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Welcome to a Men in Blazers pod special.

Today Sunday, they're the week which I know many of you look forward to as much as I do recently

and certainly not because of anything ever some football club I've been doing but because it's released day for a new episode of Succession.

And as many of you will know if you've listened to this podcast, I'm one of millions who will be this show with its frenzy takeovers, drone strike put downs, fleeting glimpses of humanity, fleeting, smothered by greed, aspiration, desperate cries for attention, and stream of consciousness obscenity.

Sounds like a Chelsea board meeting. The performance is the writing, the Logan Roy cardigans, they've all made it like Game of Thrones without the dragons and the dialogues, both a magical confections of family dynamics, human lust for power, and then fathomable trauma, spinning narratives that are deeply timeless and truly zeitgeist in equal measure.

And it was that passion for this piece of work that fueled my work on season one of HBO's official succession podcast.

We taped it back in the summer of 2020, a project that came deep in the midst of COVID when we're all relying really on successioners and escape and J.Dubs and I were lucky enough to sit down with virtually all the show's biggest stars including none other than Jeremy Strong,

a gent who stirring, surreal and all encompassing performances as Kendall Roy of Ande M&M, and a golden globe.

And so with the show in its final season, we wanted to go back and revisit that conversation and one I had with Jeremy, one that's incredibly illuminating, especially in retrospect knowing all we know now about the direction of the series and the performance his to these turned in.

Let's say this pod was recorded back in 2020, so no worries on spoilers here. I should also know and this may go without saying you can find the whole stream of my interviews, the one with Brian Cox really that kicked it off was utterly magnificent, but also the Wams Gams interview, what an incredible human being, succession,

about a new episode tonight at 9pm Eastern time on HBO, always available on demand on HBO Max, but for now here it is, my conversation with Jeremy Strong.

My job at least last season was to be in help and so I had to find ways to do that for myself that I found very difficult and painful and God knows I didn't want to do it anymore. And then I meet Kendall. That's when I understand what he's going through.

The trodjabenip and this is HBO's succession podcast. My guest today is the haunted hip-hop slinging dead eye tri-hard air apparent to your favourite media crews and theme park empire, a broken robot who lives to self sabotage his own attempts to grapple for control of waystar Royco to grapple for control of his life to be honest against that manipulative sadistic patriarch farther of his.

A techno-guet to be character fueled by hunger for power, betrayal and ketamine, the CEO of pain and crestfall and despair, played by a man who's known to disappear into every performance he gives.

And there's been called an actor's actor capable of unfurling some of the most nuanced committed work on television. He's the Theon Greyjoy of succession, the real walking dead. Welcome to the pod. Jeremy Strong.

That is a mighty introduction. Thank you. Jeremy, I revere you. There is a Tracy Chapman's album worth of sadness in Kendall Roy. He's a remarkable amalgam of total arrogance and total insecurity.

He sees his father both as a false god and a deity he wants to worship. Is Kendall the manifestation of the most profound question every kid must answer the extent to which they want to become the person their parents expect or actualize as an independent human being?

That's the crux of the question and of the struggle and certainly where Jesse is hanging the entire show.

I went to the writer's room, which is a sort of squalid little room in Brixton a couple years ago before we started.

The very first thing at the top of the dry race board was this question, can you escape family? Can you escape legacy? Can you get out from underneath that shadow or does it become the sort of pole star that is always exhibiting this sort of gravitational force and that defines your life?

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