Global Courant 2023-05-21 16:01:26
One of the most impressive tricks HBO’s Succession has pulled on viewers over four seasons is to generate sympathy for reprehensible people.
Last Sunday’s episode, number 8 of this fourth year, in which democracy is dismissed, apparently because Roman Roy (Kieran Culkin) ate too much chicken as a kid, puts an end to most of that sympathy.
It also ended the ridiculous presidential campaign of Connor Roy (Alan Ruck), the eldest and clumsiest of the Roy sons, who launched his candidacy to tackle what he considered America’s biggest problems: “loaf sharking and onanism”.
Alan Ruck and massive success at 66, after a career spanning four decades.
But even agreeing, Connor insults the voters and issues a veiled threat to unleash the “Conheads”, his supporters, after saying he would not stoop to petty behavior.
It was perhaps the darkest moment for a character largely relegated to jester status, but Ruck sees Connor’s ignorance as his main political tool.
“It’s the best script”
“He’s going to believe whatever sounds good to him that day,” Ruck said in a recent video call filled with vivid anecdotes and laughs.
“He’ll read something on the internet or listen to something on TV, and that will become the lynchpin of his platform for that day. And tomorrow it may be something else entirely, because he’s not person centered.”
Alan Ruck, the actor who plays the character of Connor in “Succession”, here with Logan Roy (Brian Cox).
In the role of Connor, Ruck, 66, wove decades of character acting skills into some of the show’s most spectacular moments: “hyper-decanting” a bottle of wine into a Vitamix blender; the anger over the texture of the butter as he oversees his father’s gala ceremony; the suggestion to her hooker-turned-fiancée, Willa (Justine Lupe), that her wedding have “razor wire and bum fights” to publicize her presidential campaign.
“It’s hands down the best script I’ve come across, week after week,” he said. “But I think it would be fun to move on after basically playing the family goofball for what was six years.”
A gift in your career
Ruck sees the series as “a gift” in a career that was often party or famine, with occasional one-day jobs to pay the bills. In 1986, he played Cameron Frye in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, a quintessential Gen X character in a quintessential Gen X teen comedy.
But the role didn’t immediately translate to stardom, and Ruck found the shadow of Cameron’s character to be quite long.
“There were many irregular years where I basically made just enough to get by,” he says. “When people would come up during that period and say something about Ferris Bueller, I would get riled up because I felt like that was it. That was my chance.”
Connor Roy (Alan Ruck) with his brothers Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Roman (Kieran Culkin as ) and Shiv (Sarah Snook), in “Succession”.
Of Succession, he said, “I dreamed of a series like that for years.”
its beginnings
Ruck, who grew up in a Cleveland suburb, found solace in acting when he got to high school. As a student at the University of Illinois, he said, he spent most of his time on stage.
The university’s performing arts complex was designed by Max Abramovitz, the architect responsible for New York’s David Geffen Hall, but “there was another kind of student theater that was just a little theater space in an armory,” Ruck explains. “They’d give you a budget of $25 and you could put on any play you wanted. So it’s a lot of experience in a short time.”
Alan Ruck and Justine Lupe, the actress who in Succession plays the prostitute he marries.
He moved to Chicago in 1979, a time when the theater scene, anchored by companies like Steppenwolf and Wisdom Bridge, was beginning to take off. And after the box office success of The Blues Brothers (1980), Hollywood took more interest in the city, he said, making it an ideal place to be a budding actor.
“You could walk into any talent agency on a Wednesday and just say, ‘Hi, I’m new,’ and they’d sit down and talk to you,” he said. “I talk about this with people who started in New York or Los Angeles, and they’re like, ‘What are you talking about? You can’t just go see someone like that.’ It was like minor league.”
When Broadway casting directors came to Chicago to audition for Neil Simon’s Biloxi Blues, Ruck landed a part. He moved to New York and shared the stage with Matthew Broderick, his future Ferris Bueller co-star, who remembered Ruck as someone with that “‘good guy from Chicago’ aura.”
“He had the look of someone like a James Dean,” Broderick said, laughing. “Everyone in that play had very different personalities. But we all became a kind of unit, and Alan was a very important part.”
