Succession’s Jeremy Strong on why fame is worth it, ‘whatever the cost’

The first thing that strikes you as you walk into the Stone Pony in Asbury Park, New Jersey, is the smell of stale wood. Faded gig posters chequer the walls. Given the venue’s status as a temple to the history of American rock, there is something distinctly earthly about its faded glamour in the harsh light of day.

This is, after all, where Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band first crafted their sound and turned a loyal local following into a fan base that conquered America and eventually the world. It was the place where now-iconic acts, including The Ramones, Bon Jovi and Blondie cut their teeth as performers.

Artistic ghosts can be strange things to interpret, but it’s not difficult to find in this room, the faint echo of everything that has come before. Blood, sweat and beer stains feel baked into the wood. The fabrics are washed out. Even the bar stool has that rickety quality that suggests it would be uncomfortable to sit on, but handy in a bar fight.

“I can’t walk backstage in a theatre and be at that threshold and not feel a sense of the cumulative terror that has been experienced in that place,” actor Jeremy Strong says. “There’s a feeling of ghosts, of all the transcendent moments that have transpired.”

Strong came here earlier this year to film Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, written and directed by Scott Cooper, and based on the 2023 book, Deliver Me from Nowhere, by Warren Zanes. He has returned, with Jeremy Allen White (Shameless, The Bear) who plays Springsteen, and Springsteen himself, along with the film’s marketing machinery, ahead of its global premiere.

Among the conversations shared here, Strong recalls Springsteen’s response when he quipped, “if these walls could talk”. The 76-year-old rock legend replied: “Thank God they don’t.”

“You can feel the energy in those places,” Strong says. “When we shot at the Power Station in Studio A [in New York], which is where Bruce recorded a lot of these albums and where a lot of the greatest musicians of the 20th century recorded albums, there’s a certain kind of holiness to that place too. And even though it’s these empty rooms, you can feel what’s gone there before you, and it’s humbling.”

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is a complex work. Made with Springsteen’s co-operation, it chronicles the making of the 1982 album Nebraska. Like the 2024 Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, it does not set out to tell the entire story, but is a single tile that aspires to represent the larger mosaic.

Early in pre-production, Springsteen offered Cooper a morsel of wisdom: “The truth about yourself isn’t often pretty.” Cooper says he was reassured with Springsteen’s ease over how candid the film could be. “This is not hagiography,” he says. “He was never directive in any way, he was only supportive.”

For Springsteen, actor Jeremy Allen White fit the bill perfectly. For Springsteen’s father, Douglas, Cooper found Stephen Graham, the English star of Gangs of New York and Adolescence, who has fast become one of the most respected actors in the world. And for Faye Romano, young Bruce’s love interest, Cooper cast Australian actress Odessa Young.

Jon Landau, Springsteen’s manager and the man largely credited as the architect of the Springsteen “myth”, who famously said, “I have seen the future of rock, and it is Bruce Springsteen”, was a more complex ask. Cooper found his Landau in Strong, the 46-year-old Boston-born star of Succession.

Following that series, fame has come to Strong in unexpected and sometimes indecipherable ways. He is a deeply respected actor, but also a complicated co-star, whose nuanced character work sometimes sits, it seems, as heavily on a set as it sits in a scene. The result, as is almost always the case with great actors, is extraordinary work.

But the man whose face and body appears in publicity photography, on posters or billboards is to some extent a stranger in Strong’s real world. “I probably try to minimise, as a defence mechanism, any sense of that image being out in the world in some way,” Strong says. “It doesn’t help me, so I don’t spend much time thinking about it and I hope I never do.”

And yet, there is his face and body, front and centre: as a character actor whose profile emerged in films such as The Big Short, Lincoln, Zero Dark Thirty and Molly’s Game, to a stunning performance as activist Jerry Rubin in Aaron Sorkin’s Oscar-nominated The Trial of the Chicago 7 in 2020. And of course, the role of Kendall Roy in Succession.

“For better or worse and probably better, I’m not even sure I have a felt experience of fame,” Strong says. “Because whatever success has happened – and I almost want to put that in quotes – I’m just doing the same work that I’ve been doing since I was a little kid.” While he is, he says, “aware that circumstances around me have changed”, his fame is impacted by the fact that “I was in my late 30s when any kind of prominence was ascribed to me.”

Fame, Strong says, is “largely a projection from other people. It adds something to your life, which is a kind of weight and scrutiny, but your job is the same as ever, which is to remain connected to yourself and free. The thing that has changed is just that I get to play great parts now and do the kind of work that I want to do. And so if fame is the thing that allows me to do the work, then whatever that cost is, I am prepared for that.”

