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I meet Jeremy Strong on the winter solstice outside Sparsholt’s hottest pub, which is also Sparsholt’s only pub.
The population of this English village: roughly 900. The sheep population: more than that. Everything feels in tune with nature. The air is clean and damp and vegetal. The afternoon sun hangs low in the sky, illuminating fields so bucolic they make the Shire look like Times Square. And Jeremy Strong is dressed, as ever, entirely in brown.
Sweater, jacket, and corduroy pants, in shades that vary, by degrees barely perceptible to the human eye, from taupe to cappuccino to acorn. On his head: a brown bucket hat. On top of that hat: a second hat, a brown cashmere beanie.
“My wife told me that somebody said something like, ‘The three things you’re going to be certain of are death, taxes, and that Jeremy Strong will be wearing brown.’ I don’t know, it’s inexplicable,” he says about his uniform style, before providing multiple explanations.
Number one: “In a way, it’s a metaphor for the rest of my life. I gravitate towards an extremely narrow band. That’s all that I want and I don’t want anything else.”
Number two: “This is maybe half bullshit, but maybe not total bullshit: I spend so much of my life wearing costumes, I feel almost denuded in my style. It’s so consistent and neutral that almost anytime I put on any wardrobe, I feel profoundly different from my baseline self.”
Number three: “It’s monastic. Monastic chic.”
Strong holds up a map. “I have a slight mission for us.”
On his way here, he heard organ music playing down the road and wants to check it out. We wander over to its source, the village church, and cross through the parish graveyard. Strong turns to me and asks, with sincere attentiveness: “Do you like cemeteries?” He does. His 44th birthday is approaching. Christmas Day, actually. That coincidence gave him a sense of specialness growing up. He gestures at the interred souls around us. “This obviates it.”
The church is empty by the time we get inside, so we set off on one of the thousands of muddy walking paths that crisscross England. These paths were made for conversations with Strong, who will amble along with his hands clasped behind his back and casually deploy observations like: “The self is a bit of a prison.” (The self is a bit of a prison!) They’re where Strong can come to get out of his head—the place he spends a lot of his time, too much time. We’re alone, save for the sheep and the birds and the occasional pedestrian with a consummate English countryside dog, whom Strong will stop to greet.
Though the actor splits his time between Brooklyn and his wife’s native Denmark, they’re here for the holidays visiting some of her family. Strong is on a brief break from filming the fourth season of HBO’s Succession, the hit satirical drama about the messy familial power struggles of the .01 percent, which you can use to neatly demarcate his life into Before and Since.
Before, he was toiling, if not quite in the unknown, then the not-exactly-known. Off-Broadway plays and bit parts in big movies, but no breakthroughs. He spent years in a studio apartment that had “one chair, one set of fork and knife, a coffee cup, some books, a pile of scripts.”
Now, he has a family. Three daughters with his wife, child psychiatrist and documentarian Emma Wall. Ages four, two, and one, they were all born while he worked on Succession. He has an Emmy and the luxury of choice when it comes to roles. Presumably a few more chairs and forks and knives. “The difference,” he says, “is somebody finally giving me the ball.”
The thing about getting what you want, though, is that it usually comes with some baggage you didn’t bargain for. That whole monkey’s paw scenario.
For Strong, that meant being cracked open publicly. He swiftly went from Jeremy Strong, that guy you like on that TV show, to Jeremy Strong, tortured actor who’s sometimes overly intense to the point of mania and delusion.
“Last year this time,” he says, “I sort of cratered a bit.”
One day, Succession will end. That day might be imminent. Strong returned to set in January to film the final two episodes of the new season, which could be the final two episodes, period.
Strong has thought about what it will mean to bid farewell to Kendall Roy, the tormented billionaire scion he’s inhabited for the past five years. About whether this will be the high point of his career. “It will feel like a death, in a way,” he says.
He looks at his peers, who have filmed five, six, seven projects while he was in the Succession trenches. He envies “that freedom to just shoot yourself out of some different cannons. Sometimes Kendall feels like the same cannon over and over again.”
