It was the show of the year and he was its cold heart. The actor talks about fracturing his feet, concocting that ludicrous rap – and what’s next for the Roy evil empire

One of the most exquisitely embarrassing moments of 2019 centred on a rap, and it wasn’t Michael Gove quoting Stormzy. Late in the second season of Succession, Kendall Roy, the son and possible heir of the monstrous media titan Logan Roy (Brian Cox), paid tribute to his father’s 50th anniversary in the business, not with a watch or a touching speech, but with a burst of hip-hop: “L to the OG, dude be the OG, AN he playin ...”

His brother Roman quips that he is “Ken W A”. Roman’s girlfriend, Tabitha, can’t look away, even though she says it is burning her eyes to watch. It is a horrifying spectacle. And yet it is hard to deny that Kendall can, kind of, well, rap.

The 50 best TV shows of 2019: No 1 – Succession Read more

“Thank you,” laughs Jeremy Strong, the actor who plays him. Strong felt it was important for the story that Kendall should not be terrible at rapping, even if the rap itself is painful. “We did a table read in Glasgow, where we were shooting, and in the script Jesse [Armstrong] had just written: ‘Kendall does a rap.’ It was one lyric, and it was very corny, you know, like ‘Kick it MC’, and I thought: ‘Oh God, we can’t possibly do this,’” he recalls. He and Armstrong, Succession’s creator and showrunner, decided that it, in order for it to work, the rap had to be halfway decent.

Armstrong showed Strong a clip the model Heidi Klum had posted to Instagram of the oil heir Mike Hess rapping at his 30th birthday party with Nelly. “He’s pretty fucking good, and Jesse said: ‘That’s what I want us to do. It should be earnest, he should be actually committed to it and he should be pretty good.’” They asked Nicholas Britell, who composed the show’s much-admired theme music, to come up with a beat and write the lyrics, and Strong spent a day wandering around Glasgow with his headphones on, perfecting the rap.

“To be honest, I remember waking up that day and just not knowing what was going to come out of me, and if I’d be able to do it or pull it off.” Rest assured, he pulled it off. “So it was fun.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest L to the O G ... the rap that launched a thousand Halloween outfits. Photograph: Succession

After the episode aired, there was a surprising new entry to the Halloween costume canon. People kept sending Strong pictures of people wearing the LOG50 baseball shirt that Kendall had revealed underneath his tuxedo. That was Strong’s idea – he sketched it out on a piece of hotel notepaper after studying videos of rappers to work out what to do with his hands. “Then, all of a sudden in New York, there were hundreds of people walking around in those jerseys. That was really wild for me.”

Strong is calling from the US, where he is currently shooting Aaron Sorkin’s latest movie, The Trial of the Chicago 7. “I have a giant, wild beard and a different voice,” he explains, half-apologetically. He is the kind of actor who likes to fully immerse himself in his characters. Time spent as Kendall, who has to make his way through a cut-throat corporate world while navigating his own complicity in some of the Roy family’s darkest deeds, can be taxing. After season one finished, Strong, who is from Boston, moved to Denmark. “I immediately decamped to Copenhagen, where my wife’s family is, and we had a baby. I had to insulate myself from any response to the show.”

He need not have been concerned. When Succession began in the summer of 2018, it was well-received, but a slow burn, picking up heat as it progressed. Viewers introduced to the brilliant horrors of the Roys – who took inspiration from a number of real-life family empires, including the Redstones, the majority shareholders of ViacomCBS, and the Murdochs, owners of News Corp – were soon hooked. By the time season two arrived a year later, it was being hailed as one of the best dramas on TV. Armstrong, who had previously co-created Peep Show and Fresh Meat with Sam Bain, won an Emmy for best writing on a drama series and had his acceptance speech censored when he made a gag about the amount of British winners. (“Maybe you should have a think about those immigration restrictions on shithole countries,” he joked.) A rabid online fandom vigorously deconstructed the show’s pivotal scenes after each episode aired, and the memes began to spread. Someone made a video of Kermit the Frog dancing to the theme tune. A Buzzfeed quiz allowed you to work out which character you would be (me = Marcia). Succession had officially blown up.

