Why so Self-Serious?
My stupid friends told me I need to write about Jeremy Strong, an actor I enjoy watching and love analyzing. After we all read his interview with Variety about his development process for a Super Bowl advertisement, they began encouraging me to publicize my appreciation for Strong.
There was a condition, though. They’d only let me publish it if I made the writing funny and not overly serious. Strong is a public figure, he says wildly pretentious stuff in wildly long interviews. He just turned a coffee advertisement1 into absurdist cinema. He creates so many opportunities to be mocked.
“You connect with him,” the people closest to me said while we were discussing the most insufferable artist of his time.
Buoyed by their belief in me, I opened my computer. Here is what I sent to them after fifteen minutes:
Sometime in the future, a director will give Jeremy Strong his opportunity to play Hamlet. It’s his dream role2, and the pairing is on a collision course with inevitability.
His graying hair will be bleached Danish white. He will plunge himself so deeply into Hamlet’s melancholy that he nearly destroys his natural self.
The first response was “LMAO.” The friend from Massachusetts said I should write that Strong is the “second-best person from Massachusetts.”
I explained to them that I can’t just riff about Strong’s self-seriousness because I find it relatable.
Then, I sent them a screenshot from a recent philosophical essay3 I’d read about Hamlet, which says the character delivers “endlessly chattering soliloquies” and that “there is even a perverse consolation in feeling tragically riveted to oneself.”
Is this not a description of Strong’s approach to talking about his own creativity? Have you seen how long his answers are?
And how, remarkably, they always include a reference to something he read about Kandinsky or by Knausgaard or Dostoevsky? Like the way I quoted a philosopher to really drive home the already-made point that Strong should play Hamlet?
For me, this type of behavior is the result of intellectual insecurity. Everyone in my life gets subjected to inane musings because The Void tells me I’m inferior. I can’t speak for J. Strong’s motivations — but he usually lets Tolstoy speak for him anyway.
Pretense is a malady he and I share. Curiosity is, too. Put those things together and give its host a public platform? Forget it, dude. You’re going to get a quote like this:
“If I were to eat one of those donuts now, it would be like Proust dipping the madeleine in the tea,” Strong said about a chain store’s mass-produced pastry. “It would send me back to my childhood, to my roots.”
There is something rotten in the state of Strong’s self-awareness, because his approach to dispelling the notion that he is self-serious and pretentious was to spend the entire Variety interview talking about his maniacal creative process and quoting literary icons. In this interview, he says he developed his character for an advertisement by thinking back to “Apocalypse Now.”
Additionally, Strong says he spoofed his own reputation in a commercial as a “response to the idea that I ‘don’t get the joke.'” But in the process of developing his absurd and demanding coffee character, he actually demonstrated realistic examples of the methods his “Succession” co-stars are still complaining about even now.4
At one point in the commercial, he begins his performance before abruptly asking if the “dialect coach” is around. He says he can’t be in character with so many non-Revolution Era things in his line of sight. Even in the Variety interview, he says: “They prepared (the coffee sludge) in a way that I didn’t have to get in it. But of course, I did anyway.”
This commitment to the bit — any bit — is precisely why Strong is beloved by the fans who don’t share a sound stage with him. He reflexively quotes artists and intellectuals to the point of farce. He wants to wear the stupidest looking outfit you’ve ever seen. There is something outrageously honest about the caricature he makes of himself.
(Plus, most of his cinematic contemporaries try to convince interviewers that they don’t even have inner lives.)
So, when you strip away the acting methods or the seafoam bucket hat, you’re left with a person who simply elects to live at the extremes. Strong attempts to sacrifice his own identity to truly become a character. Now, his actual identity has become a character of its own.
This piece of writing will not satisfy my friends and their demands to lighten up. (“i’m getting into the vat goodbye,” I told them as I began to write.)
But they are correct. I do connect with Strong, who seems like the most annoying person in the world.
So in our group chat, I am but a young fish swimming along56. I happen to meet two fish swimming the other way. They nod at me and say “write something that’s not self-serious” and swim away. Eventually, I think to myself, “What the hell is self-seriousness?”
I cannot believe I am linking to Brand Content. Only for Jeremy.
Have you seen him give interviews as opposed to just reading them? He doesn’t seem annoying at all to me. He seems very kind and soft-spoken and thoughtful. I’m not sure why this is worthy of mockery.
Imagine how shocked the audience will be when Hamlet immerses himself in a vat of coffee.