And so, as the show winds down, Strong finds himself at a new and entirely unfamiliar juncture altogether. “When I was younger, I saw the future in the crosshairs. I don’t feel that anymore,” he says. “There is a feeling of ‘Now what?’ that I don’t have the answer to.”
We come upon a wide-open pasture dotted with sheep. Strong exhales as he takes in the view. Calm sweeps across his face. “I mean, it’s kind of like…fuck Brooklyn.”
A goose honks in the distance. “Should we follow that sound?”
There is no character on television like Kendall Roy. The middle son of bullish media titan Logan Roy (Brian Cox), he was once the heir apparent of the family corporation, Waystar Royco, and is now the chief antagonist to his father. But Kendall transcends your typical failed-rich-kid archetype to become an actual tragedy—an addict and absentee dad who Chappaquiddick’ed a cater waiter and is plagued by the unceasing heaviness of his guilt.
He is also unquestionably hilarious. Swaggering and bumbling in equal measure. A perfect little gift of bottomless secondhand embarrassment, packaged in a Cucinelli suit. Rapping along to the Beastie Boys. Rapping an original composition dedicated to his father. Shitting the bed, both metaphorically and, one time, literally.
Despite this, or perhaps because of it, Kendall is a sex symbol for legions of female viewers—the ultimate “I can fix him.” (That unlikely appeal goes beyond Succession: I came across a fancam video of Strong in character as a hard-boiled Queens dad in the 2022 film Armageddon Time, set to Ginuwine’s “Pony.”)
It is a testament to Strong that he can make you feel empathy for a character who says things like, “I’m looking for pussy like a fuckin’ techno Gatsby.” It is also a testament to Strong that he can always do that with a straight face. “I’ve had two or three times where he’s broken, and it’s been in one-on-one scenes. So I feel very proud about that,” his costar Nicholas Braun, who plays the perennially goofy Cousin Greg, said. “Usually, he is un-breakable. It’s incredible.”
In a show that already stomps all over the culture during each 10-week run, Kendall resonates in particular. Strong has encountered Kendall tattoos in the wild. He’s heard from dynastic offspring who find the character relatable. He’s even seen his visage slapped on Frank Ocean merch, which sold out instantly. Though you can easily imagine a Succession scene in which Kendall humiliates himself in front of Ocean, the musician and Strong are friendly. “He, a couple years ago, reached out and asked me to come do a kind of creative project with him,” Strong told me, which resulted in the photos featured in that drop.
I first talked to Strong in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in mid-December. It was a drizzly night, and he asked me to meet him outside his apartment building prior to dinner at a nearby restaurant. Strong bounded downstairs. But before going anywhere, he told me he had to say goodbye to his daughters. We crossed the street and looked up at a large, well-lit window, where three small silhouettes stood waving sweetly down below.
“I feel a thousand pounds lighter,” he said.
Strong had been filming Succession since July, traveling between New York, California, and Norway in the ensuing months. When he wrapped for the hiatus at 2 a.m. that morning, the first thing he did was the first thing he always does when shooting ends for the day. He put all his jewelry back on: a vintage green signet pinky ring that was a 40th birthday gift from his wife; a silver amulet necklace, engraved with a guardian angel and one of his daughter’s sonogram footprints; and a silver bracelet engraved with his daughters’ names.
“I sort of shed all of that,” Strong said. “And then I’m happily bound by it again.”
Before our dinner, Strong had Zoomed with the director David O. Russell about potentially working together. “So how else did you spend your first day of break, besides Zooming with David O. Russell?” I asked him.
“That’s it,” he said. “I prepared to Zoom with David O. Russell.”
At the restaurant, he peeled off his jacket (brown) to reveal a sweatshirt (also brown). My eyes migrated to a splotch of water on the left shoulder. “My daughter put macaroni and cheese on my sweatshirt,” he explained. “I was like, ‘Ah, fuck it, I’m not going to change.’ ”
Each season of Succession requires Strong to prepare differently. On the recommendation of show creator Jesse Armstrong, he kept Richard III in mind (“But I am in/So far in blood that sin will pluck on sin”). He made a new playlist to get into the Kendall headspace and texted me snippets of what he added for season four: “New Level,” by A$AP Ferg; “Moon,” by Kanye West; and “I Don’t Care Anymore,” by Phil Collins.
