Deep into Season 3 of HBO’s “Succession,” Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong), the scion-gone-rogue of a family of media billionaires, tells his brother Roman (Kieran Culkin), “You’re not a real person.”

 
It’s a significant insult on this show, on which the question of who does and doesn’t qualify as “real” comes up repeatedly. Most shockingly, it arises in the corporate designation for incidents of sexual abuse and violence against workers on the cruise lines owned by the family business, Waystar Royco: “NRPI,” or No Real Person Involved.

 
This chilling language gets to a core theme of “Succession”: that today’s very rich have become more different from you and me than F. Scott Fitzgerald could have dreamed. The Roys, and the handful of hyperrich that they move among, are not simply a breed apart from us. They have become another species.

 
“Succession,” whose scabrously funny third season begins Sunday, is superficially in the same genre as “Dynasty,” “Dallas” and other bygone soaps about the unhappy superrich. Minus the lyrically deployed obscenities, it would have fit perfectly on prime time in 1981 with its thumbnail premise: Kendall, Roman and their sister, Shiv (Sarah Snook), strive and connive to become either the favorite of their mogul dad, Logan (Brian Cox), or his destroyer.

 
But in key ways, the show is also nothing like its predecessors, because being rich is nothing like it used to be.

 
The wicked oil tycoons of ’80s TV soaps were different from you and me in the way of Ernest Hemingway’s rejoinder to Fitzgerald: They had more money. They used that money the way their viewers would have if they had won the lottery. The opening sequence of the original “Dynasty” is a time-capsule rendering of champagne wishes and caviar dreams, with John Forsythe cradling a snifter of something expensive and Joan Collins wearing bejeweled earrings the size of squash racquets.

 
Like wealth itself today, “Succession” is both a logical progression from its Reagan-era predecessors and something of an entirely different order. The show is made for a time when the richest are proportionally so much richer that it has made them alien. (Even the ones not literally going to space.)

 
Being rich, on “Succession,” does not look fun. If anything, it is aggressively anti-fun, as if fun itself were just a tatty concept for the lumpen masses who crowd the family’s amusement parks.

 
The show’s libido is not hot but warped; Roman, for instance, gets most aroused by being shamed and insulted, preferably by the family consigliere Gerri (J. Smith-Cameron). Its aesthetic is not glitzy but cold. 
The opening episodes of the new season — which pick up immediately from Season 2’s climax in which Kendall dramatically pinned the cruise ship cover-ups on his father — take place largely in conference rooms and on tarmacs, in the interiors of airplanes and corporate cars. The Roys move from one sleek, arid bubble to another. Occasionally they go to parties, which look like conceptual art installations and feel like work.

 
Compared with the covetable glitter of ’80s soaps, the modern luxury of “Succession” is both unattainable and alienating. It says, not only will you never have this, you NRP, your primitive mind doesn’t even have the cultivation to want it.

 
This may be one reason that “Succession,” unlike its predecessors, is a niche sensation rather than a mass broadcast hit. It’s a bitter acquired taste, like expensive imported licorice, with twisted pleasures but little wish fulfillment.

 
Unless, at least, the wish is for untouchability. The Roys’ surname — &lt;em&gt;roi&lt;/em&gt;, king — is an understatement. They are more like Greek gods. They may occasionally descend and sport among us. But they recognize obligations only to one another — if that — and they can be hurt only by their own transhuman kind. (Vulture reported that the creator, Jesse Armstrong, decided not to rewrite the new episodes to address COVID-19, in part on the theory that the pandemic doesn’t really touch people like them.)

 
The new season, the most overtly political and gleefully dark one yet, is focused on whether the forces of reckoning can penetrate the force fields of the Roys and their ilk. It is not optimistic.

 
As Logan musters his defense, he leans on the show’s fictional American president, an unseen Republican he derisively calls “the raisin.” In the end, raisins are grapes, and grapes are meant to be stomped. Or cultivated, when the old ones stop giving juice.

 
With an election looming, Logan — who owns a Fox-like cable news network with conservative kingmaking power — begins auditioning candidates, including a slick quasi-fascist played by Justin Kirk. To Logan, the leader of the free world is, as he puts it in Season 1, basically an “intern.” This may explain his contempt for the presidential ambitions of his oldest son, Connor (Alan Ruck): Connor’s dream isn’t just absurd, it’s slumming.

