Anne Hathaway & Jeremy Strong | Actors on Actors - Full Conversation

there was a moment where i sort of just gave up where i was like oh i give up i can't do this and you're on such an amazing team on that yeah yeah because yeah which is that's right that's all possible because the other actors because they were there and the camera operators are so fluid i mean it's sort of like i think you worked on rachel getting married and you guys shot like 90 minute takes or something right radical listening yeah yeah that's kind of the way we work on this show always wow but it's a dream [Music] hi jeremy sorry in case you're watching this at home or on your phone on the subway or any place we're meant to call each other and all actors by full names so hello jeremy strong nice to see you good to see you i was thinking you know we know each other and we've worked together twice but we've never sat down and like talked about talked about work or talked about acting i know and every time we have um the rooms had a lot of other furniture in it right so preparing for this i went back and watched a lot of your body of work oh i'm just trying to imagine you watching the princess diaries i didn't i didn't re-watch the princess diaries re-watch you are good but i'm so honored to be doing this with you i think we both feel the virtues of commitment and courage are ones to be aspired to and i feel like i see your work and just blown away by the versatility of it but also the the courageousness and the investment thank you i'm i'm um a little speechless but uh the thing that i've noticed as our friendship has deepened and one of the reasons why i'm so grateful to know you and also i'm so grateful that we're you know pals it's so wonderful without having to talk about the creative process because it can feel very intimate to just know that you do it with your whole soul that you do it with every everything that you have and having gotten to spend a lot of time with you i know how extraordinary your brain is and the way that you're able to like our co-star anthony hopkins recall quotes and verse seemingly effortlessly and i just think it's so exciting this moment because i mean it's really happening for you like you're really being revealed as one of our great great actors and i guess my first question is because i think there's going to be a lot of actors watching this and they're going to want to know what did you tell yourself during those years when you were building it and it felt like you were taking smaller steps before you've had this beautiful cosmic explosion it's such a great question it's sort of the central question right what keeps us going sort of despite any lack of evidence that that we'll have the chances to do the work that we we want to do i don't know the answer really i think it was just the need to do this and the feeling that um it's something worth devoting one's life to you know i don't know about you but i'm constantly in awe of what actors do of other actors i i mean i i was in awe of what you did in in in we crashed as rebecca there's nothing to revamp damien we have 600 followers okay no we need to think bigger we need to reach a wider audience the great desire to make a contribution to the work that has moved me and i don't know if it was apocryphal if you really were the ninth choice for for devil wears prada but like going and interning in an auction house and that ninth choice feeling whether or not it is the case it's a great engine that feeling i read you say something once about vivian lee and how she would crawl over broken glass if she thought kazan said this about her if she thought it would serve a moment or serve this scene so i feel like each of us have that trait as as people as actors this character this show is such a gift it's like the mountain i've always wanted to climb we were shooting together when you found out that you've gotten cast or had you gotten cast just before oh right on serenity yeah i think i had done the pilot and i think i found out that we were going to make the show you are known for your immersive process and i remember going like kind of seeing you while we were in the beautiful island of mauritius like kind of just walking around so deep in character and kind of wave and i remember one time kind of sidling up to you and saying listen i completely respect what you're doing but i also want to like be a human so i'm going to let you do you i'm going to nod and just know wide open if you ever just want to talk or do anything and just kind of nodded because you were deep in your character and then a few weeks later i just remember you just kind of appearing next to me and you said i think i need to come up for air and i said one come over for dinner and you said yes please and you came over for dinner and we spent the mo and we had this so fun you me adam our son was asleep and we talked about life and we spent time together and you remembered what we drank that night oh yeah we drank uh penny blue that's right a lot of it a lot of it a lot of penny blue rum and you told me about succession i tried but i i thought that i could change things but i'm not as there's things you're able to do that i can't i'm you know a huge fan of the show and you know i'm a huge fan of your work and i'm still a little annoyed that you did not wrap your emmy's acceptance speech as i encouraged you to but i think the world could have used that moment but you know maybe maybe there will be more opportunities but it's a show that is seemingly about one thing but it's actually a show about the legacy of abuse yeah first of