Strong, a noted menswear-head off-screen, also turned a meticulous eye toward Kendall’s wardrobe. He collaborated closely with costume designer Michelle Matland, and, as a result, the character has become a fashion icon in his own right. For season four, Loro Piana sent Strong a custom jacket, and Richard Mille, a watch. “Those are all things that I do on my own because those details just feel really important to me, and so I take initiative in that area,” he said.
For most of season three, Kendall was on a manic high. “I thought about Kanye,” Strong told me. After publicly denouncing his father for his role in a sex scandal at Waystar Royco, Kendall went on a rampage, self-styling as a feminist ally. The illusion begins to crumble in one of the most devastating TV episodes of all time, when Kendall throws a 40th birthday party for himself. The night starts gloriously over-the-top: He has guests enter through an immersive room meant to mimic his mother’s womb, plans to sing a rendition of Billy Joel’s “Honesty” while suspended from a crucifix, and brags about hiring the Tiny Wu-Tang Clan—a group of children who specialize in Wu-Tang covers.
The episode is a clinic in how Strong can take the character from cringeworthy to profoundly human. Ultimately, Kendall breaks down when, rifling through a massive pile of gifts, he can’t find the one from his children and realizes he’s surrounded by people who couldn’t care less if he lives or dies. (Originally, there was no gift-room scene; it was written after Strong shared some ideas with Armstrong, namely, the end of the David Mamet play American Buffalo, in which the character Teach trashes a junk shop and yells, “The world is lies!”)
“I felt like my task [in that episode] was to really try and retrieve a sense, for Kendall, of a lost childhood that he really never had,” he told me. “There were some talismanic things: my childhood blanket, a stuffed animal that I had when I was a kid. There was a Mark Strand poem called ‘Where Are the Waters of Childhood?’ that I read a lot. You get in touch with that emptiness. You get in touch with searing regrets. I have three young children right now, and I’m at work almost all the time. That’s something that Kendall, in a way, is experiencing.”
While filming season four, he didn’t know how things would end for Kendall. “I have a broad-strokes sense of things,” he said. “But this season, I didn’t want to know more. What I can say is I’m on the rack…. I feel a sense of really wanting to, now that we’re at the one-yard line, finish this season and possibly the show, in a way that delivers a real payload of what this journey has been.”
Strong referenced Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel’s historical novel about Thomas Cromwell’s methodical rise in the court of Henry VIII. In particular, he was struck by an early scene from Cromwell’s childhood, when his father is beating him. “I remember writing it down, because I was thinking about Succession,” he said. “In a way, I would say that’s what Kendall’s arc”—a child who is both his father’s son and trying desperately to get out from under his thumb—“has slowly been.” (It should be noted that Cromwell is far more shrewd and capable than Kendall.) (It should also be noted that things did not end well for old Thomas Cromwell.)
“I still hope that there are rungs on the ladder that are redemptive for Kendall,” he said.
Strong’s unflagging and obsessive seriousness about his craft has raised some eyebrows about whether he can separate fiction from reality and whether he’s difficult to work with. He prefers to isolate himself on set. Trading TikToks and weekend plans with his colleagues make everything feel too casual and rote for him. “It’d be one thing if I was working on Friends or something,” he said. “I worked on a Guy Ritchie movie, and I approached that very differently.”
He does typically come armed with ideas. Braun told me about an instance while they were working on season four when, to get his costars in the mood for a scene, Strong “found a YouTube video of horrible crashes and destruction from, maybe, Transformers, and he had the sound department play it loud on the speakers so that we could hear it. I think that’s the mentality: Why not try something to see if it does change the energy in the room and in a performance?”
Jesse Armstrong recalled a memory from the first season when Strong showed up on set with his wife during one of his off days. “I didn’t recognize him,” Armstrong said. “The way that he’d been carrying himself for the preceding weeks as he played Kendall in the dark place meant that his whole physicality was completely different.”