Strong puts the show’s success down to Armstrong. “All of the credit is due to Jesse and his group of writers, and their little squalid room in Brixton where they cook all this stuff up,” he says. Just before the first season began filming, Strong visited Brixton, and found a wall covered in note cards, plotting out the story. “All I remember is that there was one card which became prescient: Kendall wins but loses.” The reverse was true of the second season, which came to an epic conclusion when Kendall finally rose up against his father, with bombastic timing, publicly blaming him for a disastrous corporate cover-up, potentially ending his father’s reign and career. Having previously failed to depose the king, thanks to distractions such as manslaughter and cocaine relapses, Kendall finally stuck the knife in. Strong knew the big betrayal was coming from the start of season two. “I knew that Kendall was going to be in a submissive, deadened, subjugated place, inwardly collapsed and sort of frozen,” he says. “And I knew the final scene of the season was going to be a reversal, turning the tables against my father.”

Succession is brilliant at cooking up moments of operatic grandeur, but even by its own standards, the season two finale was immaculate. Naturally, fans debated the last scene, in which Logan witnesses his son’s betrayal, and twists his face into a hint of a chilling smile. Did it mean that Logan had engineered this all along? Or was he impressed that his son had finally become as ruthless as him? “Really? There’s been debate?” says Strong. Politely and apologetically (“I’m not being cheeky”), he says he’d rather not offer his own opinion on what it meant, because he feels that everything is there, in the scene. “But, of course, it is an act of strength, of defiance, of ruthlessness that is of the kind that probably [Kendall’s] father has wished to engender in him his whole life.” He also knows what has to happen next. “We’re probably going to go to war with each other, on some scale.”

Kendall first tried to topple his father halfway through season one, when he attempted to force a vote of no confidence in Logan. He got stuck in traffic and had to sprint to the start of the meeting; the tension was almost unbearable. Strong took the scene to extremes. “It needed to become a disaster in slow motion.” He ran for hours and hours, up and down the West Side Highway in Manhattan, working himself up into the necessary state. “I fractured the bones in my foot doing that, just stupidly not wearing running shoes.” During season two, when Kendall grows isolated from his siblings, Strong kept himself away from the actors who play them. “There was a real gulf between me and the cast,” he says.

Strong has been a theatre and film actor for years, starring in Zero Dark Thirty, Molly’s Game and The Big Short, which is how he came to Succession in the first place (Adam McKay, who directed The Big Short, also directs episodes of Succession). But Kendall seems to be a particularly draining role. “I don’t think I’m a very dark person,” he says. “I think I tend towards positivity in my own life. At times it has felt like holding myself under water, or under a sheet of ice.”

I wonder if it alarms him that people seem to be warming to the Roys, or at least seem to be developing admiration for some of their qualities, whether that’s Roman’s affection for Gerri, or Connor’s gormless ambition, or Shiv’s ruthlessness, or now Kendall, for rising up against the beast. “These kids are very wounded people, and it’s not their fault,” says Strong. “They’re damaged by their upbringing and they are trying very hard to gain their father’s love and approval. It’s very human.”

He doesn’t think the Roy children are reprehensible. “Which leads down a very interesting path, because then you think: well, what about Donald Trump Jr? But there is an argument to be made that these are people damaged by their inheritance, by their emotional inheritance, and by their inheritance of capital, but also by their legacy.”

The writers’ room for Succession’s third season has already started, and Strong says he will return to Kendall in May, after he has finished the Sorkin film. “Then I’m heading back to Copenhagen with another new baby.” He describes the city as a place where he can “cocoon”.

With everything that will no doubt come from the imminent Roy v Roy showdown, it sounds like he is going to need it.