In The Apprentice, Emmy Award-winning Succession star Jeremy Strong played Roy Cohn, the infamous lawyer who has previously been depicted in the 1992 TV movie Citizen Cohn (portrayed by James Woods) and in Tony Kushner‘s play Angels in America (and portrayed by Al Pacino in the 2003 HBO miniseries). Speaking with NPR, Strong shared his take on how he “empties” himself to portray unsympathetic figures and explains why he stopped notating his scripts.
Strong explains that he has taught himself to “clear” himself out to take on a new role. He says, “If I’m honest, I feel that my job is to almost be a sort of vessel, which involves kind of clearing myself out. I went on a silent meditation retreat last week, […] And the teacher, who’s an incredible man named Jon Kabat-Zinn […] Jon talked about a term called anatta, which means no-self or not-self. And it really resonated with me because I find that that is the place where I tend to be when I’m working, I think, creatively.”
In other words, each role is like a new instrument that he is instructed to play. He continues, “I guess I feel like my job is to be a musician, a first chair musician, to play whatever instrument it is that I’m given […] To play whatever piece of music that I’m given.”
When asked if he notates his script like music, Strong confesses it is not something that he does anymore. However, he compares finding the “voice” for a character, including Roy Cohn, to finding the right piece of music. He explains:
“I sort of have held on to old scripts and plays, and when I did, you know, American Buffalo or something,Look Back In Anger in college, I have a million notes, and it’s sort of notated and annotated to death. And then at a certain point, I just stopped writing anything down. I guess at a certain point, you develop a trust in your unconscious, intuitive self that if it’s properly absorbed something, then it will be there somehow. Now, the – I think voice is very important to me for any character. And Roy had a very, very particular way of speaking and a very specific pentameter. And the music of that is something that becomes your job to both master and then throw away. You know, he writes in Hamlet — Shakespeare says that use can almost change the stamp of nature. And I feel that actors, especially when you’re attempting to do some kind of transformational work, which is the kind of work that I love the most and have been inspired by in my life the most, your job is to kind of change the stamp of your nature. And voice is a really key part of that because there’s something about a person’s voice that is like their eyes. It’s such a way in to that person.”
