Nicholas Braun defends Jeremy Strong’s method acting on ‘Succession’: ‘I think it can be very helpful’

Nicholas Braun has lifted the lid on the final season of Succession, and revealed where he stands on co-star Jeremy Strong’s oft-criticised method acting approach.

There’s a myriad of reasons why Succession has been lauded as genius television, from the inconceivably witty writing and twisting plots, to its nuanced portrayal of the human psyche and the colourful crop of characters.

But perhaps the key masterstroke in the HBO series is the meek, unassuming role Gregory Hirsch plays. Affectionately dubbed ‘cousin Greg’, he’s possibly the only relatable person in this cutthroat world who isn’t supposed to stand out, but that is exactly why he does.

Part of that can be put down to the script, penned by the brilliant Jesse Armstrong, but Nicholas Braun’s fumbling delivery could easily be mistaken as 100 per cent improvisation.

Much like his beloved character, the 34-year-old US actor feels like a fish out of water since finding fame (and two Emmy nominations) with his breakout role in 2018. But that impostor syndrome coexists with a desire to be right where he is.

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Tell me this isn't something Greg the egg would post?

Going back to where it all began, Braun says it was a “life-changing moment” when he got the call in August 2016 that HBO was making a new drama, having just come off the back of projects that weren’t leaving him fulfilled in showbiz.

“I just wasn’t inspired by any of the things I was making. Some movies that I thought were gonna be big, and parts that I thought were gonna really help me, just didn’t do that thing that I hoped for,” he tells news.com.au from Sydney.

He had been living in San Francisco with his brother when he decided to take a break from acting to focus on his other passion, writing music.

And then came cousin Greg.

In a pilot script peppered with executive jargon, Braun says Greg was the only piece of the Succession puzzle that made sense to him.

“It was so dense,” he says of the screenplay. “It was dramatic, filled with all this business lingo and talking about a trust, and, it was pretty confusing.

“But all the Greg stuff, I understood. I get who this guy is.

“There were all these cues of who he was. And so I did the audition with [executive producer] Adam McKay in the room, and he asked me to improvise in character. And I just felt like I knew how he spoke.”

Cut to six years down the track and, going into its fourth and final season, Succession is considered one of the best television shows of the past decade, with 48 Emmy nominations and 13 wins.

Brian Cox, Sarah Snook, Jeremy Strong, Matthew Macfadyen, J. Smith-Cameron, and Nicholas Braun, at the Emmys. Picture: Frazer Harrison/Getty Images

Armstrong took fans by surprise recently when he revealed the new season, airing locally on Binge, would be its last, which is highly unusual to announce this late in the piece.

Naturally, Braun can’t tell us a lot about the conclusion with eight episodes left to air.

But he says Armstrong was still writing the script as they were filming season four, meaning not even the actors knew how it was going to end until fairly recently.

“Jesse wrote the finale probably while we were filming [episode] seven or eight,” Braun says.

“He knows the story, but he’s writing it as we go along here. It’s so impressive. I’m like, ‘How did he write this in the last three weeks?’

“It’s shocking. And for it to be as good as it was, and for all these different things to get tied up in a way, it’s exciting.

“The season really breaks off into a million directions. And I just thought it was just unbelievable how he landed the plane.”

… Braun stops himself.

“I wish I could say more,” he adds with a grin.

Approaching the conclusion of Succession is somewhat of a Game of Thrones experience, as viewers eagerly anticipate who will come out victorious in the Waystar family war.

CEO Logan Roy (Brian Cox) has always proved to be 10 steps ahead of the game, but his children, Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Shiv (Sarah Snook) and Roman (Kieran Culkin) are unrelenting in their respective bids for overall power.

And then there’s the underdog players like Greg and Tom Wambsgans (Matthew MacFadyen) who are equally ambitious with their agendas.

