’,” Culkin says—dead serious—still with his trademark smirk plastered across his face.
“I was surprised, sure, but anything is possible here. I still haven’t had to process that it’s done with, to be honest. I don’t know how much I’m going to miss it. Maybe a lot,” Culkin continues.
It didn’t really hit Snook until the wrap party in mid-March, when they all stopped egging on Brian Cox to dance with them for a moment to watch a blooper reel play on the big screen.
“As we all watched it, it really felt significant to me in a different way. I started thinking about how much this has been a part of my life for the last seven years. It was so special,” Snook says.
In Cox’s mind, that’s exactly why it’s time to say goodbye.
“This has been so good, but sometimes you can stay too long at the fair,” says Cox. “It’s a very British thing, as this has primarily British writers. We know how to keep it. Americans would have just allowed it to go on forever.”
“It takes a person of integrity to say, no, this is what it’s about. This thing is complete. I’ve done it,” Cox continues.
Succession, for the uninitiated, is HBO’s latest masterpiece and perhaps its most unexpected. After all, who could have expected the show that would best match the character tension and agonizing power struggles of Game of Thrones would be set in a boardroom for a mostly evil media conglomerate?
The show, created by Jesse Armstrong, follows the Roy family, with its cantankerous and brilliant patriarch Logan approaching his twilight years unsure of which of his offspring he can trust with his legacy, Waystar Royco. It’s foul-mouthed, funny, and often genuinely thrilling. It’s got the kind of TV magic that The Sopranos did, too, where its cynicism is masked with such a rich humanity that you constantly find yourself wanting to like its characters before the show reminds you not to.
Its stars couldn’t help but like them, either. Back when casting had just begun, Culkin was called in to read for the part of Cousin Greg, an oafish hanger-on trying to work his way into the inner circle, a role Culkin instantly had no interest in that ultimately went to actor Nicholas Braun.
“I just knew I wasn’t Greg. I couldn’t be that character. I didn’t get him. That voice that Nick ended up coming up with for him just wasn’t there on the page. I was ready to say no. But I kept reading anyways, because I enjoyed it,” says Culkin.
Culkin found himself chuckling at every line from the family’s youngest son, Roman.
“His first line in the script is, ‘hey, hey, mother****ers,’ and I kept reading that first scene with the burning sage and as soon as it ended, I thought, I like the way this guy talks. Let me go back and read that again,” says Culkin. “Then at the end of the pilot, there’s a scene where Roman offers a kid a million dollars to hit a home run. I love that idea, I don’t really know why, of torturing this kid. The scene was also written in a very unspecific way, so I knew I’d have to figure out how to make this work. That was so interesting to me.”
Culkin arrived to the audition to say he was going to read for Roman instead. “We’re not reading Romans yet,” he was told. Undeterred, he insisted on putting himself on tape anyways.
“I remember thinking that, even if I don’t get this, I had a really fun day being Roman, but I hadn’t yet figured out why,” says Culkin.
He booked the part, of course. And as they filmed the pilot, directed by Adam McKay (The Big Short, Anchorman), Snook took him aside after the home run scene in question, seeing the glee in Culkin’s eyes as he brought it to life.
“Snook told me, ‘jeez, that was hard to watch. You were like really mean to that kid. Did you go talk to him after?’ I was like, we’re acting. It’s fine. This was fun. I couldn’t see him as truly awful,” Culkin muses.
With little written into the script to tell the actors how to understand the characters and so much room left for improvisation, it was in those early days that the show found its identity, as each of the actor’s filled in their own blanks with little time to second guess their choices.
“In the big dining room scene during Logan’s birthday party, Adam would ask us for improv in every take. He’d say, ‘Nick, can you kick off the scene?’ So I had to think, what would Greg even say? And the more we did that, the more I started to understand the way he thinks,” says Braun.
“I remember in the hospital during episode two, Greg is pretending to be really upset, and I was like, ‘Oh, ok, he’s a liar. He’s a manipulator. He’s playing dumb or naïve, but he’s actually pretty good at this,” Braun continues.
While Braun figured out cousin Greg early, other characters didn’t begin to shine until the show was well under way, such as Waystar Royco exec Geri Kellman, played by J. Smith-Cameron, who comes to life once she forms a deeper bond with Culkin’s Roman.
“I don’t think Jesse intended that from the beginning. It was sort of based on Kieran and myself acting silly. We knew each other pretty well because he worked with my husband, Kenneth Lonergan, on several ventures, so we were riffing on that dynamic,” says Smith-Cameron.
There was an underlying connection in that first scene the two did together in episode two that none had planned but they all felt.
“Looking back at it now, it’s almost like the flirtation started there, though I don’t think it was on anyone’s mind consciously yet.”
That’s exactly how Succession creator Jesse Armstrong wanted the show to stay—always keeping things feeling as real as possible, never letting things hang long enough to feel rehearsed, shot primarily with handheld cameras to give each scene a sense of immediacy and sometimes jarring intimacy. As a result, Succession often feels like a documentary because in many ways it is one.
“I’ve been doing this since I was a little kid,” says Culkin, making us briefly picture him again as the bespeckled younger brother in Home Alone, “that becomes second nature, hitting your mark, and continuity. And then on our show, we don’t f***ing have marks, and there’s no such thing as continuity, we don’t do coverage. And that’s great. It’s free. But I don’t know how to go back into the bubble after this.”
None of them know exactly how they’re going to move on from this, how they’re going to exist in a world where they have so little room to play, where the writing isn’t as sparkling and the atmosphere isn’t as electric. Succession is a once in a lifetime kind of show, but as ready as they are to admit that, they each backtrack a bit, saying things like, ‘once in a decade’, to keep open the possibility that something nearly as good might be around the corner.
Still, there’s a sense of great loss. Even if they do find another masterpiece somehow, it won’t be together.
“The last day of shooting was just as much celebratory as it was tinged with grief. I think there was a real sadness that a lot of us won’t be able to work together again, because people may only see us as Shiv and Roman rather than Sarah and Kieran. That’s something to come to terms with,” Snook says. “But we’ll always have Succession.”
Cox, of course, is ready for his next challenge, having already lined up his directorial debut, his return to the stage, and umpteen other things in the near future. In true Logan Roy fashion, he’s ready to f*** off, as it were, even if the rest aren’t.
“I think it’s funny that Jesse said, ‘maybe we’ll do a spin-off of one of the characters’. It’s not going to be me, I can tell you that much,” adds Cox.
“I’m very grateful, thank you very much. Bye, bye, Logan, on to the next.”
Though it’s time for our own goodbyes, we linger in the room a bit as we sit with Cox. He’s done with Logan Roy, but that doesn’t mean we are—nor the millions of fans he’s earned, each who have seen Succession become a secondhand reference point to life as they know it. Even the cast quotes the show to each other constantly, Snook says. It may be time to say goodbye to the Roy family on screen, but as far as Succession’s own cultural legacy, there’s no end in sight.