For many, he is first and foremost Kendall Roy from the
Succession
series .
This cursed son, heir to a media empire from which he sees himself constantly dispossessed, crushed by an all-powerful father who never knew how to truly love him.
A man who, himself, is gradually moving away from his own children.
A role for which Jeremy Strong won an Emmy Award in 2020. In
Armageddon Time
, James Gray's new film (
The Night Belongs to Us
,
The Immigrant
), the 43-year-old actor is once again caught up in a transmission story.
This time it is not the world of the ultra-rich and powerful, but of a middle-class Jewish family in Queens in the early 1980s, in an America that is showing the first symptoms of the social and racial crises that plague it today.
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A family of which Jeremy Strong plays the father, Irving Graff, a plumber striving to raise his children as well as possible, sometimes harshly.
The Graff family (of which Anne Hathaway plays a courageous mother, and Anthony Hopkins, the wise-hearted grandfather) is inspired by that of James Gray, who appealed to fiction to tell his own childhood.
And offer Jeremy Strong, in addition to his very first climb of the steps at the Cannes Film Festival, a role that matches his immense talent.
A ghost story
Madame Figaro .-
What does it feel like to play the director's own father who makes you work?
Jeremy Strong .-
It's a challenge, and a big responsibility.
James Gray has always made very personal films, whose stories fit into something bigger.
I had read in an interview that he wanted to break down the walls between himself and his work.
He does it here in a very beautiful way: this film is intimate but also fits into the epic narrative in which we all live today.
It recounts both the birth of an artist, and the emergence of the racial and political divisions that have existed in our country since the 1980s.
"I don't have a particular technique. It's the script that indicates what to do, how to work."
Jeremy Strong
How did you work together?
During one of our first conversations, James read me the end of Proust's
In Search of Lost
Time, which is about places we've known that no longer exist, memories and regrets.
Armageddon Time
is a ghost story, a film that seeks to find those lost moments.
In a way, my character is a ghost, too.
But I wanted it to be as lively as possible, true to the essence of James' father.
I take very seriously the fact of interpreting roles based on real people, it is a burden to bear.
My biggest wish was for James to be transported in his memories as soon as I arrived on set.
You have the reputation of being a "method actor", who soaks up the smallest aspects of his character to the extreme.
Did you use this technique to embody Irving Graff?
Everything helped me to embody this character.
The way he speaks, for example: there is nothing more fundamental than the voice of a person to express who he is.
But also the music she listens to, the books she adores, her favorite food… Being an actor is like becoming a detective: you try to unravel the mystery of what “makes” a person.
I was also inspired by my grandfather: he was Jewish, he was a plumber, he lived in Queens and I lived in his basement in the summer when I was young.
So I could rely on my own experience.
The costumes were also important, the smells… The famous architect Louis Kahn said that it was the bricks that told him what a building was going to become.
That's how I feel when I read a script.
You have to be receptive, it is he who will tell you what to do, how to work.
I don't have any particular technique.
It's about feeling things.
Legacy and the American Dream
Succession
and
Armageddon Time
have in common that they deal with what a father and son pass on to each other...
It's a very rich subject, I hadn't thought of the fact that the film and the series both evoked it.
Most of James Gray's films are about the father-son relationship: what it brings that is beneficial and instructive but also painful, what we have to get rid of.
It was hard to embody those things with James behind the camera, a few feet away from me.
He had the courage to explore, to unearth his past, to confront it.
Some days on set were tough: I sometimes wanted to protect him from this character, during very tough scenes that we had to play.
But James had told me that his goal was to express love in all its facets, even the murkiest.
In the same way as the character of Willy Loman in
Death of a salesman
: his aspirations push him to transmit to his children a certain way of being, a way of positioning himself in society.
With a share of cruelty, abuse, injuries.
But also benevolence, tenderness, and brilliance.