all how do you chart a character over multiple seasons when you don't exactly know what's coming do you just kind of throw yourself against the wall do you crawl across broken glass like how how does it how now that you've done it three times yeah how does it work honestly i don't want to ascribe too much um [Music] sort of uh ownership over that i think a performance is not a monolith you know it's a it's a thousand thank you thank you yes it's a thousand imperfect attempts at a scene or a moment and and i find personally that i feel sort of always on the frontier of uncertainty and confusion and from that place making attempts at you know based on your intuition in terms of charting it i feel very fortunate to be working with material you know these right jesse armstrong and that and the writers are so brilliant and have such a sort of incisive forensic understanding of psychiatry of sort of interiority so a lot of that needle is threaded for you and like very powerful magnets just sort of pulls out of you what it needs to and you and this is the hardest part as you know have to make yourself available to that and be a vessel for it so i feel like i've been sort of coursed through these classified whitewater rapids for a few seasons and and i love it and and it is heavy the weight of it is is heavy just trying to you know trying to trying to meet the demands of it and trying to embody what the character's struggle is for me in this last season there was a lot of imagining a golden light and there's this sense of needing to for kendall there's a sort of airborne quality to this last season of this almost manic need to stay above the pain and and incredibly the writing incredible line i'm blown into a million pieces which you know the whole work for me i think as i see it is to earn the right to say those words come on it's lonely hey i'm all about it is about the legacy of abuse i remember jesse and adam mckay the first thing they talked to me about was feston the winterberg movie which is in the substrate of the show trauma and abuse but also also what we work on both of these things are about sort of late stage capitalism you know we live in this time where i think i read somewhere that the richest three americans have more money than 160 million of the poorest fellow countrymen and so these people that we are inhabiting exist in that rarified world and so the terrain is really similar actually i feel you know watching your work to me this is sort of the perfect representation of what you can do which is with great precision do like a triple reverse somersault from the high dive and then moments after like a complete deep sea dive and touch the bottom so for me when you have that scene which is amazing you know around the oka golden chain of golden chain and you go and you go into that russian accent but then the moment in the stairway afterwards it's an incredible moment i think that one of the main ways i'm different as an actor than the way i started was i have learned how to shake off a bad take my whole existence as an actor is not defined by a good take or a bad take anymore and so i have gotten comfortable with okay that was terrible let's see let's let's learn something from it and try to find something else you know personally the permission to suck like the permission to to make a loud wrong choice to sort of fail yeah boldly and and find that thin ice to be on is sort of the best thing you can give yourself as an actor i think so much of that precision that you're talking about has to do with the team that i was on and the way that i was able to make hyper-specific choices because of the excellence of everyone right really and then that specific moment that you're talking about it's got a history to it so it begins in a sad place so everybody but my very first job was on a tv show called get real and it was my senior year of high school and i was away from home i was shooting in los angeles and i was just dealing with a lot of feelings that i didn't how old were you i was 16 when it started and i turned 17 while we were doing it there were just a lot of feelings that i had that i didn't really understand and every morning i would get my makeup done which felt very very strange because i was very young and it would kind of change the way my face looked which felt very weird and i would go into my little three banger with eric christian olsen on one side and jesse eisenberg on the other side and i would have to like go to set and i feel really nervous and i would start to cry but i would know that i couldn't cry my makeup off so i would take a tissue and i would fold it in half and i would cry into the tissue i just remember thinking to myself this would be great to see on camera and i have tried to get that moment into a film on several occasions and it never and everybody always just kind of looked at me like i had three heads when i would suggest it and this is what i mean about the way i was invited into the process and i described it to drew and lee and i don't know if they totally got what i was talking about but they trusted me and so i said i would like to us to shoot it in such a way please where there's an outward facing part because these are of course glass walled offices and it's an open floor plan an open cubicle and all those things where she has to have a public face and she turns around and she has to cry without crying off her makeup which is something that i think a lot of women understand and i just had a feeling that it would look really strong on camera to watch the tears just kind of like saturate the tissue