10 Things Jeremy Strong Can't Live Without

I mean, are people normally doing

like face cream and stuff like that?

Is this really heavy?

[Interviewer] Yeah, this is much better.

[people laugh]

[tense upbeat music]

Hey, I'm Jeremy Strong.

They do a thing called 10 Essential Items.

I've clearly broken that assignment.

There's more than 10 things here.

These are all very important artifacts

from my life that I'm sharing with you.

[music continues]

This is from season two.

This is a letter that I ripped up at a press conference.

If you've seen the show,

you probably know what that moment was.

Oh, this is from season one.

This says Kendall.

I don't know if you can see it.

This was on my suit after I had gone into the water

at the end of season one at my sister's wedding.

That was a really harrowing, difficult thing to do

but this is the only thing I've kept from that

from that season.

This I love.

As you can see,

I sort of already have my own version of it.

I wanted something for Kendall's birthday

in season three.

That felt colossal.

Rashid Johnson is an artist that I've admired

and I saw that he had collaborated with Liz Swig

based on a series of paintings that he made

called The Anxious Man Paintings.

This was like a keystone

that made everything come together for me.

This is also from my birthday party.

I assumed to make a drink stir with my face on it

like 3D printed with a crown.

So, they did.

[chuckles]

The end of season three,

we're in Italy and every time you do a movie

or every time I do a season of this

there's always a scene that you read

that you think, I can't do, I don't.

I can't do this and I don't know how I'm gonna do this.

And I just remember being

in that sort of trance in this room

before we shot that scene and the feeling of peril.

This was on the door in that room

and I guess I looked at it 'cause part of

what you have to do as an actor is get out of your way.

And so I looked at it

and it was kind of just telling me something

about don't disturb like yourself

and surrender to the uncertainty and the unknown.

But that was a tough day.

You know, the scene didn't go well

for like nine or 10 takes.

And then on the next take I sat down on the ground

which I hadn't done before

and that's what's in the show.

And that's, but that was just a result

of giving up and sort of coming face-to-face

with my own, in a sense, limits.

This is pretty self-explanatory.

This is a script binder that Robert Duvall gave me.

So it's just something that I treasure.

I went down to visit him once at his farm in Virginia

and he's got the Godfather script

in one of these same same binders, same company,

same stenciling and everything.

I find this object both very meaningful

given who it came from.

You know, I've learned a lot from him.

I think he's one of the greatest actors of all time.

But what's scary about holding this right now

is that it is really just, at this point,

the exoskeleton that is gonna contain something

that I don't know what that thing will be next.

So, it's sort of a steadying and comforting

and reinforcing to have this kind of embracing it.

And then the thing on the inside will be

I guess the next risk and attempt at doing something.

Jacques Marie Mage sunglasses,

the best company making sunglasses right now.

Jerome Mage Frenchman, who lives in L. A.

I have been very deliberate about Kendall's sunglasses

and I've worn some of his frames last year.

And I kind of sent up a flare

and reached out to him and asked him

if we could collaborate on something for this season.

So, his frames are made in Japan

and he went there,

and I pitched him sort of a colorway that I liked

and this old model that they didn't make anymore.

He made me

well, he made Kendall these sunglasses

and Kendall's initials, Kendall Logan Roy.

KLR are written on the inside.

I have my pair,

which also say KLR

and Kendall's pair.

So I do know where one ends and where the other begins.

[gentle music]

[Jeremy sighs]

So I've never shown this to anyone.

This is sat on my desk for like over 20 years.

These are like artifacts

from work I've done since my early twenties.

This cup was from a play that I did

called A Matter of Choice in a storefront on 39th Street.

And I'm, I guess I'll just kind of dump some stuff out.

This is a cherry bomb from The Trial of the Chicago Seven.

I lit as Jerry Rubin,

in a scene demonstrating how to make a cherry bomb

to the students in a class.

[rattles]

This is a watch that I wore

in the first movie I ever did called Humboldt County.

Wow. I mean I haven't touched these things in a long time.

That's from Molly's game.

I used to be able to do all kinds of poker tricks

but I can't anymore.

You forget, you know, when you do these things

you fill yourself up

with all kinds of visceral understanding

but also whatever skills you need to do it

but they leave you when it's done.

I don't even know what this is.

Double Smirnoff Rocks.

This is when Kendall goes off the wagon in Arizona.

From the end of the first season,

I called a friend of mine who was recently sober

and I said, what would you order if

you were gonna go off the wagon?

And so this is from this bar in Arizona.

[rattles]

First play I did, off Broadway,

play called Defiance by John Patrick Shanley.

I played a marine, there was a letter written

by a soldier who was in Vietnam

that he wrote home to his parents.

And he ended the letter saying

We are all in desperate need of love.

So that's what this says on here.

A story about the Velveteen Rabbit

that I was gonna tell to my kids on Succession

that we shot, that didn't make it into the show.

Just an improvised story

that I asked Jesse if I could do.

This is from a Eugene O'Neill play called Hughie

that I'd seen Pacino do.

I tried to do myself when I was an undergrad in college.

And so I did that play.

And this is probably the oldest thing I have.

I did this maybe when I was 19.

Vinny Daniel's, character I play in The Big Short.

This is all I kept from it.

You know, there's a Stanley Kunitz poem

called The Layers, and he says:

I have walked through many lives, some of them my own.

