She was best known for her work on the stage – then along came her role as Gerri. J Smith-Cameron meets Will Pavia to talk late fame and her chemistry with co-star Kieran Culkin.
J Smith-Cameron orders a martini. “Grey Goose vodka, straight up, very dry with a twist,” she says. It’s a real Gerri move – Gerri being her character in Succession. I ask the waiter for the fruity one with tequila and a little umbrella. “I got you,” he says.
It is a cold Sunday afternoon and we’re ensconced in a gaudy little alcove in a hotel in New York talking about the Oscars. Smith-Cameron was there, and the carpet left much to be desired.
“And who am I following down the non-red carpet?” she says. “It’s the Kardashians. I right then just changed gears. I’m like, ‘I’m here as an observer, less than a participant. I’m just here to enjoy myself.’ "
Oh. But wait a moment, I say. People talk about you now as a sex symbol. Because of her turn as Gerri Kellman in Succession. Gerri is the general counsel of Waystar Royco: the media conglomerate controlled by an ageing tycoon named Logan Roy whose children are sparring for the prize. She is allied with Roman Roy, the youngest son, and has steadily evolved from a substitute mother into the object of his lust.
As this relationship blossomed, if that is the right word, a legion of “shippers” – people who desperately want two fictional characters to get it together – has sprung up, agitating for more Gerri-Roman action and setting clips of the two of them to swelling music, as one of the great love stories of our time. You can find them on Twitter, demanding that the fourth and final season of Succession contain more of that sort of thing. And talking about Smith-Cameron as a sex symbol.
“That’s so funny though,” the 65-year-old says. “What kind of a sex symbol is that?”
She takes a sip of her martini while I fumble around for an answer.
“I mean, I’ll take it,” she says. “I’ll take anything.”
Alan Cumming was a sex symbol when he was in Cabaret, I say. He said it was wonderful to be recognised publicly for steaminess.
“He was, like, 30 or something,” she replies. “I just feel it’s weird.” Then she adds, “I don’t want to be ageist.”
I’m not sure you can be ageist against yourself. I’m the one trying not to be ageist, trying to give Smith-Cameron her proper recognition as a sex symbol while inhaling a snort of tequila.
“I know, I know, I know,” she says. “I have heard this before but I’m not sure it’s true or whether it’s just sort of a whipped-up idea.”
It’s the year of the hot cougar, I say.
My editor told me this. Back in 2015, Amy Schumer made a sketch in which she happens upon Tina Fey, Patricia Arquette and Julia Louis-Dreyfus drinking champagne at a picnic table. “We’re celebrating Julia’s last f***able day,” Arquette says. Fey says this is the moment “in every actress’s life” when Hollywood and the media decide “that you are not believably f***able any more… You know how Sally Field was Tom Hanks’s love interest in Punchline and then, like, 20 minutes later she was his mum in Forrest Gump?”
Now it’s 2023 and you have that woman on The White Lotus.
“Jennifer Coolidge,” Smith-Cameron says. “And Jean Smart, from Hacks,” she adds. Coolidge is 61, Smart is 71. And you’ve got Smith-Cameron, 65, on Succession. The cougars are multiplying.
“The Brits have always [had this],” Smith-Cameron says. “I mean, Helen Mirren is the definition of it. And Charlotte Rampling, right? They paved the way.” Mirren in particular “could play a carrot that looked like a boiled potato in a movie and show up for the premiere like a f***ing siren”, she says. “And all the little stories I’ve heard about her, it’s always just been part of her range. Part of her ‘Who am I?’ is sexual. She’s a sexual being.”
I once had a mortifying encounter with Helen Mirren at a party in London. I was there for work and I had prepped by googling the long list of celebrities that might show up. All I could find on Mirren was a post on a film blog that declared with great certainty that her latest film was the last in which she would appear naked.
Well, she was there. I approached her. Mirren said she wouldn’t talk to me about her new film if I didn’t know what it was, so I pretended that I knew and we talked at cross-purposes for a bit. I got the idea that she was playing Queen Elizabeth and assumed that she meant a period drama involving Elizabeth I and some bodice ripping with Sir Walter Raleigh. “And is this the last film in which you will appear naked?” I said.
As I now know the film was The Queen. I had managed to offend two classy birds with one stone. Mirren clinked my glass with hers, said, “Nice to meet you,” and walked away. Nowadays, whenever I think of her I want to hide under the table.
“Oh my God,” Smith-Cameron says. “She seems like a tough customer.”
She is. I pick up my drink and take a large gulp of it, trying to forget about Helen Mirren.
“I’m glad you told me that,” Smith-Cameron continues. “I met her a few years ago at a restaurant and she was doing a play on Broadway.”
