Succession introduced Matthew Macfadyen to many American viewers, but he has been well-known in Britain for years. Photo / Mark Sommerfeld, The New York Times
“It’s sort of awful and heartbreaking, but at the same time, there’s a slight relief,” said the actor, whose unbearably awkward Tom has gone from punching bag to power player.
Could there be a more excruciatingly awkward TV character than Tom Wambsgans in Succession? Played with understated comic glee by British actor Matthew Macfadyen, Tom manages to simultaneously exist on all points of the show’s power spectrum: bullied, bullying and wafting helplessly in between.
Over most of three seasons, Tom has stayed 1 1/2 steps behind the machinations at Waystar Royco, the company run by his imperious father-in-law, Logan Roy (Brian Cox), while being treated with casual contempt by his wife, Shiv (Sarah Snook).
So it came as a shock when Tom pulled himself together at the end of Season 3 to orchestrate a stunning power play, teaming with Logan against Shiv and two of her brothers in an epic battle over Waystar’s future.
Not that this guarantees Tom will end up on top in the fourth and final season of HBO’s Succession, which begins March 27 on Neon. (Whatever “on top” really means when the pole is as greasy and compromised as this one.)
“Tom may be in Logan’s camp, but it’s not an easy camp to be in,” Macfadyen said on a February afternoon, sipping a bitters and soda in Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle hotel. “He still doesn’t feel particularly secure, and he’s still worrying about his relationship with Shiv. And everyone else is still manoeuvring and jockeying and competing.”
If Macfadyen is operatically ill at ease in Succession, in reality he is the opposite: relaxed, easygoing and affable, his voice deep and self-assured, with none of his character’s nervous tics or frantic efforts to read his fate in others’ eyes. While Tom is beset by inner demons and crippling insecurity, Macfadyen comes across as remarkably well adjusted, someone happy to do his job and not get too wound up about it. He uses the word “lovely” a lot.
Long a familiar face to British viewers, Macfadyen had been mostly under the radar on this side of the Atlantic before Succession. If Americans knew him at all, it was likely in his guise as a different Tom — Tom Quinn, an arrogant yet vulnerable spy in the first two seasons of the British series Spooks (known in the United States as MI-5), starting in 2002. Or they might have seen him playing a brooding, tortured Mr Darcy in Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice (2005), or a Victorian detective in the BBC series Ripper Street.
It was a different role that won over Jesse Armstrong, the Succession creator: Macfadyen’s turn as the drunkenly bumptious Sir Felix Carbury in The Way We Live Now (2001), a British miniseries based on the Anthony Trollope novel.
“He’s well known in the UK as being able to play all sorts of parts, though most people wouldn’t necessarily know him as a comic actor,” Armstrong said.
While Tom began Succession largely on the fringes, “I knew this role would be significant and important,” Armstrong said. As the series went on, the writers played to Macfadyen’s antic comic skills and ability to show Tom’s poignant vulnerability in quieter moments.
“In a show that’s about power and its manifestations, Matthew is very good at playing a character who is the crux of a number of different power relationships,” Armstrong said. “He’s good at showing Tom’s willingness to shape and adjust his personality to fit into the power structure.” As Macfadyen explained recently on The Tonight Show, one way he does this is by raising and lowering the pitch of Tom’s voice, depending on who else is in the scene.
Macfadyen, 48, was born in England but raised abroad, including spending several years in Jakarta, Indonesia, because of his father’s job in the oil business. He went to boarding school back home, skipped college and enrolled instead at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
After graduation, he toured internationally in the Cheek by Jowl theatre ensemble, performing in plays like The Duchess of Malfi and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
He had a breakthrough when he was cast as Hareton Earnshaw in the 1998 British TV adaptation of Wuthering Heights, followed quickly by a two-part BBC film, Warriors, in which he played a UN peacekeeper in Bosnia. He has worked steadily since.
“You just get a momentum,” he said.
Macfadyen has a tendency, common to English actors, to downplay his work, as if it all flows effortlessly from him. He also has a predilection for supporting roles.
“I feel sometimes you can get in a rut when you play leading men,” he said. “It’s much more fun being the baddie or the clown.”
Succession is full of big names and memorable characters, including the three Roy boys: Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Roman (Kieran Culkin) and Connor (Alan Ruck), each appalling and damaged in his own way. But Tom Wambsgans — mercurial yet sensitive, diabolical yet almost constantly hapless — stood out from the beginning.