Strong spoke of feeling as if his job is to make a sacrifice of himself for the audience. I asked him if that meant that work was a torturous process for him.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.”
So, what, you only enjoy it when you’re having a rapturous moment, every once in a while?
“I wouldn’t even say it’s rapturous.” He closed his eyes, remembering a difficult night of shooting from the first season. At 4 a.m., as he was heading home, one of the grips on set walked by him and said, “Well done, mate.”
His voice caught. When he opened his eyes again, they were glistening. “It’s moments like that you feel like, ‘Okay, I put myself through something that is difficult, and it’s connected with someone.’ And that’s all that it really is.”
Later, Strong texted me a photo of a note he wrote out—as both Kendall and himself—on Waystar Royco stationery. It was dated November 2017, right before filming the first season, and read, in part:
I NEED TO BE STRONG BUT I DON’T FEEL STRONG
I FEEL COMPLETELY ALONE IN ALL OF THIS
I HAVE TO BE THE LEAD BUT I DON’T KNOW IF IM UP TO IT BUT I DO FUCKING KNOW
The leaves are slick under our boots. The woodlands grow thicker and thicker, trees curving above the path to form an overgrown green tunnel with no end in sight. Mist starts to envelope us. When we emerge, we might find ourselves in a different century. A different cosmic plane.
“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.”
James Gray, who directed Strong in Armageddon Time, told me that Strong “has not been given anything. He’s had to work for what he’s gotten, and that’s part of what makes him wonderful, because he doesn’t take things for granted.”
After Sudbury, Strong was off to another elite space where he felt like an outsider: Yale. “Maybe the quoting is just a part of an armor,” he says. “I don’t come from a very highly cultured, highly educated…I come from a family that has a lot of emotional intelligence and presence and empathy. But when I went to Yale, I felt like I had a lot to compensate for, and part of it was probably a way to cope and a way to feel a sense of belonging in that environment.”
He smiles a wry smile. “My mother always felt like going to Yale ruined me. In the sense that she saw me become very turned inward and more depressive, or less free…. People used to tell me that I smiled too much, which is maybe hard for people to believe when they know me now.”
By 2001, he had landed in New York and was working the types of jobs you work when you’re trying to make it as an actor in New York: temp, room service waiter, regular waiter. “I fucking hated all of these jobs,” he says with a laugh. He tried the LA thing, too, on and off. Mostly off. “My experience in LA was: ‘This place doesn’t accept my form of currency.’ ”
Though he had accumulated industry experience as a teenager and young adult, working on film sets and in the theater, his first movie role didn’t come until 2008, with the indie Humboldt County. He landed the lead, an uptight medical student who ends up in California weed country. Peter Bogdanovich played his disapproving father. (“I remember being in a hotel room in Eureka, California,” Strong recalls, “where he was telling me a story about Tom Petty—and his joint caught on fire and caught his ascot on fire.”)
With Humboldt County, Strong thought he was making his version of The Graduate meets Five Easy Pieces. “And no one saw that movie,” he says. “I was very used to, for years and years and years, doing work and used to it not being seen or recognized. And while that was hard, I was at peace with that.”
A pause hangs in the country air.
“No, that’s a lie. I was dissatisfied.”
He wanted to create work that gave him satisfaction. He wanted to create work that was seen and appreciated.
“There’s something about peer recognition that has always been important to me,” he says. “Although the older I get, I try to cultivate a place of trying to not give a fuck what anybody thinks.”
He brings it up himself, and he brings it up more than once, so there’s no use talking around it. In late 2021, Strong was the subject of an infamous profile in The New Yorker.
What was it with that article? Why did it strike such a chord? Some readers said it was an honest, unflinching portrait of its subject. Others, especially his celebrity friends who released statements in response—Anne Hathaway, Adam McKay, Jessica Chastain, Aaron Sorkin by way of Jessica Chastain’s Twitter account—claimed it was a sneering character assassination. Others still argued that Strong really did sound like a pain in the ass to work with, as evidenced by a handful of his Succession costars all but stating as much. “I’ve worked with intense actors before,” said Brian Cox in the piece. “It’s a particularly American disease, I think, this inability to separate yourself off while you’re doing the job.”
