Yahoo News Succession directors break down Shiv and Tom's savage showdown
WARNING: This article contains spoilers for Succession season 4, episode 7, "Tailgate Party."
On Sunday's Succession, Sarah Snook's Shiv Roy and Matthew Macfadyen's Tom Wambsgans took a break from hosting the Roy clan's traditional pre-election party at their swanky Manhattan apartment to finally deal with the state of their troubled marriage. The result was an emotional, venomous fight, which couldn't help but bring to mind a certain play by Edward Albee.
"I thought of George and Martha, I thought of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which is one of my favorites," director Shari Springer Berman tells EW.
"There was a great line, which was cut, maybe because it was a little bit of a nod to that," Berman's fellow director Robert Pulcini adds. "Someone confronts Shiv about the fight, and she says, 'Oh, that was nothing, we're Burton and Taylor in a car that we f---ing crash constantly, chauffeured by Grace Kelly.' Yeah, it didn't make the cut, but it was nice to hear the allusion."
Below, the two filmmakers talk more about the episode, Shiv and Tom's fight, and the just awful jacket worn by Alexander Skarsgård's tech bro billionaire Lukas Matsson.
David M. Russell/HBO Matthew Macfadyen and Sarah Snook on 'Succession'
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: There are wonderful scenes before we even get to the party. As someone who is not the best gift-giver, I found the sequence in which Tom gives Shiv a scorpion paperweight to be both utterly horrifying and kind of relatable.
SHARI SPRINGER BERMAN: [Laughs] The most fun about doing that was finding the right [one]. We had like, 20 scorpion paperweights. How big was the scorpion? Was it too big? Should it be more decorative? You don't want it to be that nice, you want it to be more sort of horrible. It was fun [looking at] the varied scorpion paperweights that apparently exist.
ROBERT PULCINI: They go ahead with this party to represent themselves to the world as an item to the most important people in the country. Starting off with the scorpion as a present, it just goes from bad to worse. They've done such horrible things to each other. The scorpion is a way of defining like, we can love each other and make of fun of this, but it doesn't work.
David M. Russell/HBO Sarah Snook and Alexander Skarsgard on 'Succession'
Can we talk about Matsson's choice of jacket?
BERMAN: I love that jacket, it's just the greatest jacket. It's so inappropriate, it's perfect. He's very tall, Alex, so he already stands out, and then walking in with the jacket during the moment of silence couldn't be more of an invasion of the Roy moment.
PULCINI: I love that they went broad with that. Succession is a show that shies away from anything broad, so we were like, is this going to get taken away? It was such a great character thing, we thought, and it was truthful. It was great, seeing him walking in in that.
I find Matsson horribly believable but also completely mystifying. I'm still not sure whether he's a genius or an idiot, although I guess in some ways those two things are not mutually exclusive.
PULCINI: I think in the tech world, that's kind of right. We worked on a show called WeCrashed (about WeWork founder Adam Neumann), we worked on the finale of that, which was similar. It was like, is this guy insane or is he a genius? And you kind of have to believe both.
BERMAN: It was fun to watch Alex's Matsson try to be charming and behave. I mean, he's really good at behaving at the beginning of the party and he kind of grooves on it. He's like, oh, I'm winning people over, this isn't as hard as I thought. But he can't keep it up. It has to crumble. It leads to this horrendous, weird, public fight with Kendall in front of all of these important people, which was not good.
PULCINI: But he is mystifying. I told Shari, if they ran an episode where he's revealed as a cannibal, I won't be surprised.
It wouldn't surprise me at all either, although actually that could be said of several characters on the show, I think.
PULCINI: [Laughs] Yeah.
BERMAN: Maybe that's the finale.
Macall Polay/HBO Sarah Snook on 'Succession'
Moving on to the main event, what did you think when you read the Tom-Shiv confrontation in the script?
PULCINI: I thought that I had never seen dialog in Succession that wasn't in some way coded. Usually, everything is half-committed when they say something in Succession. Everything is half-way, no one commits. It was the first time I saw a scene from beginning to end where it's raw, and it's out there, without any kind of jewelry of clever writing. I was just so excited to see that, because you've been waiting for them to say these things to each other for so long. Like how long can people survive without actually saying the obvious?
BERMAN: It was cathartic to read this very human fight between these people who don't always act very human. One of the lines that's just completely devastating is when Tom says, "I don't think you would be very good as someone's mother," which, knowing that she's pregnant, is just horrible to hear. There are all these amazing comebacks in Succession and she says, "That's not a very nice thing to say," which just is such a basic, human, almost a little-kid reaction. It's true, but it's so unlike anything we hear in Succession. It really threw me off and was very emotional.
What was it like reharsing and shooting the scene with those two actors?
PULCINI: It wasn't as time-consuming as I thought it was going to be, because they're so keyed in to how these people respond to each other. I was worried that we might need a whole day for it or something. But we did leave them on the terrace alone for a while, while they ran lines, which became a private rehearsal for them, and they worked some things out. We were seeing them through the glass as we were shooting other things or doing other things. We could see where it was going and then they kind of auditioned it for us. Yeah, both of them are just remarkable, they're just remarkable actors.
I found it quite harrowing that they were having this discussion on a patio many flights up. Is that just my fear of heights playing into this, or was that a deliberate part of the scene?
BERMAN: I think there was danger in every aspect of it. I mean, on one side, you're high up above New York City, and all you can see are tops of buildings, and then behind them there's a glass window where all of the party guests are sitting, and clearly can see something's going on. They're in a fishbowl, and to me that says a lot about a fight. If you're willing to fight like that, in front of people, and in front of powerful, important people, then this is a fight that's really got a life of its own.
David M. Russell/HBO Matthew Macfadyen and Nicholas Braun on 'Succession'
I also found it alarming to see Matthew Macfadyen playing that level of anger.
PULCINI: Well, he is everything you want him to be as a person and as a collaborator. I don't know where he found this character that he becomes, it's so far from his real-life persona, it's so amazing and it's so American too, it's so specific.
BERMAN: You call "Cut!" and suddenly he becomes Mr. Darcy again. He really is the most remarkable actor and also the loveliest person.
When you started work on this episode, did they give you all the scripts for the previous episodes to read? So you're not going around saying, "What happened to Brian Cox?"
PULCINI: Yes. To keep that secret was really interesting. I don't think I've ever kept a secret like that! We couldn't tell anyone, and it was very painful, because people ask us all the time about Succession, and how was the experience, and people even say, "Well, how was Brian on set?" What do you say?
What did you say?
PULCINI: I answered a different question, I think. I didn't want to say, "He wasn't there!"
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
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