 
Is there anyone good in all of this? Shiv, once a political consultant of modest principle, has ideals she’ll cling to a touch longer than the other Roys, before discarding them like a champagne flute onto a waiter’s tray. Roman is an irresistible imp, but his eternal joking-not-joking mode makes him all the more sneakily dangerous, like a circa-2016 internet memelord.

 
Beyond the family core, you get to the characters who are merely morally weak in the way you or I might be if thrown into this world. Shiv’s husband, Tom (Matthew Macfadyen), is an arriviste with a tormenting awareness of his dispensability. Greg (Nicholas Braun), a cousin from a poorer branch of the family, is delightfully squirmy, a worm constantly twisting to avoid the hook and maybe wriggle a few inches higher up the fishing line.

 
Greg’s haplessness makes him sympathetic, but is he honorable? His grandfather Ewan (James Cromwell), Logan’s embittered brother, tells him in the new season that he is “in the service of a monstrous enterprise.” Ewan may be a sanctimonious scold — he is the most principled and least likable character on the show — but he is not wrong.

 
That’s “Succession” for you. The best lack all charisma, while the worst are full of panache and intensity. 
This is where the Kendall 2.0 of the new season is especially interesting. You might expect him, in rebel mode, to fill the Bobby Ewing good-guy role, and it’s hard to argue with his attack on the toxic Waystar culture.

 
But he comes off like a rich poseur trying to make idealism his #brand, manically quoting progressive catchphrases the way he spat bad rap at a Season-2 party for Logan. Morality, for him, is like an exciting new market in which he can claim first-mover advantage — or like a handy Oedipal cudgel to brain his father with.

 
The only unifying figure is Logan, the blustering, manipulative Kronos whose children vie to make sure he doesn’t snack on them first. He always seems to be tantalizingly close to destruction — corporate, legal or physical — yet his kids can never shake the fear that he will rise vengefully from his sickbed like the father from Kafka’s “The Judgment.” There is no tyrant as absolute as the one who knew you when you were in diapers.

 
But the evil genius of “Succession” is that it knows that drama pulls the audience to want to root for someone regardless. You skip from one allegiance to another — Team Shiv, no, Team Gerri, no, Team Greg! — as if hopping barefoot on hot pavement. The viewers are like the citizens of a country fallen to one-party authoritarian rule. The good guys are not going to win; the good guys are not even in the game. You can only hope to see a terrible person do something terrible to a more terrible person. 
This makes “Succession” both an addictive spectator sport and one of TV’s great horror stories. We NRPs can enjoy it knowing that we have no stake, except for the tiny fact that people like the Roys run the world. And we can take comfort in the certainty that whoever wins out in this Greek drama — whoever, in Roman’s words, ends up “climbing Mount Olympus to be the new Dr. Zeus” — will at least have the decency not to enjoy it.

Deep into Season 3 of HBO’s “Succession,” Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong), the scion-gone-rogue of a family of media billionaires, tells his brother Roman (Kieran Culkin), “You’re not a real person.

