Succession's Matthew MacFadyen: 'It's a joy to play a real human grease stain'

Pitting fathers against sons, siblings against siblings, and morals (or lack thereof) against cold hard cash, the twisting plotline of the Bafta and Emmy Award-winning Sky show can only be described as Hunger Games meets Dynasty.

Centred around a Murdoch-style empire run by faltering mogul Logan Roy (Brian Cox), season two saw chaos ensue after the failings and cover-ups of Waystar Royco's cruise division surfaced publicly.

And with seemingly only one way to rescue the company from demise thanks to tanking stocks and crippled public trust, the selection of a familial sacrificial lamb coincided with a climactic series finale.

Unfortunately for the misguided aspirations of son Kendall (Jeremy Strong), the end was nigh. With the family gathered on an abhorrently extravagant superyacht in the middle of the Mediterranean and the gears of succession oiled and set in motion, the outcome was merely a formality. However, as we know all too well in the world of telly, events don't always play out in the way we'd expect.

The long wait for season three

With Succession being one of the first projects hit hard by the production shutdowns that followed the onset of Covid, the prolonged wait for season three was as drawn out for the show's cast as it was for the fans - unless you're Emmy and Bafta nominated actor Brian Cox, that is.

The man charged with bringing the domineering persona of Logan Roy to life, Cox met Succession writer Jesse Armstrong (Peep Show/Fresh Meat) the day prior to the first full national lockdown for what turned out to be a rather revealing chat.

"He normally doesn't expose the show to the actors, but he did on this occasion," reveals Cox, 75.

"This was just before lockdown 2020; I met him literally the day before everybody was locked down in March. I'd done Desert Island Discs that day... And then Jesse said, 'Come in, we'll talk'.

Describing how the writer filled the actor in on "the shape of season three", Cox recalls how his overriding feeling was "should you be telling me this? Isn't it best to keep me in my sublime ignorance?".

"I felt very privileged and honoured that he actually did fill me in on how it was going to end."

However, "sublime ignorance" appears to be the favoured position of fellow Succession actor, Bafta Award-winning Matthew Macfadyen, who plays apple-polisher Tom Wambsgans as part of the series.

"I don't always want to know, you know, because you can't play the end at the beginning," says Macfadyen, best known for his roles in Pride & Prejudice and Ripper Street, of the show's scripts.

"It's quite nice just guessing - and we get the episodes quite late. We get them sometimes at two in the morning before the table read, the day of. So yeah, that's quite fun."

The characters

Crafting characters so distinctly dislikeable they see internet forums awash with debate following each and every episode, Succession's writers consistently dapple the show's central figures with just enough humanity to ensure audiences hang on their every word.

With series three marking the return of outspoken head of the family Logan Roy, the forthcoming instalment also sees his four children - misguided eldest son Connor (Alan Ruck), power-hungry Kendall (Jeremy Strong), belligerent Roman (Kieran Culkin), and politically adept Siobhan (Sarah Snook) - return in a fierce battle to take charge of the failing family-run company.

With Cox describing his character's son Kendall - a man initially lined up to take control of Waystar Royco - as "a bit of a pillock", the actor says on more than one occasion he found himself thinking "'you know Kendall, you cannot take over the job, you're not fit!' I mean, both as Brian Cox and as Logan Roy I think that".

"Logan and I share one thing in common," reflects Cox, "which is a deep disappointment in the human experiment."

A boiling pot of dysfunction, Succession serves up one of the most perplexing family dynamics on television. And with Macfadyen's character becoming the latest addition to the Roy pyramid, the actor takes time to reflect on his character's contributions to the show.

"There's a wonderful TS Eliot line in Prufrock where he says 'you prepare the face to meet the faces that you meet' - and Tom is a good example of that," says Macfadyen of his character, who wed Logan's sole daughter Siobhan at the end of series two.

"He's constantly changing who he is, depending on the status of the person he's with - which again, we all do to varying degrees. So for an actor, that's just heaven."

Describing it as "a joy" to play "a real human grease stain", Macfadyen says the primary draw of the show is that the Roy family are "so relatable" despite being "from another planet".

"They're so wealthy, there's a sort of chemical change after a certain amount of noughts - they don't even think about money in the way most ordinary people do. Sometimes I think it's not really about the wealth. It's the power, it's corrosive, and also the absence of love is corrosive."

The scriptwriting

With Oscar-nominated Armstrong at the helm, Succession's team of scriptwriters have proved pivotal to the show's success. Conceived prior to the Trump administration, watched during it and now with series three emerging at the start of a new US political era, the rise and rise of the super-rich is reflected on screen - all without a single mention of Covid.

With Macfadyen describing how the scriptwriting "does the work for you", the actor says he often sits on material in order to "let it percolate in my head in the days and weeks before we shoot the scene".

"The other actors are so brilliant that you just trust in the process and try not to overthink it or over prepare. We don't rehearse very much for this show and I think we would if we needed to, but we don't because it's all there for you."

A view seconded by Cox, the actor says Succession's scriptwriters - including former Bafta nominees Lucy Prebble (Secret Diary Of A Call Girl) and Tony Roche (The Thick Of It), as well as Susan Soon He Stanton (Modern Love) and Jon Brown (Veep) - have also "grown" as writers as a result of the show.

"They're satirists, they're dramatists," says Cox, "and this is a unique combination that has come to the writing of British television. Armando Iannucci - what he's sort of fostered, Jesse's amazing work on The Thick Of It, Tony Roche's amazing work.

"It's very much now part of the course that these writers are infecting things in a way that the writers have not done for a long, long time. It used to be through the medium of the theatre - and it still has the sort of excellence of a small theatre piece that you would find in a pub somewhere. So that's what I think is so extraordinary."

Succession is available to stream now on Sky Atlantic and NOW.