“I kind of hope people like the show I’m on because I’m having such a good time doing it, so I want to keep doing it,” he says.
Interview highlights
On feeling ambivalent about being an actor
I’ve been doing it since I was a kid, and I don’t think when you’re 6, 7 years old and you say, “Hey, mom, dad, I want to be an actor” that you’re actually really making a decision for your future. You’re just a kid. So I felt like I’d just been doing it since I was a kid and never actually made the choice to do it. And I think around the age 18, 19, 20, I found that suddenly I had a career that I never decided I wanted, and didn’t really like that. So I kind of tried to stay out of the limelight as much as possible while I figured out what I want to do with my life and, in the meantime, I’ll just do this acting thing as long as I like it and as long as I find a project that I like. I didn’t necessarily pursue the acting career or success or anything like that. I just enjoy doing work from time to time.
On working with such a talented ensemble cast in Succession, especially Brian Cox, who plays patriarch Logan Roy
It just sort of rubs off on you. … Just being in a scene with someone like Brian, there’s a lot less work for me to have to do. … Brian is a force to be reckoned with as a person, so he just brings so much that there isn’t much effort I have to put forward. That’s also really interesting on the show. I agree there’s a lot of extremely talented actors on the show, and a lot of them just work very, very differently and you get to see people’s different approaches and how they can all make it work. … There’s elements of the real [actors] in the character, so it gets blurred a bit. Brian has Logan-y in moments, but for the most part, he’s just a wonderful guy and Logan is obviously not. But you see these little things going, “Is that Logan or is Brian just hungry? Can someone get him a sandwich? He’s about to snap at you.”
On how all the cursing in the show has affected his real speech
I would say the F-word just slides out of me. I mean, I think in general, that’s always been a sort of natural word for me. But since doing the show, it’s every sentence, more or less. I’m trying to be careful now because my two-year-old daughter actually has become a mimic. So that one’s been tough. She hasn’t said it yet.
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On witnessing child stardom via his brother, and how toxic fame is
It was pretty nuts. And I think what people sometimes fail to remember, too, is that he was a kid. He didn’t really choose that. It’s something that happened to him. And I think when you’re a kid, you obviously don’t have the tools to handle something like that. So I think it might have been pretty tough. …