Succession creator says he was terrified when Jeremy Strong tried to jump into the river while filming the final scene

Succession – 86%the hit HBO series, was created by Jesse Armstrong and its first season premiered in June 2018. The show follows the life of the wealthy and dysfunctional Roy family, who owns a media and entertainment conglomerate called Waystar Royco. The plot centers on internal conflicts and power struggles between the family patriarch, Logan Roy (Brian Cox), the founder and CEO of Waystar Royco, and his four children: Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Siobhan “Shiv” (Sarah Snook), Roman (Kieran Culkin) and Connor (Alan Ruck), all of them aspiring to inherit the family empire.

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After five years, four seasons and a total of 39 episodes, the acclaimed program said goodbye this Sunday, May 28, with the premiere of its latest episode, entitled “With Open Eyes.” Warning, spoilers for succession next. In a new interview for Fresh Air of npr (via Variety), Armstrong admitted he was completely “terrified” when Jeremy Strong he spontaneously tried to jump into the Hudson River while filming Kendall Roy’s final scene in Succession.

Jeremy Strong spoke about the incident for the first time in an interview with Vanity Fair published at the end of May, and now Armstrong has recounted his reaction to the actor’s hasty attempt to jump into the water. This told the creator of succession in the middle:

I was terrified. He was terrified that he might fall and injure himself. It didn’t look like he was going to jump. But once he got over that barrier, when you shoot, there’s usually a lot of health and safety screening going on, and that wasn’t our plan that day. If we had been thinking about that happening, we would have had boats and divers and all kinds of security measures, which we didn’t have. So my first thought was for the physical safety of him as a human being, not the character. That’s what I felt that day. Oh my God.

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In the last moments of successionKendall, the character of strong, is found only in Battery Park. He has been stripped of his life purpose; his brother-in-law, Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen), was named the new CEO of Waystar following the merger with GoJo. The scene cuts to Kendall staring at the river, but Jeremy Strong tried to push things further. In the May interview with Vanity Fair, strong He said the following about this last scene:

As written, it was meant to end with an aerial shot where we see Kendall walking and see Colin following him. I begged (Armstrong and director Mark Mylod): ‘Can we go in the water? I want to keep walking.’ We ended up at the bitter end of Battery Park, facing the water. I had never seen waves like this on the East River. He felt biblical. And there was a terrible banging on a nearby scaffolding. We didn’t know what we were looking for, but something profound happened. We only had about eight minutes to shoot that piece at the end because the sun was going down. The water was calling me. It felt good for all of us.

strong explained what motivated him to try to jump into the river that time:

I tried to get into the water after cutting; I got up off that bench and ran as fast as I could over the barrier and over the stilts, and the actor playing Colin ran towards me. I didn’t know he was going to do that, and he didn’t know it, but he ran over and stopped me. I don’t know if at that moment I felt that Kendall just wanted to die, I think so, or if he essentially wanted to be saved by a representative of his father. To me, what happens in the board vote is an extinction level event for this character. There is no going back from that. But what I love about the way that Jesse chose to end it, it’s a much stronger ending philosophically, and it has more integrity to what is Jesse’s very bleak overall view of humanity, which is that, fundamentally, people really not change. They don’t do the spectacular, the dramatic. Instead, there’s kind of a fatal loop that we’re all stuck in, and Kendall’s stuck in this kind of silent scream with Colin there as a bodyguard and jailer.

Although strong He felt at that moment that his character wanted to die, Armstrong he told Terry Grossthe presenter of Fresh Air of npr, that he did not believe that Kendall was actually contemplating suicide. These were his words (via Variety):

Not for me. I think for me, Kendall, in the end, one of the things she’s missing is even the freedom to determine her own course in life. The name and the wealth that surrounds it, to many of us, obviously seems extraordinarily lucky, and it is. But I do think there’s a certain kind of tragedy in a real name, in a big business name, in being a Disney or a Windsor or any of those kinds of names, and he can never get away from that. And one of the ways he can’t escape is to have a bubble of protection around him… even if he’s looking at it, I don’t think it can happen to him. And yet, to me, that’s not the way the story plays out for this type of person.

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