“There’s this book of aphorisms.…” Jeremy Strong is saying. He catches himself. “I’m like a walking book of aphorisms.”
Here, an exhaustive list of everyone he quotes or references by name in my presence: Henry James, T.S. Eliot, Walker Percy, Kenneth Lonergan, Mark Strand, Hilary Mantel, Karl Ove Knausgård, Dustin Hoffman, Glenn Gould, Stanley Kunitz, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rainer Maria Rilke, Anthony Hopkins, Meryl Streep, Charles Bukowski, Steven Pressfield, Steven Spielberg, M. Scott Peck, Ron Van Lieu, Carl Jung, Franz Kafka, Barry Michels, Peter Brook, Thomas Kail, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Cate Blanchett, Bob Dylan, LCD Soundsystem, John Berryman, and John Keats talking shit about Lord Byron.
Somewhere between Jung and Kafka, I have to ask: What’s with the quotes?
“People have been making fun of me about it for as long as I can remember,” he says. “I had an old girlfriend who used to call me Kierkegaard.”
I was prepared for the quotes. Strong was prepared for me to be prepared, which is probably why he prefaces a lot of them with “I’m sure I sound like a jackass when I say stuff like that” or “I’m just going to keep quoting shit, because this is who I am.”
The habit registers less as a pretension than an earnest compulsion to absorb what he can from the world and share what’s meaningful to him. You can see that part of his mind working in real time. When I mention the concept of arrival fallacy—the illusion that when we reach the goal we’re striving toward we’ll attain lasting happiness—he keeps on referencing it with me. When we encounter a sweet greyhound mix on our walk, her owner tells us that she’s a lurcher, a Britishism for a specific kind of mutt that has a strain of sight hound. Strong later uses the term to refer to himself. “When I married my wife,” he says, “she brought my breeding up a notch.”
He’s kidding, but acknowledges that when he’s with her European family during the holidays, wearing their best black-tie around the Christmas tree, “it feels like a very far world from the one I came from.”
That world was working-class Jamaica Plain, Boston. Mom was a hospice nurse. Dad worked in juvenile-detention centers. Whereas Kendall Roy has all the money in the world but not an iota of parental love, Strong speaks, again and again, of relying on the latter. When I ask if his parents watch him on Succession now, he says, “I think my mother is probably upset by it. She loved when I played James Reeb in Selma. The darkness of Succession is hard for her.”
As a child, sensing his parents’ stress over their financial precarity, he came up with an original song to cheer them up called “Poor, So What?” (He sings the chorus for me, which goes: “Pooooooor…so what?”) When he was 10, his family moved to the wealthier suburb of Sudbury. They struggled to fit in, but it provided Strong with the intended opportunities. In his case, that meant throwing himself into the theater program. (It is startlingly easy to picture Strong as a precocious child actor in a newsboy cap.)
Acting became “a way to feel of value, to have self-esteem, to feel seen and valued in a community I didn’t otherwise feel that I belonged in,” Strong says. When he was a teenager, he wished, as teenagers all do, that he had a more interesting backstory. But we can’t choose our origins. And, in any case, they mold us in ways that we can’t always see at the time. “The specter of an unlived life is probably the thing I’m most afraid of,” he tells me. “My parents have very lived lives. But there was a sense that they gave everything to my brother and I, but maybe didn’t give much to themselves or follow what might have been. I would see ways in which people stop themselves or succumb to our own inner resistance. That resistance I saw as the enemy.”