Smith-Cameron was starstruck. “I just stuttered. I was like, ‘You’re a goddess.’ " She does an impression of Mirren brushing her off. “She went, ‘Oh, these Americans are always telling us we’re goddesses.’ I went, ‘Well, I don’t tell everyone they’re goddesses. Just you.’ "
And now you’re a Helen Murn figure yourself, I say, slurring my words. It must be the tequila. How embarrassing.
“You’re doing great,” Smith-Cameron says. “I just didn’t understand the last bit.”
You’re like Mirren, I say. She demurs. But Mirren “had a huge part in changing [attitudes in Hollywood] and I think Gerri’s had her part in changing that too”, she says. She’s not sure if this will manifest itself in requests for her to play different sorts of roles as she isn’t particularly looking for jobs at the moment.
“I’m not strategically thinking, like, get me some sexy older lady parts,” she says.
Smith-Cameron lives downtown with her husband, the playwright and film director Kenneth Lonergan, their daughter, Nellie, and a dog named Brownie, a poodle-terrier mix. She’s staying tonight at this hotel beside Central Park ahead of the premiere of the new series of Succession. Which is why we decided to meet here.
What we hadn’t considered was the marathon under way that day. Police shut down the whole area around the hotel. Smith-Cameron gets stuck for an hour in traffic while I wander about the bar, trying to decide on the right place to sit.
Since she became a sex symbol, some interviewers seem to treat an audience with her as an assignation, hoping that she will call them a “little slime puppy” – a line Smith-Cameron improvised, as Gerri, during a fraught but steamy phone call with Roman and which then went viral.
In the bar there is this strange little nook, with velvet banquettes and mirrored walls, screened with semi-translucent curtains. If you were actually planning a secret date with an older woman, you would think it a bit too on the nose. Even the writers of Succession would have said, oh no, that’s too much.
But everywhere else is noisy, so in the end I take up position there while Smith-Cameron’s assistant sends updates on the progress of her car and Smith-Cameron instructs her to tell me that, “In his country, it’s already cocktail hour.” When she arrives she hugs me, as if we have both just survived a natural disaster.
“I might need a strong drink,” she says, taking off her coat. She added martini drinking as one of Gerri’s traits during the first season of Succession while waiting to shoot a scene at a party where all the drinks were blue. Smith-Cameron went to one of the production people and said, “How much trouble would it be to get a martini?” The lady wasn’t sure if they had martinis, but she could try. The drink arrived just in time.
“I just thought that’s a very subliminal little Succession Gerri thing to do,” she says.
With small additions like this, and with a few larger improvisations, Smith-Cameron more or less invented Gerri. “I feel like I made her up,” she says. “I don’t know if Jesse [Armstrong, the creator of Succession] would argue with that, but the way they do everything is so informed by the cast.
“I don’t think they had yet sorted out Karl [the chief financial officer] from Frank [the chief operating officer] from Gerri [who was then ‘Jerry’],” she says. “They were concerned with bigger things. So when they cast a woman, they hadn’t changed my audition script yet. So the other characters were still saying horrible, filthy things to me, even though I was a woman. I tried to be unflappable, but I couldn’t help but wince a few times. And that became sort of the classic Gerri.” She does it now. “Like, ‘Yes. What?’ "
Smith-Cameron had two friends who moved in similar circles and she drew on them for inspiration. One she met years ago at the private elementary school that her daughter attended in the West Village. Parents sat in the little chairs listening to a presentation on the school’s progressive philosophy.
Their host invited questions. Someone asked about snacks. Then a lady raised her hand. “She was completely humourless about it,” Smith-Cameron says. She worked for BlackRock, the investment company. “She was like, ‘Let’s pin them down.’ "
The other Gerri-adjacent character in her life was another mum friend, this time from when Nellie was in high school, who regaled her with stories about the foul things men said to each other during meetings. This lady is “a little bitty thing”, Smith-Cameron says. Nevertheless, “She said, ‘I found myself one time crawling up onto the table and going, ‘Suck my c***.’ "
This was “before #MeToo, because I bet they cut all that out now”, she says. These days, “They can’t even put gentle cursing in a text. It’s all changed now.” It has changed everywhere except in the board meetings of the fictional Roy family. “They’re above the law,” she says.
Smith-Cameron’s mother came from an Italian-American family and ran away to New York where she got a job as a receptionist. “At one point she told me that this menial job was at the Manhattan Project,” she says – the secret Second World War scheme to build an atomic bomb, which originally had its headquarters in Manhattan. “I don’t know if that’s true,” she says.
“They’re gone now, my parents… So I’m trying to piece the pieces together.”