Deep into Season 3 of HBO’s “Succession,” Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong), the scion-gone-rogue of a family of media billionaires, tells his brother Roman (Kieran Culkin), “You’re not a real person.” It’s a significant insult on this show, on which the question of who does and doesn’t qualify as “real” comes up repeatedly. Most shockingly, it arises in the corporate designation for incidents of sexual abuse and violence against workers on the cruise lines owned by the family business, Waystar Royco: “NRPI,” or No Real Person Involved. This chilling language gets to a core theme of “Succession”: that today’s very rich have become more different from you and me than F. Scott Fitzgerald could have dreamed. The Roys, and the handful of hyperrich that they move among, are not simply a breed apart from us. They have become another species. “Succession,” whose scabrously funny third season begins Sunday, is superficially in the same genre as “Dynasty,” “Dallas” and other bygone soaps about the unhappy superrich. Minus the lyrically deployed obscenities, it would have fit perfectly on prime time in 1981 with its thumbnail premise: Kendall, Roman and their sister, Shiv (Sarah Snook), strive and connive to become either the favorite of their mogul dad, Logan (Brian Cox), or his destroyer. But in key ways, the show is also nothing like its predecessors, because being rich is nothing like it used to be. The wicked oil tycoons of ’80s TV soaps were different from you and me in the way of Ernest Hemingway’s rejoinder to Fitzgerald: They had more money. They used that money the way their viewers would have if they had won the lottery. The opening sequence of the original “Dynasty” is a time-capsule rendering of champagne wishes and caviar dreams, with John Forsythe cradling a snifter of something expensive and Joan Collins wearing bejeweled earrings the size of squash racquets. Like wealth itself today, “Succession” is both a logical progression from its Reagan-era predecessors and something of an entirely different order. The show is made for a time when the richest are proportionally so much richer that it has made them alien. (Even the ones not literally going to space.) Being rich, on “Succession,” does not look fun. If anything, it is aggressively anti-fun, as if fun itself were just a tatty concept for the lumpen masses who crowd the family’s amusement parks. The show’s libido is not hot but warped; Roman, for instance, gets most aroused by being shamed and insulted, preferably by the family consigliere Gerri (J. Smith-Cameron). Its aesthetic is not glitzy but cold. The opening episodes of the new season — which pick up immediately from Season 2’s climax in which Kendall dramatically pinned the cruise ship cover-ups on his father — take place largely in conference rooms and on tarmacs, in the interiors of airplanes and corporate cars. The Roys move from one sleek, arid bubble to another. Occasionally they go to parties, which look like conceptual art installations and feel like work. Compared with the covetable glitter of ’80s soaps, the modern luxury of “Succession” is both unattainable and alienating. It says, not only will you never have this, you NRP, your primitive mind doesn’t even have the cultivation to want it. This may be one reason that “Succession,” unlike its predecessors, is a niche sensation rather than a mass broadcast hit. It’s a bitter acquired taste, like expensive imported licorice, with twisted pleasures but little wish fulfillment. Unless, at least, the wish is for untouchability. The Roys’ surname — roi, king — is an understatement. They are more like Greek gods. They may occasionally descend and sport among us. But they recognize obligations only to one another — if that — and they can be hurt only by their own transhuman kind. (Vulture reported that the creator, Jesse Armstrong, decided not to rewrite the new episodes to address COVID-19, in part on the theory that the pandemic doesn’t really touch people like them.) The new season, the most overtly political and gleefully dark one yet, is focused on whether the forces of reckoning can penetrate the force fields of the Roys and their ilk. It is not optimistic. As Logan musters his defense, he leans on the show’s fictional American president, an unseen Republican he derisively calls “the raisin.” In the end, raisins are grapes, and grapes are meant to be stomped. Or cultivated, when the old ones stop giving juice. With an election looming, Logan — who owns a Fox-like cable news network with conservative kingmaking power — begins auditioning candidates, including a slick quasi-fascist played by Justin Kirk. To Logan, the leader of the free world is, as he puts it in Season 1, basically an “intern.” This may explain his contempt for the presidential ambitions of his oldest son, Connor (Alan Ruck): Connor’s dream isn’t just absurd, it’s slumming. Is there anyone good in all of this? Shiv, once a political consultant of modest principle, has ideals she’ll cling to a touch longer than the other Roys, before discarding them like a champagne flute onto a waiter’s tray. Roman is an irresistible imp, but his eternal joking-not-joking mode makes him all the more sneakily dangerous, like a circa-2016 internet memelord. Beyond the family core, you get to the characters who are merely morally weak in the way you or I might be if thrown into this world. Shiv’s husband, Tom (Matthew Macfadyen), is an arriviste with a tormenting awareness of his dispensability. Greg (Nicholas Braun), a cousin from a poorer branch of the family, is delightfully squirmy, a worm constantly twisting to avoid the hook and maybe wriggle a few inches higher up the fishing line. Greg’s haplessness makes him sympathetic, but is he honorable? His grandfather Ewan (James Cromwell), Logan’s embittered brother, tells him in the new season that he is “in the service of a monstrous enterprise.” Ewan may be a sanctimonious scold — he is the most principled and least likable character on the show — but he is not wrong. That’s “Succession” for you. The best lack all charisma, while the worst are full of panache and intensity. This is where the Kendall 2.0 of the new season is especially interesting. You might expect him, in rebel mode, to fill the Bobby Ewing good-guy role, and it’s hard to argue with his attack on the toxic Waystar culture. But he comes off like a rich poseur trying to make idealism his #brand, manically quoting progressive catchphrases the way he spat bad rap at a Season-2 party for Logan. Morality, for him, is like an exciting new market in which he can claim first-mover advantage — or like a handy Oedipal cudgel to brain his father with. The only unifying figure is Logan, the blustering, manipulative Kronos whose children vie to make sure he doesn’t snack on them first. He always seems to be tantalizingly close to destruction — corporate, legal or physical — yet his kids can never shake the fear that he will rise vengefully from his sickbed like the father from Kafka’s “The Judgment.” There is no tyrant as absolute as the one who knew you when you were in diapers. But the evil genius of “Succession” is that it knows that drama pulls the audience to want to root for someone regardless. You skip from one allegiance to another — Team Shiv, no, Team Gerri, no, Team Greg! — as if hopping barefoot on hot pavement. The viewers are like the citizens of a country fallen to one-party authoritarian rule. The good guys are not going to win; the good guys are not even in the game. You can only hope to see a terrible person do something terrible to a more terrible person. This makes “Succession” both an addictive spectator sport and one of TV’s great horror stories. We NRPs can enjoy it knowing that we have no stake, except for the tiny fact that people like the Roys run the world. And we can take comfort in the certainty that whoever wins out in this Greek drama — whoever, in Roman’s words, ends up “climbing Mount Olympus to be the new Dr. Zeus” — will at least have the decency not to enjoy it.

