Interview

Spoiler:

Macfadyen, for his part, loves the abuse. One of his favorite scenes takes place in a car right before their wedding, as Tom floats the idea of his taking her last name. “She gives me this look as if I have three heads,” he tells me, laughing. “It’s delicious.”

Is there much left on the cutting room floor? It would seem like Matthew Macfadyen alone would give you dozens of hilarious outtakes each episode.

Oh yeah. Our writers write long, and we write alternative lines. And then there’s some improvisation. There’s always a lot of warp and weft in the interaction between the writers and the cast. Often I cut the episodes down from an hour and a half or over. We leave some of the comic material out and it’s heartbreaking sometimes. But I think the discipline is good in the end.

She was brought into Succession, the story of a fearsome Manhattan-based media mogul and his dysfunctional children, after working with its creator, Jesse Armstrong (also a co-creator of the British shows Peep Show and Fresh Meat), on The Thick of It and Veep. Armstrong wrote the first episode alone. After that, Pritchett and the other writers worked with him to flesh out the story, talking through every episode, every scene. Whatever the credit on each episode of Succession, everyone’s writing gets tweaked by everyone else. Even during filming the writers go on set to suggest alternative lines to the cast members.
Which sounds like a tense process. Half a dozen brilliant comic minds each trying to out-funny the other must be exhausting. Actually, Pritchett says, working on Succession is “heaven”. Nobody punishes you for a bad idea. And it’s fun suggesting new lines to the actors on set: you get to laugh when they suggest even better ones back. The most competitive it has been was when Armstrong got into a battle with himself to make the perfect Christmas cake for his team.

Which sounds almost like an inversion of the paranoia and one-upmanship depicted in one of the great television shows of the century. It is unusual, she admits, for a bunch of comedy writers in a room in London to create a great American drama. Yet she thinks that their background in comedy gives them an edge. “Succession isn’t a comedy, but every line has the attention to detail a comedy would have.” Somehow they take “reprehensible but incredibly powerful people” and “have to dig deep and find their humanity”. She loves the challenge.

How long can it last? “I think the maximum would be five seasons, but possibly more like four. We’re at the end of filming season three, so at this point Jesse is saying only one more. But that happens every time. We’ve got a good end in sight.”

Spoiler:

It’s nearing nightfall on the last day of the Cetinale shoot, and it’s finally cooling down. The party band is playing “Mack the Knife,” and the Italian extras masquerading as posh, drunk guests thrash around on the dance floor. The camera is on Macfadyen, standing at the edge of the commotion and taking a phone call. His face cycles through shock, confusion, dismay, and then … greed? Macfadyen can modulate his performance by degrees. “Let’s do 10 percent more surprised,” Mylod asks, and the actor delivers. Where other actors wax poetic about the show, for Macfadyen, the job is as simple as hitting his marks. “When you’ve got good writing, it is [that easy]. If you overcomplicate things, you get scared and stuck​. Y​ou think, What’s the answer? Nobody knows the answer.”

Macfadyen and Braun have an intimate conversation together next. The setup is the last of the night, and it’s Braun’s final day on set. They run the sequence a few times, growing increasingly loose and silly as the night goes on. Tom is married to Shiv, but Greg is his real partner on the show. (When I asked costume designer Michelle Matland about pulling everyone’s looks, she said Tom’s suit was selected to complement Greg’s clothing, not Shiv’s.)

Jesse Armstrong, Brian Cox, Sarah Snook, Kieran Culkin, Matthew Macfayden (    ), J. Smith Cameron, Alan Ruck, Lucy Prebble, Jon Brown, Scott Ferguson, Tony Roche.

Stephen welcomes the cast of "Succession," including Brian Cox, Sarah Snook, Kieran Culkin, Alan Ruck, Nicholas Braun, Matthew Macfadyen, and J. Smith-Cameron for their FIRST EVER group interview, celebrating the show's third season which premieres next Sunday on HBO and HBO Max.