Succession’s Jeremy Strong reveals alternate finale ending

Warning: Spoilers ahead for the Succession finale

If you’re feeling dead inside after watching the last ever episode of Succession, it’s since emerged things could’ve been even more bleak.

Season 4, episode 10 heralded the end of HBO’s multi-award winning drama, arguably, the best small screen storytelling of the past decade.

And that ending … It was right. Dreary, but right.

Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong) was the character to close out the series, after losing Waystar at the very last second courtesy of his sister Shiv (Sarah Snook), who ultimately helped bolster Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen) to the top job.

For Kendall, everything is gone – the company, his family, his dream. He has nothing. And so, he walks soullessly down to the river in Battery Park, New York.

It’s fair to say viewers were expecting him to dive in, particularly given the character has long been drawn to water – in both moments of elation or deflation.

Strong himself has weighed in on that theory, revealing he felt an urge to go off-script and take the plunge while filming the scene.

“Listen to the John Berryman poem that Jesse (Armstrong) has named these finales after. John Berryman himself died by suicide, jumping into the frozen river,” Strong explained to Vanity Fair.

Strong continued: “I tried to go into the water after we cut. I got up from that bench and went as fast as I could over the barrier and onto the pilings, and the actor playing [Kendall’s security] Colin raced over.”

“I didn’t know I was gonna do that, and he didn’t know, but he raced over and stopped me. I don’t know whether in that moment I felt that Kendall just wanted to die — I think he did — or if he wanted to be saved by essentially a proxy of his father.”

While that was left on the editing room floor, Strong had input that did ultimately make the final cut.

In the script, credits were supposed to roll after this aerial shot, where he was being trailed by Colin:

But Strong, 44, pushed to delve further, saying he thought there was more to be explored.

“I begged [Armstrong and director Mark Mylod], ‘Can we go to the water? I want to keep walking.’”

“We ended up at the bitter end of Battery Park, facing the water. I’d never seen waves like that in the East River. It felt biblical.”

“And there was this terrible clanging on some scaffolding nearby. We didn’t know what we were looking for, but something profound happened.”

“We only had about eight minutes to shoot that piece at the end because the sun was going down. The water was calling to me. It felt right to all of us.”

Strong added it was also “the coldest day in a century in New York.”

“[It was] one of those days in February that they’d closed schools. I’d never been so cold in my whole life,” he said.

“I found myself thinking about the ninth circle of hell, which in Dante’s Inferno [poem] is a frozen lake.”

“The worst part of hell is ice cold, and so that scene became about that. It was so cold. It was almost burning.”