‘Succession’ Returns, with no real people involved

The big man had come to Little Island.

One Friday morning last month, Nicholas Braun ambled his 6-foot, 7-inch self across a bridge over the Hudson River and into this man-made floating park that has fascinated him since it opened in the spring. Or as he put it, “I’ve seen this place a lot from the highway, but it doesn’t ever feel like the moment to go.”

He wandered its landscapes and worked his way up and down its topography. He spent a few moments admiring the hypnotic rotations of a giant spinning disc (“Oh, that made me dizzy in five seconds,” he said) and somewhat less time listening to a slightly repetitive band play in an amphitheater (“They could use a few more lyrics”). He eagerly explored a cavernous tunnel that turned out to lead to the restrooms.

All in all, he came away with a new perspective on the value of public space. “Feels like there should be a mini-golf course up here, right?” he said.

When you’re in Braun’s company, almost anything he says, in his unhurried and naturally innocuous delivery, can seem funny. It can feel like he just has a preternatural propensity for getting himself into awkwardly comic situations.

Those reactions might also be the result of an automatic tendency to associate this 33-year-old actor with his breakout role as Cousin Greg on HBO’s “Succession,” who could have ended up a hapless second-tier character if Braun hadn’t helped elevate him into a first-rank buffoon on that cutthroat comedy-drama. In just two seasons, Braun has slid seamlessly and un-self-consciously into Greg’s blundering fish-out-of-water rhythms, whether he is excusing the mispronunciation of his own name or stammering his way through a U.S. Senate hearing.

But the real-life Braun is by no means Cousin Greg. He is a guy with regular problems and plausible ambitions, who is vexed by leaky pipes in his apartment, hopes for a long-term romantic relationship and counts himself lucky, after more than 20 years as a working actor, to find himself with a popular part on a hit show.

He is also sympathetic to Greg’s highly entertaining flaws and optimistic that the character might someday transcend his limitations — perhaps at some point during the coming third season of “Succession,” which begins Oct. 17.

“I think there is an intellect underneath it all, but it’s buried by all the other stuff — being afraid to talk in a room full of important people,” Braun said. “But when he does get a chance, I think he does have a good take to put forth.”

If there is a point where Braun syncs up completely with Greg, it is in telling the story of someone who suddenly and surprisingly finds himself exactly where he has always wanted to be, and is determined to make the most of the opportunity.

“There’s a trying to Greg that’s really endearing and fun for me to play,” Braun said. “A trying and usually failing — but occasionally not, and it keeps working, slowly working, for him.” 
A certain amount of happenstance has played a vital role in his career. Braun grew up in New York and Connecticut, and he was 5 years old when his parents divorced. After his father started attending acting classes he’d been given as a gift, he encouraged the reluctant young Nicholas to follow him into the craft.