She’s the youngest child. Her older sister is a teacher, her older brother is a physicist and engineer and actually worked for a while at Los Alamos, the government laboratory in New Mexico where the Manhattan Project completed its task. “He’s never able to talk about what he does,” she says.
Their father was an architect, the son of an English-born architect named Richard Sharp Smith who became quite famous in South Carolina. He met their mother in New York and they moved back to the south. “She was tremendously charismatic, movie star beautiful, Italian… funny,” but she really came into her own later in her life when she began working for Head Start, the government programme designed to boost the prospects of young children from poor families, Smith-Cameron says.
“This is hard to describe in this era of how uptight everybody is, understandably, about cultural appropriation,” she says. But, “She made friends in the African-American community and she was like, ‘I’ve found my people.’ And she just blossomed. Then she went on to a job in the library where she’d take a van out into the sticks in South Carolina and read stories. But she said, ‘You’d notice that half the listeners, standing up behind all the kids, were the parents who couldn’t read, who were just listening to the story.’ And I’d go with her to the supermarket and out of everywhere people would be like, ‘Miss Mary! Miss Mary!’ "
Smith-Cameron, who grew up as Jean Smith, played the violin at school and got quite far with it, auditioning for the state orchestra. But then she was cast as the lead in a high-school production of The Diary of Anne Frank. “It was like, ‘Oh, this is everything I like about being in music, but it’s what I can do best,’ " she says.
She went to theatre school at Florida State University but got a lot of stage work while she was there and dropped out. Her plan was to start in a regional theatre company and, after she moved to New York in the early Eighties, she was cast in a national tour. “Then the tour got cancelled, but they offered me the part on Broadway. So my first job in New York was on Broadway.”
The play was Crimes of the Heart. Holly Hunter, now a co-star in Succession, was in it too. Smith-Cameron became a theatre star; playwrights wrote for her. In the late Nineties, in what she describes as her heyday as a stage actress, she met Lonergan. He’d just had his first big hit. She met him after attending an evening of short plays, one of which was his. He was hauling his bicycle down a staircase. She told him his play “reminded me of a William Inge play”, to which he shrugged and said he didn’t know who that was. “I was like, ‘Did you go to college?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ And I said, ‘Well, I didn’t but I know who William Inge is.’ And he said, ‘Well, I’m not proud of it.’ " And after this, “We had a lot of those little exchanges.”
Lonergan was also working as a screenwriter at the time. His first film as a writer-director had a cast that included Smith-Cameron and Rory Culkin, brother of Macaulay and Kieran. His second, Margaret, was about a teenage girl. Smith-Cameron played her mother and Kieran Culkin was the boyfriend.
“Kieran and I have known each other for a long time,” Smith-Cameron says. “We go way back.” He was in the London production of Lonergan’s play This Is Our Youth in 2003 and they were both in a play called The Starry Messenger.
“I knew his mean-spirited sense of humour and his potty mouth and I just was not bothered by it,” she says. Her husband loved it. “Kenny is very snarky and they’re both friends with Matthew Broderick, Kenny’s best friend from high school.”
So when she shot her first scene in Succession, which happened to be with Culkin, she was ready for it. Logan Roy, the tycoon, is in a coma and Culkin, as Roman Roy, is suggesting that she serve as interim chief executive. She declines.
“Er, OK,” he says, stunned. “But Gerri, I’ve always thought of you, and I mean this in the best possible way, as a stone-cold killer bitch.”
“Who says you don’t know how to flirt?” she tells him.
Gerri-Roman “shippers” now refer to this exchange as Succession’s version of a “meet cute”, the moment in a romantic film when the characters are first thrown together by circumstance. “It was not in my mind at all,” she says. “But if you go back and look at it, it’s kind of like we’re flirting even then.”
The dynamic became clear to the writers near the end of the first season during a shoot in the UK. The show’s producers like to leave the cameras running after all the lines have been said, to see if anything interesting happens. It always felt like “a National Geographic special, seeing the animals in their habitat”, she says. Kendall and Roman Roy were chatting, while Gerri waited at the bar for a martini. Roman “came over to kind of bug me”, she says. “He’s always the one starting the flirting.”
The previous evening, off-camera, Smith-Cameron had shown everyone how to make a dry martini. “Kieran is also a martini drinker. We always had that in common.” So in this improvised scene, “We had a little talk about how you can’t get a good martini in England unless you were in London,” she says. Then, “I left and he looked back at me, and then I looked back at him. We missed each other.” Everyone behind the camera was laughing, she says. The exchange at the bar was cut but the writers took the idea and ran with it.
