For the Deliver Me from Nowhere star, risk-taking isn&rsquo;t a choice. It&rsquo;s a way of life.

PHOTOGRAPHY Odieux Boby&nbsp;
STYLED BY Fernando Echeverria 
By Hollywood standards, Jeremy Strong is an enigma. He&rsquo;s as known to immerse himself completely in his roles as he is to step onto a red carpet in a head-to-toe monochromatic look, bucket hat included. He&rsquo;s also a literary sponge, famous for quoting, verbatim, those who have inspired him; over the course of our 45-minute conversation, he&rsquo;ll reference the wise words of at least six legends in their respective fields, from painter Frank Stella to philosopher Francis Bacon. But no matter how much internet chatter surrounds Strong&rsquo;s every magazine interview or sartorial choice, the actor, 46, prefers to ignore the discourse entirely. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m aware that there are opinions about me, but I try not to think too much about how I'm perceived,&rdquo; he says, Zooming in from Copenhagen, where he resides part-time with his wife, Danish psychiatrist and documentary filmmaker Emma Wall, and their three children. &ldquo;I think it's such a waste of time.&rdquo;&nbsp;
These days, Strong has hardly a moment to spare. Last year, he earned a Tony Award for his role in Broadway&rsquo;s An Enemy of the People and an Oscar nod for his portrayal of Trump advisor Roy Cohn in The Apprentice, and his fall is already off to a busy start. This month, he stars in the Bruce Springsteen biopic Deliver Me from Nowhere, portraying the musician&rsquo;s mentor and Rolling Stone critic, Jon Landau. He&rsquo;ll also shoot two films, and in between those, he&rsquo;s in production for Peter Morgan&rsquo;s Netflix limited series, The Boys from Brazil. The show&mdash;&ldquo;an allegory for the rise of fascism,&rdquo; says Strong&mdash;marks his first time back on TV since Succession aired its series finale in 2023. His portrayal of Kendall Roy, the brooding #EldestBoy, earned him an Emmy, a Golden Globe, and a Critics&rsquo; Choice Award, launching a thousand memes along the way.

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Two years after hanging up Kendall&rsquo;s ever-present cashmere baseball cap, Strong has moved on. Today he shares little more with the character than an affinity for luxury clothing, although he tends to incorporate such pieces into his own wardrobe differently. &ldquo;I don't feel that I personally share the tastes of Kendall Roy,&rdquo; Strong says. &ldquo;I'm not dressing for Sun Valley or Davos.&rdquo; Unlike his attention-seeking alter ego, the actor has no interest in what&rsquo;s said about his most-discussed looks. &ldquo;I know that some of the fashion choices I've made on red carpets have gotten a lot of attention, and it&rsquo;s not something that I&rsquo;ve sought out, to be honest,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve always been interested in clothes as a form of expression; I don&rsquo;t have any sort of philosophy, or rule book. I think everything in my life is very intuitive. I guess I&rsquo;m just not afraid to find the edge.&rdquo;
While he doesn&rsquo;t follow trends&mdash;&ldquo;I have no interest in what is hot,&rdquo; he says&mdash;he does approve of consistency: &ldquo;I think uniforms are underrated. Right now I&rsquo;m oscillating between Haans Nicholas Mott and Loro Piana.&rdquo; Strong is a brand ambassador for the latter, having first worn the label on Succession. He also has an ongoing sunglasses collaboration with Jacques Marie Mage and has recently started working with watchmaker Richard Mille. &ldquo;Whether it's in my art form, or clothing, or horology, or the culinary world, I like to really get into these things,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;I'm interested in process.&rdquo;

For me, it's just about deepening the game. I'm very clear when I do these things that it's artifice.

