Of the many Succession clips that have swallowed my Twitter timeline in the last week as the TV series started its engine for the final time, it's always the clips of Tom Wambsgans which stop me scrolling. A few days ago, it was Matthew Macfadyen, the British actor who plays the hapless interloper, bemoaning being forced to carry a case on his “wedding eve” in season one.
Tom and Greg's (ostensibly platonic) relationship is the most important and intimate one on the show as it enters its final days
There is a similarly brilliant delivery involving a bag in the first episode of Succession season 4, which aired last night, in a moment which has been doing the rounds as Tom admonishes the “ludicrously capacious” bag which Greg's date has brought as her date to Logan's birthday party. “What’s even in there, huh?” Tom asks, with the illusion of an innocent question. “Flat shoes for the subway? Her lunch pail? I mean, Greg, it’s monstrous. It’s gargantuan. You could take it camping. You could slide it across the floor after a bank job.”
In a less skilled mouth the words ‘wedding eve’ or ‘lunch pail’ might be throwaway, but there is a luxuriousness to the venom that Macfadyen brings that means his are the lines which achieve immortality on your timeline.
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On Succession talk is never cheap, with the rapid-fire dialogue exchanged in each episode the motor which keeps things running even when plot lines can sometimes seem to be frustratingly going around in circles. The imaginative insults, eccentric swearing and playful language on the show regularly see it compared to Shakespeare, but there's a flavour of fellow social satirist Jane Austen, too. Macfadyen has done Shakespeare, and Austen, even Brontë in his time. Though there's a fascination with the improvisation which the actors bring to Succession, Macfadyen's steady career was been built on bringing the text to life with the way he delivers it. That's how you get ‘wedding eve’ or ‘lunch pail’ to feel gloriously unhinged: giving them to an actor who makes them sound like the most withering words in the English language.
It's not just the choice of words but the way Tom tries to negotiate power through his delivery, with Macfadyen explaining that raises and lowers the pitch of his voice, puffing up or shrinking down over depending on who else is in the scene. That constant jockeying has come to define what has become one of the most unexpectedly compelling journeys of the show: his weaselly ascent within the ranks of the Roy family.
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With the final season it feels as though the other actors have become versions of themselves in the wings that threaten to interrupt the fiction of the show. Macfadyen, however, brings an alluring invisibility as an actor that you don't feel with Jeremy Strong, Brian Cox or Nicholas Braun. You get the sense that the dramatic finale of the show isn't especially getting his blood up, as he said with very un-Tom restraint in an interview with the New York Times earlier this month, "there's a slight relief.”
“I feel sometimes you can get in a rut when you play leading men," Macfadyen added. "It’s much more fun being the baddie or the clown.” To go one further, perhaps the most fun of all is turning the baddie and the clown into the leading man – the unlikely feat he's pulled off in just over three short seasons of Succession. Forget the keys to the Waystar Royco corner office, this season the real prize he has to lose is the Emmy for best actor.
Succession season 4 is available to watch now on Sky and NOW.