There is the matter of his strange last name, its awkward B bristling aggressively in a string of consonants, defying casual pronunciation. There is his status as a Roy punching bag, a man whose wife announced on their wedding night that she wanted an open marriage and whose father-in-law dangles power before him but uses him as a scapegoat and bagman. There is his loopy relationship with Cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun), a sadomasochistic romp that Armstrong describes as a “homoerotic power play.”
While Tom is no dummy, his awkwardness is so easy to mistake for stupidity that sometimes even Macfadyen does it.
“Jesse will remind Nick and me, ‘He’s running a billion-dollar wing of this company; he’s not a total moron,’ " he said.
Over four seasons of filming in New York City, the Succession cast became particularly close, and it was not unusual to see them dining around town in various configurations in what Macfadyen called “the Succession supper club.” He often had dinner with Snook, his fictional wife, and other cast members.
“I don’t know how he’s managed to make such an obsequious and bullying character likable, but he has,” Snook said. “He’s one of those actors who’s got such love and empathy and compassion and curiosity for the world that he can really fashion a character into anything he wants.”
Macfadyen seems to be that rare thing: an actor without a huge ego. (Or perhaps he is such a good actor that he can hide his egotism.) Among other things, he said, he has never felt compelled to demand more airtime or a better story arc for Tom.
“I’ve seen actors get very proprietorial about their ‘journey,’ " he said. “But I don’t feel like it’s my character — it’s Jesse’s, and I’m the conduit for it.”
Also, “You don’t want to get attached to a possible storyline, because they may change their minds.”
Braun said Macfadyen has a genuine selflessness, a helpful quality in a series in which numerous actors are often in a single scene. He also praised Macfadyen’s uncanny ability to stay in the moment while performing, and to do so with an absence of vanity.
“He doesn’t expend a lot of extra energy before a scene,” Braun said. “He’s not, like, ruminating or taking a lot of private time or ‘staying in the energy’ of Tom.”
In this way, Macfadyen would seem to be the opposite of his co-star Strong, whose intensity and extreme immersion into his characters have been extensively chronicled in The New Yorker and elsewhere. Macfadyen was loath to discuss this topic.
“I think enough has been said about that,” he said.
Though Succession is carefully scripted, the actors are encouraged to improvise and play around with alternative dialogue. Braun and Macfadyen, who have shared some of the show’s funniest scenes, were famous on set for cracking each other up.
“The guy is abusive in a way that isn’t super on the nose,” Braun said of Tom.
“They evidently just find each other amusing,” Armstrong said dryly.
Macfadyen is married to British actor Keeley Hawes, whom he met when both played spies in MI-5. They had a highly public affair — she had a husband and a baby at the time — but married in 2004, after her divorce, and had two children together. Macfadyen said that everyone has become great friends and co-parents.
“It was a bit bumpy at the time, but it’s fine now,” he said.
Macfadyen missed his family when he was shooting Succession, and often flew home to England when he had a break in filming. But he sounded wistful about the end of the show.
“It was a really lovely bunch of actors,” he said. “It’s a weird thing, the grief when you finish a job. It’s sort of awful and heartbreaking, but at the same time, there’s a slight relief — a complicated mélange of feelings.”
Macfadyen has worked steadily on other things between seasons. In the British series Stonehouse, which debuted in January, he starred as the real-life 1970s Conservative politician John Stonehouse. It was a juicy role: Stonehouse spied (badly) for Czechoslovakia, got involved in dodgy business schemes, cheated on his wife, faked his own death and turned up under a false name in Australia.
Mrs.Stonehouse was played by Hawes, whose character soon gleans that her husband is not all that he seems.
“It was fun to get a chance to see Keeley at work,” Macfadyen said, “especially her withering looks.”
Macfadyen’s next project, with Nicole Kidman, is Holland, Michigan, an Amazon thriller about the secrets that lurk in a small town. He seems deeply unfussed about what comes next. Unlike Tom Wambsgans, Macfadyen is content with his place in the world.
“The whole art of being an actor is to imagine what it’s like to be someone else with sympathy and empathy, to not make it about you,” he said. “The job is great. I like the old-fashioned thing of putting on a costume and sounding different and doing things you would never dream of doing in real life.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Sarah Lyall
Photographs by: Mark Sommerfeld
©2023 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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