At first glance, the role of Jon Landau contrasts dramatically with Kendall Roy in one simple way: Landau is a real man, whereas Kendall is not. But that fundamentally misunderstands both how Strong works as an actor, and also the complexity of Jesse Armstrong’s writing for Succession, in which Kendall served perhaps as an amalgam of Lachlan and James Murdoch, paralleled tensions in the Redstone and Maxwell families and was perhaps also the thematic offspring of Shakespeare’s King Lear.

“Kendall is real to me because he’s made out of bits and pieces of myself, alchemised with the writing, and that’s as best as I can understand it,” Strong says. “He’s as real to me as the character of Jon is, which is to say half-imagination and half-grounded in something that I don’t totally understand. Certainly, the responsibility feels different. I feel an enormous weight of responsibility to render someone with accuracy and depth and fidelity to who they are. But at the same time, in a way, my biggest obligation is in a sense to myself to be as free as possible.”

The key, Strong says, is to “disobligate yourself from some mimetic thing or trying to get them right or nail something, and really it becomes about trying to have ownership over it based on a deep understanding.” The other influential factor was having Landau, along with Springsteen, on the set a lot of the time. “So, in a sense with something like this, I have an audience of one, which is for Jon to feel seen and understood in the work.”

Surely, Landau’s presence was risky, I ask. “I would say probably the correct answer would be yes, but I think I am steadfast in terms of protecting my own impulse [in the way] that Bruce and Jon protect their own impulses. The danger would to not be listening to my own impulses, not to not please someone. Of course pleasing them ultimately is supremely important to me, but the way to do that is for me to be free and to do my work, which they understood, and they … empowered me to do that.”

Now 78, the New York-born Landau was one of America’s pre-eminent rock critics. He was Jann Wenner’s first choice when recruiting journalists to contribute to the launch issue of the now-iconic Rolling Stone magazine. And he was the man who said that the key criterion for art in rock is the capacity of a musician to create a personal, almost private, universe and to express it fully. That quote, more than anything else, was something Strong hung onto.

“They did that with Born to Run, they did that with Darkness, they did that with Nebraska, and maybe Nebraska is almost the supreme example of a fully expressed private universe,” Strong says. “But Jon had a moral and aesthetic compass as much as he had a commercial one, and I think that tension exists in the character in this film. He’s there to protect Bruce as an artist and steadfastly translate that artist’s vision and also to protect his commercial interests.”

Cooper describes Landau as much more than a music manager. “He is an artistic collaborator,” Cooper says. “He’s a father figure because Bruce had a very challenging relationship with his father, and he’s also part therapist. So you have a man in Jon Landau balancing Bruce’s artistic brilliance and the creative risk with also trying to manage a career.”

It is true too, that the two Jeremys – Strong, as Landau, and Allen White, as Springsteen – have very similar rhythm and energy as actors. Whatever that chemistry is, it translates very smoothly onto the screen. In the hands of lesser artists, they might have become competitive performances, subtly fighting to edge each other out of the emotional boundary of the scenes. But in fact, they are beautifully complementary, delivering a slow and careful dance around each other that captures powerfully the uncomplicated trust between Landau and Springsteen.

“It’s purely instinct,” says Strong. “We never talked about anything, but he’s a very honest actor and I tried to be as well, and so that in itself becomes a lifeline for each other. He’s a great listener, he’s very present, and he’s also totally immersed in what he’s doing. So we shared an affinity in that sense. There was a kind of tacit understanding between us that required very little muscle. It was just sort of there because I think we’d both done our homework so much and just showed up as these people and ready to inhabit them.”

For Strong, this might be a difficult role to walk away from. In a sense, if you imagine the actor to be a blank canvas, then you expect the canvas to be wiped clean for the next role. For Strong, while the process is clear, the outcome is less certain. And in a world where these men, whether it be Kendall Roy’s real-world avatar Lachlan Murdoch, or Springsteen and Landau, are often still in the headlines, Strong acknowledges an instinctive, enduring connection.

“I think you start from nowhere every time, and the task is in a way to reinvent yourself and fully disappear into each thing because these things are such an important part of my life when I’m doing them, that stays with me somewhere,” Strong says. “So I feel a connection to a lot of disparate things that I’ve given my life to.

“But I don’t identify with things that I’ve done in the past,” Strong adds. “Even with this, we’re sitting here talking in Asbury Park about something that we did a year ago, and I’m sort of deeply onto the next thing, and it’s a strange part of what we do ... to completely fill yourself up with something to the point where you tip over into it and then, like a rain cloud, you sort of rain it all out and then it’s gone.”

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere is in cinemas from October 23.

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