but not fall i mean it's an amazing moment you're able to just summon that as well i mean that what do you mean that you can access that you can access that i think that's a good it's baby you know what when we were in mauritius on the steve knight movie i just started working on the show and i had read something really struck me and and has sort of become something that i think about all the time and i've tried to put into the work on succession and i think i try and put into everything now which is something that jung said that only that which is really ourselves has the power to heal and so maybe there's something about the fact that that moment came from you know the ground of your being that is why it is yeah i um it's a funny thing because i remember when i was younger an actor saying you can only ever really play yourself and i thought i don't know that i fully agree with that i mean whatever works for you but i'm trying to play as many different characters as i can i'd like to apply as much as imagination to it but it is interesting and i don't necessarily work this way anymore but in the beginning part of my career i did connect to my characters through trauma like i would kind of search out parts in myself where i was broken and parts where they were broken and i would try to like kind of find my way into them through that way so i think i was like in the beginning i think i was using it as kind of like an acting out of certain things that i wanted to to understand better you said it was all for me and it is i don't need it do you find that you have a shape to the performance that you try to adhere to or is it something where like the wind hits and i'm off in a different place i think my only goal at this point is to be as free as possible here i go i'm gonna i'm gonna not censor myself and quote something but this is one of your gifts this is why i brought it up because it's it's amazing i can't remember what day it is there's an amazing book about painting that i read last year about about uh edward monk and they say in this book painting it must not merely reconstruct a moment it must itself be a moment oh good one it must not exist beforehand but come into being in the moment it is expressed that's the aim and i think that's the aim so so in a sense every time somebody calls action and i don't like it when they call action i i like it i love it when it's just i think and then you kind of just take it but you sort of blindly follow as you say a sense of truth and really i think rigorously do that and then you discover what it is and it reveals itself to you but i don't ever prescribe a shape or know where i'm going i think if you prepare enough and have internalized enough then you kind of just yes you know i'm so happy you brought up preparation because when we worked together on armageddon time your character was a plumber plumber and you went to learn how to fix a refrigerator and plumb and you kind of you went there and it was a humbling moment for me as an actor to realize that you have more children than i do and i was at a reading i was at a reading the other day and i was like is that guy the voice of daddy pig and peter pig wow sorry maybe maybe yeah um so with kendall was there something that you really went deep on and nerded out that kind of put the character in perspective for you or made him come alive for you because i was blown away that you had such an arsenal of knowledge about irving in our movie and i just i was curious about your level of preparation and all your other projects specifically succession i think with each time you're sort of starting from from nothing right i think it tells you how to work on it and you sort of follow the line of your intuition i felt like there was a lot of skills and some stuff that i wanted to understand viscerally for for our movie also voice you know i always imagined that i would be my heroes are all sort of chameleonic actors i always imagined i would be a character actor and sort of travel great distances to create a character there's a stevie smith poem called not waving but drowning and the idea is the idea is that it's sort of imperceptible which one it is and i think that that's true of both of our characters actually yes i agree it's one of the things i find so poignant about about her you can't help but care about this person and you give such care and respect to who she is you know very clearly your empathy for her the way that she is a student of life but also i mean part of our job is to create a character who can say does it have a key in the way that you said does it have a key but that's part of a world right and it's and i feel very very lucky in many ways to have been born in a world that's different than the one that i've i've earned my way into because i feel that it kind of lets me have a perspective on it and see where i stop and where it begins and i found that helpful in this story because your character in succession my character and we crash they line up in a very specific way but yours is inspired by someone and i was playing someone very very real right and so there was a component to it where i had to sit there every every single day and check in and just be like you are playing a real person right she's going to watch this be fair yeah be honest um but there was a book that i read because i read a lot uh you read books that rebecca had read i read books that rebecca had read and i also read a lot of books around sort of around what it's like to grow up wealthy right you know just the sort of things that you would take for granted that you wouldn't