Jeremy Strong is too busy “committing” to pay any attention to criticism over his method acting process.
“I’m just there to commit utterly to serving the material,” Strong, 47, told The New Yorker in an interview published Friday, October 2, addressing claims some of his costars have grown frustrated with his art. “If some people feel that I’m taking it too seriously, or it changes the molecules in the room in a way that makes something uncomfortable, I guess that’s something that I don’t feel that I need to apologize for.”
He continued, “I believe — and I think the directors that I work with all believe — that it’s in service of the material. I personally think that a lot of the reactions to it are of a personal nature.”
Strong is one of many actors who prefer to stay in character after cameras stop rolling as a way to create an authentic onscreen portrayal. While Strong’s colleagues might raise their eyebrows over his approach, he stressed to The New Yorker that he would “never” get in the way of their own performances.
“It is never my intention to interfere with anyone else’s experience or anyone else’s way of working,” the Social Reckoning actor stated. “First, do no harm, right? But commit to what you’re doing, and utterly.”
Strong famously employed a method acting approach to play Kendall Roy in HBO’s Succession, which ran for four seasons from 2018 to 2023.
“I think you’re like a detective, and you’re just looking for clues,” he recalled of his process for getting into character. “So you read everything. Each time it’s different. You really kind of start from nothing every time.”
While Succession was loosely based on the Murdoch family, Strong didn’t wish to reach out to the real-life media moguls for inspiration.
“I don’t think it was — certainly that family, along with a lot of other families, are in the genome of what Jesse [Armstrong, our show creator] wrote, but it’s not a one-to-one,” he stated of the comparisons. “It’s not, I would say, about them.”
As Strong moves on to portray Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg in Aaron Sorkin’s upcoming The Social Reckoning, he employed a similar approach.
“My hope is that the film is a dialectic rather than a polemic,” he said of the film. “There’s a kind of trend, generally, of ‘It’s all Facebook’s fault’ — like, all of it, everything. I don’t think that that is. When we talk about truth decay and the deterioration of civil discourse, our storytelling plays a really important role in that. I personally — and it’s why I reached out to Mark — was defending him a lot, when we were making the film to my director.”