Regardless of where most readers came down on it, the story made people way more interested in Strong. And why not? Here was a guy who pulled himself up by his Paul Harnden bootstraps, who tried hard and cared and was deeply invested in his work, who still had passion and dedication and fire in his belly when the whole world was going the way of quiet quitting. And, God, weren’t actors so boring these days with their veneers and their Marvel movies and their relatable Twitter accounts? Give us a Knausgård-quoting eccentric any day of the week.
Strong calls the whole matter his “15 minutes of shame, with a long tail.”
The fact that the writer went to Yale, too, brought him right back to his college days. “I hadn’t felt judged like that in a very long time,” Strong says now.
What did you find so shameful about it?
“The shadow is the part of ourselves that we don’t want to share with the world and we want to disavow. The part of me that is striving. The part of me that wants what I want. I was less bothered by other actors having feelings or opinions about the way I work. Really, it was just feeling exposed.”
When you got back to the Succession set in July, did you have any conversations with your costars about their viewpoints on your work?
“Everyone’s entitled to have their feelings. I also think Brian Cox, for example, he’s earned the right to say whatever the fuck he wants. There was no need to address that or do damage control…. I feel a lot of love for my siblings and my father on the show. And it is like a family in the sense that, and I’m sure they would say this, too, you don’t always like the people that you love. I do always respect them.”
I saw that Brian Cox also said, in a follow-up interview, that “there is a certain amount of pain at the root of Jeremy, and I just feel for that pain.”
“You know, I don’t think so. I don’t think there is. There’s certainly a lot of pain in Kendall, and I haven’t really met Brian outside of the confines of that.”
So the piece didn’t change the way you work at all?
“Am I going to adjust or compromise the way that I’ve worked my whole life and what I believe in? There wasn’t a flicker of doubt about that. I’m still going to do whatever it takes to serve whatever it is. Which is not to say that that is the same thing as riding roughshod over other people. It has to do with autonomous concentration. It’s a very solitary thing. I think there’s very low impact on others except for what they might want to project onto it and how that might make them feel.”
Did you ask anyone to say something publicly afterward?
“That took me by surprise. I was really moved by it.”
When did you feel fully over it?
“If anything, I was worried—could it have harmed how I feel about doing what I do? And that kind of haunted me for a while. Acting is a bit of a game, right? And depending on how you look at it, it can be quite a ridiculous game. The thing is to commit to the game. If I were to be halfway in and at the same time aware of the artifice of what we’re doing, I would just think the whole thing is ridiculous. And so I have to do whatever I have to do to believe in it and to create my own sense of belief.”
After the article came out, Strong spent the winter throwing himself into work. He’s developing and starring in two series that, when they come to fruition, will be primo entries in the iPad Dad prestige canon: one about the health crisis that faced 9/11 first responders and one about the corporate malfeasance responsible for the Boeing 737 Max crashes. (Despite reports, he won’t be in Bradley Cooper’s upcoming Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro, having had to drop out because of scheduling conflicts.)
Over the course of 2022, Strong let himself feel his shame. And then he let it pass through him, until it was gone. Last spring, he went to Cannes for the first time with Armageddon Time, then to the northern coast of Denmark with his family, where they have a house in a sleepy seaside town. They spent their days puttering around at the beach and eating from the local fish truck until Succession started up again. He brings up some wisdom from an acting teacher named Ron Van Lieu. “He said that the most vital thing that an actor, and maybe a person, could have was ‘undefended openness,’ ” Strong says. “I guess I didn’t want to learn a lesson to be guarded, so here I am again.”
The path we’re walking along in Sparsholt gives way to another herd of sheep. We stop in front of their pasture and they run toward the fence, perhaps because they recognize the Emmy Award–winning actor and definitely because they think we have food for them. (How fast do you think sheep run? It’s faster than that.)
