Boy Movies #45
The Jeremy Strong issue
You’re reading Boy Movies, a weekly newsletter written by Allison Picurro — that’s me. I had some other ideas for what to write about this week and then I ended up doing this instead. Nobody asked, but I hope you enjoy.
It’s still audience participation time
If you read to the end of last week’s newsletter, you already know I’m currently “TAKING QUESTIONS” for next week’s one-year anniversary extravaganza issue. Reply to this email, take it to the comments, or send a carrier pigeon to my home if there’s anything you want to hear my stupid thoughts and opinions on. A, if you dare, MA.
Every little thing that you say or do…
I imagine you’ve heard by now that Jeremy Strong has recently been spotted exhibiting silly and goofy behavior across Academy Award winner Jessica Chastain’s social media accounts.
It’s hard not to love these two together, and harder not to appreciate Chastain’s dogged commitment to being a hag (complimentary) to straight actors with insatiable legions of fans (Strong, Oscar Isaac, Michael Shannon…). The famously, iconically offline Strong has been relatively quiet since Succession ended in May, making Chastain’s updates the first real sightings we’ve gotten of him in a while. Thanks to our collective lack of intelligence, Strong has often been perceived as some sort of dour, self-important on-set terrorist who annoys his coworkers; a video of him using “dramaturgically,” a normal theater guy word, to describe a scene from his TV show sent the internet into a tizzy, as if it’s somehow better to be dispassionate about stuff. I am — obviously, hi — on record as being a huge Jeremy Strong fan and a great defender of him, largely because I’m staunchly in favor of a couple of things here: actors caring deeply about their jobs and celebrities being weirdos. I literally never need or want them to make disingenuous attempts at relating to me. That, I think, is what makes these Chastain-sanctioned videos of Strong quite literally living his best life so charming: This intensely serious thespian is looser than we’ve ever really gotten to see him, and it comes courtesy of the deeply unrelatable scenario of hanging out with other super famous people at a glitzy event. It’s the perfect dichotomy.
Over the past couple of years, the “method acting” question, much like the “nepo baby” question and the “cancel culture” question (barf), has made its way into a small rotation of default, trendy things journalists ask celebrities in interviews. To me, these are all obviously leading questions, quick and easy ways to isolate a potentially clicky quote for a tweet in the hopes that it’ll annoy people enough into reading the article from which it originates. (I obviously can’t really begrudge anyone this; we’re all out here doing what we must.) Strong’s discussion of his process, mocked as gets, is what prompted the addition of the method acting one1; Austin Butler, another guy whose whole thing I’m a big fan of, was also relentlessly derided for his earnestly passionate soundbites about the level of investment he brought to playing Elvis in Elvis. I loved it when Michael B. Jordan said he couldn’t interact with any “family or children” while shooting Black Panther, and when Lady Gaga talked about speaking in an Italian accent for a year and a half while filming House of Gucci. And you know what? I remember every single one of these performances. All of them have stuck with me. Imagine being so boring that you can’t see the appeal in this type of gonzo dedication to entertaining.
It’s always been interesting to me that the actor who brought Kendall Roy, one of the all-time great TV characters, to life, and so clearly honed his craft from watching film actors work, has a somewhat scattered filmography. (One thing about your favorite TV actor is that nine times out of ten they’re going to make you watch some supremely stupid movies.) His film debut, a meandering indie from 2008 called Humboldt County, is a little like if Brokeback Mountain had been set on a weed farm. In The Big Short2, Adam McKay’s smug Succession precursor about the 2008 financial crash, he played a guy named “Vinny” and chomped down on gum and spoke in a wavering New Yawk accent. For Armageddon Time, James Gray’s coming-of-age period piece, he learned to fix a refrigerator to help him get into character as a put-upon father.
By Strong’s own account, no one saw Humboldt County:
With Humboldt County, Strong thought he was making his version of The Graduate meets Five Easy Pieces. “And no one saw that movie,” he says. “I was very used to, for years and years and years, doing work and used to it not being seen or recognized. And while that was hard, I was at peace with that.”
A pause hangs in the country air.
“No, that’s a lie. I was dissatisfied.”
It’s a shame, because it’s actually a pretty good movie, one that shows off Strong’s talents for entrenching himself in a fraught father-son relationship and looking profoundly, unspeakably sad. It is, somehow, the last lead role he would have until Succession. Even after Succession, he’s continued his habit of popping up in various supporting film roles, as he did in the Aaron Sorkin joints Molly’s Game and The Trial of the Chicago 7. He nonetheless approaches each one with his typical vigor, as he explained to the New York Times when asked about what the vibe was on set while filming The Big Short:
“There was a day where people were cracking jokes and laughing, and I started to allow myself to have a good time. I immediately found it distracting and depleting. It was very charged for Vinny because he felt that something really bad was about to happen. He saw a tidal wave, and people were totally unaware. So I thought, These guys can all be in a comedy, but I need to feel like I’m in a global warming catastrophe documentary.”
As McKay once said, Strong’s performance on Succession worked because, “He’s not playing it like a comedy. He’s playing it like he’s Hamlet.” This is the central idea of Strong’s entire deal as a performer. He plays everything like he’s Hamlet because he takes acting so seriously. It’s a distinctly boy actor quality, an approach that has become synonymous with freaks of nature (complimentary) like Daniel Day-Lewis. And yet! It’s not as if he method acted his way into abject misery, the videos from this past weekend prove as much. He’ll appear on camera dancing to Madonna and hugging Paul Mescal. Never forget the time a journalist told him about Kendall being called babygirl, a stan Twitter term he’d obviously never heard before, and he was totally unbothered by the feminization of his character. You will not bait me into commenting on “parasocial relationships” or apologize for enjoying someone’s vibe, but for a guy people love to disparagingly call pretentious, there’s an unpretentious quality to all of this that gives Strong an easy appeal. It’s like the old adage goes: Boy actor, babygirl… sometimes they’re one in the same.
I wrote about the disappointing final season of Sex Education, a show I used to really like :(
In a thematically appropriate bit of self-promo, I represented the Taylor antis ([Desus Nice voice] gotta hear both sides) in my friend Akosua’s Taylor Swift zine, which is ABSOLUTELY GORGEOUS and out to read and download now. She very generously let me write about fancams and Kendall Roy, and I had a blast contributing. I’ve talked about Akosua’s excellent newsletter,
, before, but I’ll yet again recommend it to you all, because it is extremely good and consistently one of my favorites to read.
It was Beyoncé who said, “You know you that bitch when you cause all this conversation.”
He is so crazy hot in this movie just thinking about it makes me feel ill.
Question for next week: What is the most fun you’ve had writing a boy movies so far? BONUS QUESTION: What is Jon Hamm’s deal?
let more actors reveal themselves as huge weird nerds (complimentary)