be able to see because it's you know i don't know it's just it's everywhere it's the water that you that you swim in and i did a lot of research and i spoke to a lot of people that had spent a lot of time with a woman that i was playing and i heard the same thing again and again which was she's so sweet and that was for me such an important aspect to playing her so i was thinking about it you know you mentioned in terms of monk of color but i was also thinking i think about negative space a lot and i think that it's so important when you find the balance of someone because you know we've all grown up on fairy tales we have young children we're spending a lot of time in them but we all know that reality is so much more complicated and that villains are never convenient there's usually something we love about them we're also living through an interesting time where we're going back and we're reconsidering what we think about villains period and it seems like the best way forward is empathy and so one of the books that i read i came across this phrase which said judge all persons favorably and what that means is don't not see the thing that they're doing there's no bs to that approach you see someone maybe they come in and they're like screaming their head off and they're acting in a ridiculous way and in that moment you can either say how could that person act like that or you could say what would make someone act like that right and you can either supply a generous reason or you can go up to the person and ask them if they're all right and i found that was the only approach i could take to playing this part was it was a new level of compassionate curiosity that's great about what would make someone who is defined as sweet by one person but who's also defined very differently by other people what's what's going on behind there and you mentioned trauma and i do think that you know if there's one thing that we're learning in this world is that everybody's carrying around something yeah and you know and take a look at the roys i mean money doesn't protect one from trauma no that's right i mean it is both sort of heavy as the head that wears the crown but it's also this idea that having the external having that having the trappings of power being raised with that kind of power doesn't mean that that sense of power was installed in you internally in a real way and that's a kind of burden so it's very easy to sort of put labels on people or to make judgment and one of the things i love about being an actor is is you get to sort of slide around that you have to slide around that because your only job is to have compassionate curiosity and try and empathically understand what this person's struggle is and what it's like to walk a mile in their shoes one of the things that i was thinking about kendall and rebecca is they're both idealists yeah and i've been thinking about i mean i don't want to you know step outside my lane and label an entire generation but it seemed to be this moment when idealism and capitalism were so woven together and and there really was this very real belief that you could save the world with money and we're seeing evidence that that might not be true um and so i just wondering if you wanted to speak at all about the idealism of kendall and why he keeps tripping over it well i mean i think certainly in this last season there's a sort of messianic quality that i have that kid i was drunk i was up but i drove and he saw something and he snatched at the wheel and we went into the water and then i left him in there and ran we're in this dirty dirt parking lot in in the final episode and to me that was sort of hey it was one of the greatest pieces of writing i've ever been given and and so that you know sort of how heavily that weighs on you as an actor that's when it all sort of imploded and i'm 43 and the inferno is sort of about someone in the middle of their life lost in a wood having lost the right way in life and so i think that reckoning of i've lost i've lost my way was a very powerful thing to kind of work with and try and puzzle through i couldn't breathe during that scene i i could not i was just i was completely held and i know a little bit about what went into the making of it i'd sort of totally blown it really i had asked the production designer to build this plinth i had an idea that i would sit there and ideas are never a good thing and we did like sometimes sometimes we did like nine or ten times but i agree sometimes when i have ideas i should just they they instantly be they're instantly revealed as as an unnecessary detour i was trying to make it work and and and something about the chemistry between us just wasn't happening and often with a scene like that it's sort of um whatever's going to come is going to come sort of immediately or not at all and i don't really believe you can go looking for it there was a moment where i sort of just gave up where i was like oh i give up i can't do this and you're on such an amazing team on that yeah yeah i am because yeah which is that's right that's all possible because the other actors because they were there and because the camera operators are so fluid i mean it's sort of like i think you worked on rachel getting married and you guys shot like 90 minute takes or something right radical listening yeah yeah that's kind of the way we work on this show always wow but it's a dream jeremy um we've run out of time to speak in this room in which we have the only chairs would you like to go to another room where there's more furniture that sounds great this was so loud [Music] you