The success
It was during the Biloxi Blues performance that casting for Ferris Bueller’s Day Off began. Ruck had met the director, John Hughes, in Chicago when he auditioned for an early version of The Breakfast Club, and his agent pitched him for the role of Cameron. But casting directors thought Ruck, then 28, was too old.
“But then he came along, read it, and blew John Hughes away,” says Broderick. “Everybody thought he was perfect.”
Ferris Bueller was a success and is still highly regarded nearly four decades later. But three years after starring in it, Ruck was working in the sorting room of a Sears shipping yard in East Los Angeles. He had moved to the city after landing a pilot with Nell Carter for NBC, but it had flopped, and he had a wife and young daughter to support.
His coworkers knew nothing of his acting career. One day, while Ruck was smoking in the break room, one coworker pointed it out to another.
“He said, ‘Have you ever seen the movie ‘Ferret Buford’s Day Off’?” remembers Ruck laughing. “It looks like the one in dad’s car.”
Over time, Ruck found many roles in sitcoms and drama series, most notably on ABC’s Spin City, and landed small parts in movies like Young Guns II, Speed, and Twister. It’s the kind of career that can be hard on an actor’s ego and paycheck, but gives him room to hone in. In Ruck’s case, he showed him exactly what he was looking for.
“I worked on a sitcom for 18 episodes and then there was nothing for a year,” he explains. “So that’s pretty discouraging, because you’re not doing what you’re supposed to do.”
Rumbo a Succession
Alan “Connor” Ruck y Jeremy “Kendall” Strong as Kendall, en “Succession”.
By the time Succession was casting in 2016, Ruck, who is now married to actress Mireille Enos, had settled more into a groove, taking whatever role came his way.
He was shooting the Fox series The Exorcist in Chicago and flew home to Los Angeles on weekends, while Enos worked 16-hour days on the set of The Catch and took care of his two young children.
One weekend, she asked him to come with her and her 2-year-old son to a music class before heading back to Chicago. She then received a call from her agent: there was an audition for an HBO show, but she would have to skip class.
“I turned to Mireille and said, ‘Honey, I have an audition for an HBO show,’ and she started crying,” she says. So she kept her promise: “We went to music class and we played the tambourine for about an hour.” She then stopped by Succession executive producer Adam McKay’s house on the way to the airport, and auditioned in his living room.
With no time to read the script beforehand, he was told to improvise, which came in handy when he got the job and started shooting. Mark Mylod, director and executive producer of Succession, said Ruck’s understanding of Connor’s delusional worldview brought “this beautiful soul to the character.”
This became especially apparent during what Mylod called “freebies”, or extra takes in which the actors tried alternate lines or improvised their own.
“Alan is brilliant at it,” Mylod says. “You give him a free take and he could basically do a 10-minute reel without breaking character.”
Most of Ruck’s scenes are with Justine Lupe, many of them terribly awkward. But when the relationship between his characters became more than just a transaction, Lupe says, his off-screen dynamic was cemented. They texted regularly about how to make scenes of him illustrate that evolution.
“It was very helpful,” he says. “We felt like we could do it together instead of having to create a whole narrative by myself or by him.”
Lupe pointed to their wedding scene earlier this season. They were only a few seconds of screen in an episode destined to be remembered by viewers for the death of the paterfamilias, Logan Roy (Brian Cox). But what Lupe remembers is the emotional intensity of shooting Willa and Connor’s nuptials.
“We had some vows that we exchanged among ourselves that helped us get an authentic presentation,” he explains. “Between takes, Alan was saying things like how great it was to work together and what a great time we had together. And I was like, ‘No, don’t! I’m going to cry.'”
Two movies await Ruck: The Burial, a legal drama with Jamie Foxx, and a sequel to Wind River. And while he’ll miss the camaraderie of the Succession cast and crew, he feels he’s gotten all he could out of Connor Roy…and some things he could do without.
“It’s weird when you play a character that’s so easily dismissed,” he says with a laugh. “People call you a ‘jerk’ all the time. It gets under your skin a bit. I’ll be happy to forget it.”
Finn Cohen, The New York Times
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