Strong has been intensely dedicated to his craft since college, when he performed with Yale University&rsquo;s student theater group. In between rehearsals of the French Revolution&ndash;set play Marat/Sade, he recalls &ldquo;sitting in a bathtub and writing with a quill pen for hours, trying to understand the state of someone in [the historical Charenton] asylum.&rdquo; After graduating with a degree in English, he studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London before joining Chicago&rsquo;s Steppenwolf Theatre Company. &ldquo;Over time, I&rsquo;ve just come to trust my own instincts more&mdash;and maybe that has emboldened me to commit to working in the way that I understand best,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;I think there&rsquo;s a lot of misunderstanding and mythologizing around what actors do, but at the end of the day, it's about commitment.&rdquo;&nbsp;

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As an actor, Strong certainly isn&rsquo;t afraid to commit. When asked about the immersive nature of his approach, he paraphrases philosopher Francis Bacon. &ldquo;All art is a game, and the thing about modern art is you have to deepen the game,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;For me, it's just about deepening the game. I'm very clear when I do these things that it's artifice&mdash;but you're basically telling the truth through a lie.&rdquo; Strong takes it all quite personally. &ldquo;I think I've always felt a need to be&mdash;as you say&mdash;immersive to believe in what I'm doing and make it meaningful,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;I go off and have these experiences that are, to me, profound and liminal and take me beyond myself. That's a very private thing; I'm not even fully conscious of how it happens or what it is that I'm doing. You get lost in it, and then when you emerge from being a sort of deep-sea diver, other people project all kinds of things onto you. And I feel flattered by that projection.&rdquo;

I'm not interested in doing this if it's something that comes easy to me. I'm interested in the difficulty.

Still, the process can take its toll. &ldquo;There's a great poem about making art that says you are called only to make the sacrifice; it's not for your own glory or peace of mind, and that's something that I believe,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;It is often a sacrifice&mdash;not in the context of real-world sacrifices, let me be clear about that&mdash;but you put yourself through the fire to do this, and you do it for an audience.&rdquo; He describes noted method actor Dustin Hoffman&rsquo;s &ldquo;troubling&rdquo; discovery that he felt most at home when pretending to be someone else as &ldquo;the nature of the beast&rdquo; before comparing his own work ethic to that of another legend: Springsteen, who&rsquo;s portrayed by Jeremy Allen White in Deliver Me from Nowhere.&nbsp;

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&ldquo;Bruce is on my mind a lot,&rdquo; says Strong. &ldquo;He talks about how deeply you can inhabit a song, and I think I'm trying to do the same thing. In my case, the song is a character in a film or a play or a television show&mdash;but it's about how fully and deeply you can be embodied within it.&rdquo; He equally relates to the passion of his own character. &ldquo;As a critic, Jon Landau wrote about the danger of becoming a pro&mdash;how, when we stop loving something and it becomes a job, we have to go back and find what it is we loved in the first place,&rdquo; says Strong, labeling Landau and Springsteen&rsquo;s half-century of work as &ldquo;an artistic goal.&rdquo; &ldquo;When they talk about music, it isn't a job or a business; it's a reason to live. That's how I feel about acting: It's not a job. It's not a career. It's my raison d'&ecirc;tre.&rdquo;
Simpler roles don&rsquo;t do it for Strong, either; it&rsquo;s the more complex characters that reel him in. &ldquo;I'm not interested in doing this if it's something that comes easy to me,&rdquo; he says, invoking the I&rsquo;m-only-interested-in-what-I-can&rsquo;t-do mentality of artist Frank Stella. &ldquo;I'm interested in the difficulty. When I read scripts and consider roles, the degree of danger and risk are essential components&mdash;when I&rsquo;m up against a challenge, that's the only thing that makes it vital. There&rsquo;s the common denominator of wanting to find a new impossible wave, or a different mountain to climb, that remains the same&mdash;and there&rsquo;s always the feeling of being a beginner. You start from scratch every time, because you've never done it before.&rdquo;&nbsp;

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Perhaps it&rsquo;s that hunger that leads Strong&mdash;who&rsquo;s notoriously influenced by Daniel Day-Lewis and Al Pacino&mdash;to balk at the suggestion that future acting generations could someday regard him with similar reverence. &ldquo;It is hard for me to take that in,&rdquo; he says, peppering in a quote from 20th-century English novelist D.H. Lawrence about one artist&rsquo;s work being the salvation of another. He continues, &ldquo;I guess I don&rsquo;t see myself the way that I see those actors&mdash;who I've either worked with, worked for, or sought out in some kind of apprenticeship-type way. They&rsquo;re like North Stars or beacons of light that are guiding me. But there&rsquo;s only a certain amount that you can internalize from other people, their values, and their way of working. When I was in my twenties and thirties, I was very much still absorbing lessons from some of the greats&mdash;but then you kind of have to let that all go and throw it away to find your own line.&rdquo;&nbsp;

I think we could all stand to worry less about how we're seen, and focus more on what we see.