“Yo!” Strong yells to the sheep.
He looks over to me. “Do you have a good baa?”
“You go ahead,” I say.
He doesn’t hesitate: “Baaaaa!”
As the sun starts to set, we make our way back to the pub. Once you’re off the walking paths, there are winding roads and blind corners and more cars than you’d expect out here. Each time one whizzes by, Strong reflexively holds up his arm to shield me from the road, mostly out of an instinctive thoughtfulness and at least subliminally from an awareness that it would make for bad optics if the GQ writer got pancaked on his watch.
I say that our setting reminds me of the Succession episode when Kendall’s car, on a foggy, remote English road just like this one, veers into a pond and accidentally kills that waiter.
Strong gets quiet.
“Yeah, me too. Me too,” he says. “It brought me back to that, even some of the bird sounds and the hedgerows. We were in a place called Ledbury. I was living in an old converted piggery.…”
He is a million miles away.
“One day, when the show is over, it’ll be easier for me to maybe talk about that stuff, but while it’s still going, that thing still feels real to me in a way.”
We settle into a booth in the back room of the still-empty pub. The resident Labrador trots over, demanding attention. Strong scratches her head as he contemplates the future of his career.
“I don’t feel that same fire. I guess I’m waiting for things that will come along that will rekindle that because I know it’s in me, but it feels more dormant now than it used to,” he says, neither of us quite believing him.
He checks the time and realizes he’s late for another Zoom with David O. Russell, but tells me to hang around and he’ll be back soon.
So I order a drink. I pet the pub dog. I watch the place fill up and get warmer and louder. And I think about what it would mean if we all took everything as seriously as Strong does. If we approached every aspect of our work and our lives with the same shameless rigor and commitment. With the same intention. If we stopped, as it becomes easier and easier to do as the years go on, half-assing things and muddling along.
Then Strong bursts back in, amped up with post-meeting energy.
“I highly recommend the walk, sans flashlight. I don’t know if I’ve ever been in that much darkness. And then a fucking owl hooted!” he says. “It was great.”
He takes a sip of his IPA and waits for his family to join him for dinner. Hearing them enter, he pops out of the back room momentarily and materializes with a baby in his arms: Agathe. We walk out to greet his wife and her relatives. His other two children, Ingrid and Clara, previously those anonymous silhouettes in the window, run into his arms with a level of enthusiasm somewhere between Beatlemania and Black Friday store opening. “We’re going to eat fish and chips!” he says. “And bread,” one of them tells him. “And bread. Lots of bread,” Strong agrees.
When he was young, he imagined a monastic, creative existence for himself. Romanticized it, even. He couldn’t picture himself having a family. His friends couldn’t either.
“He was so devoted to art-making and being an actor that there just wasn’t a lot of room for anything else,” said theater director Sam Gold, who has been close to Strong for over two decades. “So when he met Emma and had kids, I think it really, really changed him for the better. He was willing to live such an ascetic life in devotion to becoming the best actor he could become. It’s nice to see other things in his life taking priority, because he’s a great dad and partner.”
That ascetic life persisted until he was nearly 40. Was Strong waiting to be stable and successful in his career until he took the next step with a family?
“I don’t know if I formulated that consciously. I don’t know if I would’ve been ready to have a family if I felt in that place of famine that I had felt that I was in—and not fulfilled at all artistically. And now, of course, I would do anything for them,” Strong says. “It’s the one thing I feel like I’ve done right in my life is have these beautiful children, these three girls that I have.”
“Work was a center, but it’s not quite a real center,” he says. “I don’t think I knew that until I had children. Work is a very exciting, fraught perimeter to go to now.”
Gabriella Paiella is a GQ staff writer.
A version of this story originally appeared in the March 2023 issue of GQ with the title “Jeremy Strong Won’t Break”
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Gregory Harris
Styled by George Cortina
Hair by Orlando Pita for Orlando Pita Play
Skin by Jeanine Lobell for Neen
Tailoring by Taylor Spong
Prop design by NO Studio at the Wall Group
Produced by Travis Kiewel at That One Production