“I will just say that Greg is never satisfied with where he is at,” Braun says of Greg’s journey this season. “And so he continues to try and be on the right team and he‘s constantly seeking that out and playing all the possible angles he can.”

Those high stakes, which have captivated the audience’s attention season-after-season, have also, at times, filtered their way into production.

There’s been much interest in recent years of Strong’s well-documented, intense approach to method acting, which has repeatedly been critiqued by his own cast mates in the media.

Cox candidly claimed Strong’s intensity was “f***ing annoying”, while Culkin added, “That might be something that helps him. I can tell you that it doesn’t help me.”

Braun, who says Strong is a close friend of his (the two often embark on holidays together), sees it differently.

In fact, he says he’s just as “detail-oriented” as Strong.

“Jeremy definitely has his own process, but the way that I think about his process is that he just cares so much about it,” he says.

Braun said Jeremy Strong's approach to method acting was ‘helpful’.

“He very much is in [it], he has a game plan for himself and he does what he needs to do to do Kendall and be Kendall,” he adds.

“The ideas he brings to scenes, the sort of intensity that he treats the material with … Like, you can’t knock that. You need that actually.

“A lot of times on sets people get kind of complacent and you’re sort of like, ‘Yeah, OK. That’s what we’re doing today.’ And he is second guessing and challenging every part of the writing and every part of working on a scene. So I think it’s pretty amazing.

“I think it can be very helpful, that way of working.”

Braun says, despite media reports having suggested otherwise, the cast are “like family”.

“So much life happens when you‘re working on something for six and a half years,” he says.

“It is kind of this thing, even with all the cast members, that we are all going through this crazy transformation together.

“And then also people are having children and getting married and going through breakups, you know.

“So much stuff happens. So we feel very close.”

So, it’s fair to assume closing that chapter was a painful goodbye.

But the biggest grapple for Braun is, how do you top Succession?

Long live Cousin Greg.

“The writing is the best I’ve ever, ever read. And so that sets a really high bar for the next thing,” he says.

“And I haven’t read anything recently that’s as good. It’s been the best job for a lot of reasons, but creatively, the most fulfilling.

“We’re gonna have to do things where people don’t trust your improvisation or they want you to do a certain thing and you’re like, ‘Oh man, we did it better on Succession’.”

In saying that, Braun does have some ideas of what he’ll tackle next. He says he’d love to star in a good, old-fashioned rom-com.

“I feel like we’re missing some of those really classic rom-coms. I feel like they’ve gotten kind of stupid,” he says. “I think a really good rom-com would be fun to do.

“But the other part of the answer is just, you don’t know until you read it, and you’re like, ‘Oh yeah, I have to do this.’”

That moment came when he read the script for his upcoming psychological thriller, Cat Person, which was directed by Susanna Fogel and comes out later this year.

“It was based off this short story called Cat Person that was a big viral internet thing. And the script was just very good and the character was very different,” he says.

“I was like, OK, I’m obsessed with this guy. I couldn’t have expected to play this sort of sad, lonely guy who’s desperate to meet a girl and, you know, is obsessed with Harrison Ford. You’ll see the movie and you’ll know what I mean.”

For now though, he’s savouring the latest few weeks of Succession mania before the future comes calling.

And while he admits the level of fame the show has brought him can be “weird”, particularly when he spots people pulling out their phones while he’s going about his normal day, Braun says being apart of such a phenomenon makes it all worth it.

“I don’t think I’ll ever quite get comfortable with [fame]. [But] I think where I’m at with it right now, is it feels so good to make something that people love,” he says.

“We are making it for people, so if people want to take a picture or talk to me about the show, it‘s like, it’s kind of the whole point of doing this.

“The whole point of making Succession is to give an audience a really great time. I think it’s all worth it for that.”

New episodes of Succession hit Binge on Mondays.

Originally published as Nicholas Braun defends Jeremy Strong’s method acting on ‘Succession’: ‘I think it can be very helpful’