So these feel like fragments

of lives that I've walked through

and this is all that's left of any of them really.

I mean, the truth is these are such a big part of your life

and there's a strange finality when they're over,

they're just over.

I know they might exist on celluloid or on TV

but I don't go back and watch anything.

And so I guess I keep little artifacts, you know.

I mean this is the first time I've ever taken them out.

So I'm not sure to what end.

But they do kind of take me back

to different selves that I've walked through.

This is a record of Glenn Gould's recording,

first recording.

He did two recordings of the Goldberg Variations by Bach.

It's a piece of music that I've loved for my adult life.

I listen to it all the time.

Glenn Gould was a really eccentric individual

and he broke all the rules

about what was considered appropriate kinds

of concert pianist protocol.

He would hum exclaim and make sounds while he was playing.

And he said something that I wrote down

that I think about sometimes.

He said that the purpose of art

is not a momentary ejection of adrenaline

but rather the lifelong construction

of a state of wonder and serenity.

So that's what I think about when I think about Glenn Gould.

His piano playing is beautiful and incomparable

and ecstatic and probably would be the piece

of music I'd wanna listen to.

If I am lucky enough to choose the piece

of music I wanna listen to at the the end.

I use music a lot,

depending on the emotional valence of a scene.

Music can help me enter into a deeper place in myself

that I might need to come from.

So music is an access point for me.

Derek DelGaudio is an incredible artist,

illusionist, magician who had a one man show called

In and Of Itself and they turned it into a film.

It's on Hulu.

I urge everyone to watch it because it's one

of the more astonishing things I've ever seen.

When you go into the show, you pick out a card from a wall

I am something, something that is feels self-identifying.

At the end of the show, he tells each person,

the hundreds of people in the audience

what card they picked.

The Rouletista is essential character

in the story that he tells

who is essentially someone who played Russian roulette

to great success and was willing to risk everything

every time and exist on that precipice of danger.

Derek in the show talks about himself

being the rouletista and he sent this to me.

He said that he'd not sent this to anyone else

but he sent this card to me.

So it was profoundly meaningful to me.

Rilke said that surely all great art is the product

of having been in danger.

This is a person who was willing to endanger himself

again and again and again and again.

This is a book of paintings by Howard Hodgkin

who was a famous British painter, incredible painter.

I was in London and I was working

and I walked into the National Portrait Gallery

and there was an exhibition

of this guy's work and I hadn't heard of him.

What he does is he sort of takes moments in time

that were profound moments for him

or moments that really struck him in a certain way

and then he tries to translate those moments pictorially.

So he's painting the feeling of moments in time.

He would also paint

over the frame of his paintings behind the hedge.

I find them just incredibly moving.

Simple, deep, moving.

As an actor, that's your palette as well.

Your palette is your own experiences and memories

and feelings that you try to bring in an abstract way

using someone else's words.

You float those words on top of an undercurrent of feeling.

And so something about these paintings

just resonated with me.

I mean, this is like a five hour conversation right here.

So I'm not really sure cause these are all books

that have been really important books to me.

Alma Mahler's diaries.

A composer herself,

married to Klimt and Mahler,

who talks about the dichotomy inside people

of what she calls the loving soul and the calculating soul.

And her belief was these creators that were in her life

these great creators of the 20th century

made work of real value

when they were operating from the loving soul

rather than the calculating soul.

It's a great book.

Spectator Bird, Wallace Stegner.

Takes place in Denmark, which is a place that I now live.

But I read this before that I even knew

where it was on a map, I think.

He talks about the pain in every choice.

When we're younger,

we're in this life of sort of infinite possibility.

But I think to become an adult

is to collapse choices, to make choices

and to lose that sense of infinite possibility.

Robert Johnson, this is sort of jungian, dreamwork,

stuff about the shadow, the part of ourselves

that we've disavowed but is still there.

Always there.

That's a big part of Kendall

that's been a lot of the subtext of the show.

My favorite play, The Caretaker by Harold Pinter.

Incredible book on acting.

Probably if I could pick one book on acting

for, if a young actor was like, what should I read?

I would say this book.

Jon Kabat-Zinn.

He is a remarkable man who is a mindfulness teacher,

MIT trained scientist.

He created something called

Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction.

I've gone on some retreats, silent retreats with him

Four Quartets by T.S. Elliot.

When I was 18, I went to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

The principal told us all to go out and get this book.

He said,

It's the only thing you ever need to know about acting.

I kind of agree, there's a line in here

about a condition of complete simplicity

costing not less than everything.

I've already quoted this dude.

Prust, In Search of Lost Time.

You know, I spent a couple years in my early twenties

like working in room service and waiting tables

and these books kind of saved me

'cause I would, you know,

I didn't have much of a social life.

I didn't have any money.

There's so much of what anyone would hope to learn

about life contained in these volumes.

And then number one for me

is My Struggle by Karl Knausgård, Norwegian writer.

Contemporary Norwegian writer.

It's the most honest expression

of life that I've ever read anywhere.

He writes in this incredibly granular way.

He'll spend forty pages talking

about taking his four year old daughter like to a party

and the shoes that she wants to wear

and the effect of it, the accumulative effect of it

by being in such granular detail of life

is you see the beauty

and the sacredness in in those small moments

and you realize that there are no small moments.

That's my fast version of these books.

[music ends]