Secret detail in explosive Succession episode: 'Extremely exciting'

Popular series Succession did the unthinkable on Monday evening when the creator Jesse Armstrong decided to kill off main character Logan Roy (Brian Cox). HBO’s critically-acclaimed drama is only three episodes through its fourth and final season, with tensions continually rising between the rich and powerful Roy family.

At the beginning of the episode, fans were given no indication that the story was about to turn into an emotional, devastating affair, with Roman Roy (Kieran Culkin), Shiv Roy (Sarah Snook) and Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong) gathering on a boat to celebrate their half-brother Connor Roy’s (Alan Ruck) wedding.

Fans have been expecting Logan to either choose a successor or face death, seeing as this is the last season, but nobody predicted it would happen so early on.

In what has been touted as an Emmy-winning performance from the Succession cast, Kendall, Roman and Shiv struggled to come to terms with their father’s death in what seemed like real-time. From the moment the siblings received the dreaded call from Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen), Shiv’s estranged husband, the characters went through phases of denial, grief, and heartbreak.

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For those who wondered how the dramatic sequence felt so real, executive producer and director Mark Mylod has shared the extreme lengths the cast and crew went to during filming.

To keep the authenticity and pain alive, the director worked with the camera crew to film an entire 27-minute take without stopping. However, the show famously shoots on film, with each camera only being able to shoot for 10 minutes before reloading.

Viewers wouldn’t have noticed, but the crew had to hide rolls of film around the set, as well as an entire camera body, to allow the actors to do the scene in one take.

“It felt to me like the camera had to be almost sadistically voyeuristic. It had to stay really close without, kind of, taking its eye off them,” Mark explained. “We worked on this idea of ‘How could we keep the action as fluid as possible, so it’s unflinching?’.”

Kieran Culkin, who plays the youngest sibling Roman Roy, said the process of filming the scene was ‘unlike anything he’d done before’, adding that it was “extremely exciting”.

“It felt like one of the most exciting episodes we’d shot, because it moves in real-time,” the star said. “It was us doing like a one-act play on a boat, in several rooms, with background actors, with lighting everywhere, with three cameras.

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To put it into perspective, Jeremy Strong told fans that movies often film just one 2-page scene during an entire day of shooting. The Succession sequence was “very long” in comparison — a whopping 20 pages.

Although the cast and crew had already filmed the scene for “five or six days” prior to the 27-minute take, the director said their final performance was the one that resonated with the audience.

“I think a massive percentage of [the 27-minute take] ended up being in the final cut,” he declared.

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