It would seem that Jeremy Strong is becoming self-aware in the sort of way that would be concerning if he were a robot in a movie or maybe a different HBO show. “Can I give you a very Jeremy Strong answer?” the SuccessionThe New York Times Magazine, prompting the interviewer to remind him that all of his answers are technically Jeremy Strong answers because he is, in fact, Jeremy Strong.
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To hear him speak, however, you would be forgiven for assuming “Jeremy Strong” is just another character in the infamous dramaturg’s lengthy rolodex. When asked “do you know who you are?” by the interviewer, which is the sort of question only Jeremy Strong would get asked in the first place, the actor responded with a singular “no.” “The question is such a definitive question. I think of myself as a sieve,” he continued. “The thing that I most understand is creating a sort of negative space so that I can be a vessel for writing and create character through a pastiche of writing and imagination and whatever things activate me.” “Do I know who I am?” he later added. “I don’t know if I believe if the self is a discrete, fixed thing.”
All of this, to borrow his own verbiage, is yet another very Jeremy Strong way to say that he still really loves Method Acting, even though he’ll probably never use this term again. (In this interview, he likens his process to meditation: “a wordless state, and that is the state where acting happens.”) But while his affect doesn’t seem to have changed one bit since that New Yorker profile first put it on the map (he specifies here that he still “pretty much” only wears brown, for example), his response to the whole blowup is not so sunny.
“Doing Enemy of the People is my response to what I experienced from the New Yorker article,” he claimed of his current Broadway run in an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s original 1882 work. “Ibsen wrote a play called Ghosts, which was a very personal play and the play was met with derision. Enemy of the People was his response to what happened when Ghosts was savaged,” he explained. “He felt betrayed by people who he thought were his allies or respected him... So he wrote Enemy of the People out of a sense of betrayal and hurt. I’m an actor: I want to channel things that I feel into a piece of work, and that’s why I’m doing this play.”
Poor Jeremy. At least he has a far healthier way to process these emotions than whatever the hell Kendall Roy had going on.