Jeremy Strong, after Succession, Armageddon Time

Jeremy Strong in the interview he gave to I Woman to talk about Armageddon Timethe James Gray film that passed in competition at the Cannes Film Festival and which has just been seen at the Rome Film Festival, it seemed tortured to us and we write it with all possible benevolence. Because he is really good – like everyone else, from Anne Hathaway to Anthony Hopkins, to the two kids, Banks Repeta and Johnny Davis, the real first actors – so much so that the American specialized press guarantees his Oscar nomination as a non-protagonist.

Kendall’s Succession like Hamlet

Strong that is finishing up filming for the fourth season of Succession, undoubtedly a choral work, and which does not hesitate to define itself as “a character actor”, that is “a non-protagonist who plays singular or eccentric characters”, will probably never fail in its singularity, but it is possible that from now on it has often the name at the top of the opening credits. The actor who, according to his colleagues, plays Kendall, the middle child of Succession as if it were Hamlet and that he considers “the greatest challenge, disappearing into a character”, will be in fact to begin with protagonist of two new series.

The first, produced by Brad Pitt, will tell the story of the Boeing 737 Max accident of 2019, the second the post-11 September seen from the side of the rescuers. In Armageddon Time, which comes out at the end of the month in America and will arrive here in February 2023, is as “singular” as a Queens plumber can be determined to crush any artistic ambition in his younger son. Irving, the plumber, however, is the father of director James Gray and the little boy, who is enchanted in front of a Kandinsky during a school trip to the Guggenheim Museum, but who does not excel at school, is the director himself. «An origin story of the birth of an artist» explains Strong. “But also an origin story of the America in which we find ourselves now, crossed by racial and political divisions. I am very distressed, if I think about it, but I have faith in the younger generations ».

What James Gray in Armageddon Time in fact he staged, is the moment when a teenager is forced to make his first adult decisionthat is to stand next to the black classmate, or to choose one’s racial and class privilege, but it is also the photograph of a precise moment in American history, the 1980sin which Donald Trump’s father, tycoon Fred, and older sister Maryanne (a cameo by Jessica Chastain), appear on the scene (“A direct attack on capitalism” subtly commented on the director).

To be Irving Graff, un burden on the shoulders

“This is a very personal film for James. He grew up in a Jewish family in Queens. When he was 12, Ronald Reagan was elected and the nation went through great upheaval. Armageddon Time is his search for lost time, the story of a moral educationStrong continues. The actor searches for words with care, partly because it is not certain that one can always rely on Jessica Chastain’s reactivity, partly because the responsibility of embodying the boss’s father would make anyone hesitate.

“There is a painting by William Kentrige of a man who, in an elegant suit, is on his knees,” he says. «I thought about him when I started work on Irving: a man who carries a great burden on his shoulders. My experience is different from his. I am a father, I have small children (three girls, 4, 3 and 1 year old, ed), I feel fallible, I have within me the desire to move the earth and the sky for my daughters, but I know I’m not always equipped to do it. I can understand Irving and I can understand his son. ‘

Jeremy Strong and the (dis) united families

The film tells of a family that struggles to stay together. For five years with Succession Jeremy Strong has been in a family that tears itself apart regularly with every episode. In any case, an emotional tour de force, we ask him. Strong starts a couple of sentences and then abandons them: “I can tell you this. The character I was able to create isn’t exactly what James wanted me to do, but it’s the way I found to tell the story of him. And James accepted it. As an actor, you have only one way to embrace your character. And there comes a time when you can no longer think of him as the director’s father, but only a separate individual, a new man, you have to free yourself from the obsession with truthfulness and also from what the director thinks you should do. To seek your truth. He seeks that he must proceed incessantly ».

The choice of the adverb is not accidental, if we consider that the ex-kid who had the Daniel Day Lewis poster in his bedroom (but also Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman) and that at 18 he came taken at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London for a summer courseended up being Daniel Day Lewis’ own assistant on the set of The ballad of Jack and Rose. Previously there had been a Yale degree and all sorts of jobs to support New York, including “stage roles so off Broadway that there was only the river a little further on.”

The memory of the father

Strong had read Laurence Olivier’s autobiography and fell in love with the idea of ​​being “bold”no wonder she chose the Oscar-winning actor for My left foot as a model. For Armageddon Time and in the name of the audacity it deserves, he spent days with truer than true plumbers and asked the director to share photos and family memories. Gray – who in the interviews is quite direct (“I’ve been making films for 30 years, it hasn’t been too bad. Maybe because I’ve never done anything for money. If you want a film to make as much money as possible, you have to be a banker, not a director. He said to I woman. And of course: «Mine is a personal film, of course, but the personal is political, you cannot separate yourself from what is happening in the world») – speaking of his happy casting choices, he summarized:« Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong are identical to my parents. If you saw a photo of my family you would understand. Jeremy speaks exactly like my father. Someone told me that he talks like me, but that’s because I talk like my father! My children saw the film and they met their grandfather, my father died a few months ago. Well, they were shocked because Jeremy was just like him and, even though they had never seen him in the outbursts, they had never confronted the most violent part of him, they recognized it. “
Robert Downey jr. who in 2014 directed Strong in The Judge, another family story in which Jeremy played a mentally disabled person, struck by the intensity of his performance, said he “crossed the Rubicon.” Which, beyond metaphor, basically answers “one of the first questions I ask myself, not intellectually, but emotionally, when it comes to understanding if I can play a character” Or? “How messed up is this guy? And the answer is usually that the more messed up he is, the better I can work on it. ‘

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