When they started shooting season three, Mark Mylod, a producer and director on the series, asked her to sit a little closer to Culkin during a scene. He told her it was “just a little foreshadowing”. Foreshadowing of what, she asked. She drops now into a plummy British accent. “He went, ‘Has no one told you? You and Roman are going to end up [in a bedroom] with him jerking off behind the door.”
This was the now-infamous bathroom scene. She consoles him, he propositions her, she scolds him. One thing leads to another. She makes him go to the bathroom. No one was quite sure it would work.
“I must have had a dozen conversations with Mark Mylod before we got to the scene. Should I scold him? Because that… turns him on, so maybe that’s what it is? And he was like, ‘I’m not sure.’
“I said, ‘Is there a hint of seduction? Do I sort of sense, in my stone-cold killer bitch frame, that that’s a way to wield power over him?’ " He said yes, but this would come “at a very specific moment in the scene when I’m about to pitch him out of the room”.
She remembers being very cold in her pyjamas and Mylod saying, “Let’s see what happens.”
And it worked. And now there are all the shippers. “A lot of shipping. It’s so silly,” she says.
The show has such a grip on the public imagination that the Roys and their corporation are discussed as if they are real and going concerns. My editor does this. “I think Gerri’s going to win,” she told me.
Is she going to win, I ask Smith-Cameron.
“There’s a whole up and down journey all season for my character,” Smith-Cameron replies. “Then, depending on which ending they pick, your editor might be right.”
Wait a moment. You mean you don’t know?
She says it is hard to tell when you are shooting it. And there are a lot of rewrites. “And then we’d get alternate lines handed to us on the spot,” she says. “If we were to talk a year from now, I would tell you we did a version where this happened and then a version where that happened, and then this character and I walked down the hallway like at the end of Casablanca, you know, this could be the start of a beautiful friendship. I think I know the basic storyline. But in terms of where we all fall when the dust settles, I don’t know.”
She tells me about an episode by way of example and then asks to retract what she has said because it gives away too much.
“I have friends guessing,” she says. “They say, ‘Blink your eyes if that’s right.’ "
Midway through shooting this final season she had a dream in which Jesse Armstrong was “very calmly striding through the stages where we shoot the Logan apartment and the private jet… with an axe just killing off characters”. There were Karl and Frank, “bobbing around like Thanksgiving Day balloons”: whack, whack, they both got popped. In the dream, she and one of her co-stars went to find the writers, Lucy Prebble and Tony Roche, to say, " ‘I think Jesse is on the loose with an axe,’ " she says. “And Lucy went, ‘No, no, no, I don’t think so.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, he is too.’ "
I don’t suppose psychologists would take very long over that one. It was a huge part of her life. She is sad it is over.
“If you just think about the lifestyle of it… We got to shoot all over the world,” she says. “Most of us live in New York and we got to shoot here. We got to enjoy this kind of respect and excitement from critics and audiences. We were well paid. We all liked each other. It will never be this good again.”
It has made her famous all of a sudden in her sixties. The Gerri character gets sent dick pics by Roman. I ask if she gets these too, from men on Twitter, where she’s an active presence.
“I don’t think I’ve had that. Although I wonder,” she adds. “I may be missing something.”
Gerri has male fans, she says. “But there’s a lot of earnest young women… or middle-aged women who are heartened by the example of her.”
The tequila has been drunk now and I’m ready to really get into it. Why is everyone so fascinated with Gerri and Roman?
“It’s against some faux rule of nature,” Smith-Cameron says. “It’s against something that’s in our DNA maybe. But on the other hand I don’t know… We are living in a time when you can proclaim your gender up to the last minute. You could change your pronouns up to the last minute, and things are changing faster and faster. So why is this peculiar?”
Especially after the #MeToo movement, people talked about relationships being “age appropriate”. It’s partly a reaction, presumably, to the thought of someone like Harvey Weinstein forcing himself on a much younger woman.
“There’s that age-old horrible wound of a woman only being valuable when she’s at her most fecund and beautiful and guidable,” she says. But she is not sure how it works in reverse. “If a 55-year-old man is dating someone his daughter’s age, it freaks me out. But definitely, I could be Kieran’s mum. I don’t know,” she says. “I haven’t read anything that’s examined the phrase [age appropriate] in a satisfying way.”
She looks out through the curtains. Her husband was going to come along at four o’clock, she says. “We might see him.”
It’s still only half three. I tell her I’ll settle the bill.
Getting up, she hugs me goodbye and regards for a moment the strange little boudoir we have been sitting in. “It’s for assignations,” she says. “This should be your office from now on.”
For interviews with hot cougars. She sets off in search of her luggage.
Succession is available to stream on Neon.
Written by: Will Pavia
© The Times of London