“I would see him every other weekend, and he would put me in a chair and we would do these Meisner repetition exercises together,” Braun said. “They were so frustrating. I hated them. A father and son in a repetition battle — it’s actually crazy to think of that.”

The two were cast together in a short film, and then Braun started getting high-profile TV and movie roles alongside actors like John Larroquette and James Coburn. By his teens he was landing movies like the Disney superhero comedy “Sky High,” and though he enrolled at Occidental College with plans of being a math major, he dropped out after two years, deciding that his future was in performance.

“Barack Obama only did two years there,” Braun said with a smile. “Worked for him.”

When a copy of the pilot script for “Succession” came his way a few years ago, Braun found himself slightly baffled by some of the intense repartee being flung by Logan Roy, the fictional media mogul played by Brian Cox, and his squabbling scions.

“There’s all these things about ‘boost the bid’ that I didn’t understand how that fit in,” Braun recalled. “Is this a business show?” But when he read one of his first scenes as the interloping, underqualified Gregory Hirsch, that had him wearing a dog costume at a theme park and throwing up through its eye holes, Braun said, “I understood my piece of it.”

The character was “the guy in the room that doesn’t get it, who &lt;em&gt;wants&lt;/em&gt; to get it, and wants to be there,” he said. “It was pretty easy to get into Greg’s, you know, thought patterns.”

When Braun arrived to audition with the “Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong and Adam McKay, an executive producer who directed the pilot episode, he was an immediate standout.

“His height is just disarming, right away,” said McKay, the Academy Award-winning screenwriter and filmmaker. “I’m 6-foot-5, so usually when I meet people that are taller than me, they’re athletes. To meet someone who was 6-foot-7 and they have this kind of comedic neurosis to them was really unusual.”

After Braun read from script pages and riffed in a few improvised interactions, the “Succession” team was confident it had its Greg.

Armstrong said that the character was conceived as someone who would share the audience’s disorientation in the world of the Roys — a member of the family who nonetheless did not fit into it easily — but that in Braun’s portrayal he became something more.

“There’s a selfish impulse you have as a writer, which is you’re going to save me,” Armstrong said. “And Nick does this. You’re going to take stuff which is going to lie there, inert, and you’re going to make it funny. Occasionally, you think, oh, he’s going to eat this up — I want to serve this to him on a silver platter because he’s going to love it.”

Braun has feasted on scenes like Greg’s inarticulate Senate testimony, for which the actor was handed several pages of dialogue the night before filming. “Jesse was like, instead of coming back in a few weeks, would you be game for doing this tomorrow?” Braun recalled. “I was like, put me in — if I get even 80% of this scene, it’ll work.”

“Succession” has also capitalized on the unlikely bond between Greg and his mentor-slash-tormentor Tom Wambsgans, played by Matthew Macfadyen.

Macfadyen explained that Tom, who is married to Logan Roy’s daughter, Shiv (Sarah Snook), has even less of a claim to legitimacy than Greg, who is at least related to the family by blood. Therefore, Macfadyen said, “Tom is one of the few people who finds Greg very threatening.”

There is no obvious secret to his alchemy with Braun, Macfadyen said. “Sometimes we’ll think a lot and talk and have ideas,” he said. “And sometimes it’ll just come out on Take 1 and that’s the one they use.”

While there would seem to be a very sensible ceiling on just how far Greg can go on “Succession,” Armstrong did not entirely rule out the possibility that the character could someday find himself in Logan Roy’s seat.

“I wouldn’t want to destroy the fun of considering all the candidates,” he said. “Greg’s got a long way to go. He often gets what he wants, through a mixture of guile and guilelessness. I leave it up to other people to judge whether he’s a real succession candidate or not.”

He has been stretching his legs in other projects, like the comic caper “Zola,” which cast him as the hopelessly devoted boyfriend of an impulsive stripper played by Riley Keough, and he grew a beard to play the older male suitor in a coming film adaptation of Kristen Roupenian’s short story “Cat Person.” (“I didn’t even know I could,” he said of his new facial hair. “I was like, ‘I can do this.’”)