Recently, Strong has been the one doling out lessons onscreen. He&rsquo;s taken on back-to-back mentorship roles, with his portrayal of Landau coming off of last year&rsquo;s turn as Donald Trump&rsquo;s attorney and advisor Roy Cohn in The Apprentice. &ldquo;These two mentor relationships are like night and day, and it wasn&rsquo;t intentional, but one was a tonic to the other,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;Jon told me that he was there to help Bruce define the nature of his vision; Roy Cohn&mdash;the progenitor of fake news who taught Trump denialism, which we're seeing sort of [at] muzzle velocity now&mdash;was there to help his apprentice define what, to me, is a malignant vision. So one is uplifting and beautiful, and the other is a heart-of-darkness, nihilistic vision.&rdquo;

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The contrast between the two&mdash;and the chance to explore both onscreen&mdash;is what Strong finds most exciting. &ldquo;Right now, Bruce is out there speaking truth to the power that Roy Cohn engendered,&rdquo; he says, hailing Springsteen&rsquo;s &ldquo;willingness to go there and be vulnerable&rdquo; as &ldquo;the opposite of self-preservation or self-protection&rdquo; as he reflects on attending the singer&rsquo;s Milan show in July. &ldquo;I don't know if you've ever been to a Bruce concert, but it is like church. There's something profoundly spiritual and uplifting, and he really gives a shit. He cares about our common humanity and sings for the Left and the Right. He's there for everybody, and he's bringing big medicine to the world.&rdquo;
The state of the world weighs heavy on Strong&rsquo;s mind as he prepares for The Boys from Brazil. Based on Ira Levin&rsquo;s 1976 book&mdash;later adapted into a film starring Gregory Peck&mdash;Peter Morgan&rsquo;s limited series stars Strong as a Nazi hunter loosely based on Simon Wiesenthal. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s about world conditions being primed for a reawakening and resurgence of fascism,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;It feels clear to me that we're in that time again and that we have forgotten lessons from the past, which we will be doomed to repeat unless we wake up. So it&rsquo;s a profound morality tale, cloaked inside of a high-concept drama thriller.&rdquo; When asked about making his return to the small screen, Strong is indifferent. He identifies as &ldquo;platform-agnostic&rdquo; and points to the fact that this is, after all, a limited series. Plus, all that matters to him is the quality of the material. &ldquo;Peter is a juggernaut and one of the greatest living dramatists,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;Although this is a Sci-Fi about Hitler being cloned, so it does have a sort of outrageous conceit. Yeah, it&rsquo;s a big swing.&rdquo;

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No matter the end result, Strong is just happy to be on board. &ldquo;There's no security or certainty at any point,&rdquo; he says of the entertainment industry. &ldquo;None of this is a given, and whatever I've done before doesn't ensure that something else will catch fire. There's always an amount of continual surrender and humility in the face of the unknown.&rdquo; Perhaps that ambiguity is the real reason why he chooses to focus on his own creative desires, rather than public perception. &ldquo;This might seem a bit abstract, but follow me here,&rdquo; he laughs. &ldquo;I think we can either be the seer, or the seen. If we are seeing our lives and paying attention to the things that matter to us, I think that's a very empowering place to be. But if we are in a place of being seen, then it becomes about what others think of us&mdash;and I think we could all stand to worry less about how we're seen, and focus more on what we see.&rdquo; He pauses. &ldquo;Of course, doing this interview right now, I'm half in a place of, What does she think about what I'm saying? Are people going to read this and think I'm whatever?&rdquo; To a seer like Strong, it ultimately won&rsquo;t matter.

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GROOMING: Mads Stig Studio
PRODUCED BY: Narrow Agency
PHOTO ASSISTANT: Tobias Hoffmann
SPECIAL THANKS TO: Soho House Copenhagen

Jeremy Strong Is Finding the Edge

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