Braun said he has been working on his own writing as well, including a “quite personal” project that he described as a “relationship traumedy.” If he seems “fascinated by romance and courting another human,” he said it’s because “I haven’t really been in a long-term relationship, ever.”

“I do yearn for it and yet I’m incapable of it,” he said. “I go toward it and then I hit a wall where I’m like, I can’t go farther into this. I’ve got to exit.”

Before you start feeling too bad for the tall, single star of a popular TV series, Braun said, more buoyantly, “I do believe it’ll happen at the right time with the right person. Until then, it’s fun to meet people and see what works.”

The big man had come to Little Island. One Friday morning last month, Nicholas Braun ambled his 6-foot, 7-inch self across a bridge over the Hudson River and into this man-made floating park that has fascinated him since it opened in the spring.

The big man had come to Little Island. One Friday morning last month, Nicholas Braun ambled his 6-foot, 7-inch self across a bridge over the Hudson River and into this man-made floating park that has fascinated him since it opened in the spring. Or as he put it, “I’ve seen this place a lot from the highway, but it doesn’t ever feel like the moment to go.” He wandered its landscapes and worked his way up and down its topography. He spent a few moments admiring the hypnotic rotations of a giant spinning disc (“Oh, that made me dizzy in five seconds,” he said) and somewhat less time listening to a slightly repetitive band play in an amphitheater (“They could use a few more lyrics”). He eagerly explored a cavernous tunnel that turned out to lead to the restrooms. All in all, he came away with a new perspective on the value of public space. “Feels like there should be a mini-golf course up here, right?” he said. When you’re in Braun’s company, almost anything he says, in his unhurried and naturally innocuous delivery, can seem funny. It can feel like he just has a preternatural propensity for getting himself into awkwardly comic situations. Those reactions might also be the result of an automatic tendency to associate this 33-year-old actor with his breakout role as Cousin Greg on HBO’s “Succession,” who could have ended up a hapless second-tier character if Braun hadn’t helped elevate him into a first-rank buffoon on that cutthroat comedy-drama. In just two seasons, Braun has slid seamlessly and un-self-consciously into Greg’s blundering fish-out-of-water rhythms, whether he is excusing the mispronunciation of his own name or stammering his way through a U.S. Senate hearing. But the real-life Braun is by no means Cousin Greg. He is a guy with regular problems and plausible ambitions, who is vexed by leaky pipes in his apartment, hopes for a long-term romantic relationship and counts himself lucky, after more than 20 years as a working actor, to find himself with a popular part on a hit show. He is also sympathetic to Greg’s highly entertaining flaws and optimistic that the character might someday transcend his limitations — perhaps at some point during the coming third season of “Succession,” which begins Oct. 17. “I think there is an intellect underneath it all, but it’s buried by all the other stuff — being afraid to talk in a room full of important people,” Braun said. “But when he does get a chance, I think he does have a good take to put forth.” If there is a point where Braun syncs up completely with Greg, it is in telling the story of someone who suddenly and surprisingly finds himself exactly where he has always wanted to be, and is determined to make the most of the opportunity. “There’s a trying to Greg that’s really endearing and fun for me to play,” Braun said. “A trying and usually failing — but occasionally not, and it keeps working, slowly working, for him.” A certain amount of happenstance has played a vital role in his career. Braun grew up in New York and Connecticut, and he was 5 years old when his parents divorced. After his father started attending acting classes he’d been given as a gift, he encouraged the reluctant young Nicholas to follow him into the craft. “I would see him every other weekend, and he would put me in a chair and we would do these Meisner repetition exercises together,” Braun said. “They were so frustrating. I hated them. A father and son in a repetition battle — it’s actually crazy to think of that.” The two were cast together in a short film, and then Braun started getting high-profile TV and movie roles alongside actors like John Larroquette and James Coburn. By his teens he was landing movies like the Disney superhero comedy “Sky High,” and though he enrolled at Occidental College with plans of being a math major, he dropped out after two years, deciding that his future was in performance. “Barack Obama only did two years there,” Braun said with a smile. “Worked for him.” When a copy of the pilot script for “Succession” came his way a few years ago, Braun found himself slightly baffled by some of the intense repartee being flung by Logan Roy, the fictional media mogul played by Brian Cox, and his squabbling scions. “There’s all these things about ‘boost the bid’ that I didn’t understand how that fit in,” Braun recalled. “Is this a business show?” But when he read one of his first scenes as the interloping, underqualified Gregory Hirsch, that had him wearing a dog costume at a theme park and throwing up through its eye holes, Braun said, “I understood my piece of it.” The character was “the guy in the room that doesn’t get it, who wants to get it, and wants to be there,” he said. “It was pretty easy to get into Greg’s, you know, thought patterns.” When Braun arrived to audition with the “Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong and Adam McKay, an executive producer who directed the pilot episode, he was an immediate standout. “His height is just disarming, right away,” said McKay, the Academy Award-winning screenwriter and filmmaker. “I’m 6-foot-5, so usually when I meet people that are taller than me, they’re athletes. To meet someone who was 6-foot-7 and they have this kind of comedic neurosis to them was really unusual.” After Braun read from script pages and riffed in a few improvised interactions, the “Succession” team was confident it had its Greg. Armstrong said that the character was conceived as someone who would share the audience’s disorientation in the world of the Roys — a member of the family who nonetheless did not fit into it easily — but that in Braun’s portrayal he became something more. “There’s a selfish impulse you have as a writer, which is you’re going to save me,” Armstrong said. “And Nick does this. You’re going to take stuff which is going to lie there, inert, and you’re going to make it funny. Occasionally, you think, oh, he’s going to eat this up — I want to serve this to him on a silver platter because he’s going to love it.” Braun has feasted on scenes like Greg’s inarticulate Senate testimony, for which the actor was handed several pages of dialogue the night before filming. “Jesse was like, instead of coming back in a few weeks, would you be game for doing this tomorrow?” Braun recalled. “I was like, put me in — if I get even 80% of this scene, it’ll work.” “Succession” has also capitalized on the unlikely bond between Greg and his mentor-slash-tormentor Tom Wambsgans, played by Matthew Macfadyen. Macfadyen explained that Tom, who is married to Logan Roy’s daughter, Shiv (Sarah Snook), has even less of a claim to legitimacy than Greg, who is at least related to the family by blood. Therefore, Macfadyen said, “Tom is one of the few people who finds Greg very threatening.” There is no obvious secret to his alchemy with Braun, Macfadyen said. “Sometimes we’ll think a lot and talk and have ideas,” he said. “And sometimes it’ll just come out on Take 1 and that’s the one they use.” While there would seem to be a very sensible ceiling on just how far Greg can go on “Succession,” Armstrong did not entirely rule out the possibility that the character could someday find himself in Logan Roy’s seat. “I wouldn’t want to destroy the fun of considering all the candidates,” he said. “Greg’s got a long way to go. He often gets what he wants, through a mixture of guile and guilelessness. I leave it up to other people to judge whether he’s a real succession candidate or not.” He has been stretching his legs in other projects, like the comic caper “Zola,” which cast him as the hopelessly devoted boyfriend of an impulsive stripper played by Riley Keough, and he grew a beard to play the older male suitor in a coming film adaptation of Kristen Roupenian’s short story “Cat Person.” (“I didn’t even know I could,” he said of his new facial hair. “I was like, ‘I can do this.’”) Braun said he has been working on his own writing as well, including a “quite personal” project that he described as a “relationship traumedy.” If he seems “fascinated by romance and courting another human,” he said it’s because “I haven’t really been in a long-term relationship, ever.” “I do yearn for it and yet I’m incapable of it,” he said. “I go toward it and then I hit a wall where I’m like, I can’t go farther into this. I’ve got to exit.” Before you start feeling too bad for the tall, single star of a popular TV series, Braun said, more buoyantly, “I do believe it’ll happen at the right time with the right person. Until then, it’s fun to meet people and see what works.”

How the 'Succession' star Nicholas Braun elevates cousin Greg

succession-series

Succession Series, News on Succession Series, stories on Succession Series, articles on Succession Series, Succession Series stories at Wion, Succession Series news, Succession Series latest news

succession series

‘Succession’ Returns, with no real people involved

How the 'Succession' star Nicholas Braun elevates cousin Greg