Jeremy Strong shares true feelings towards Dunkin’ Donuts Super Bowl ad as Succession star mocked
Succession star Jeremy Strong has declared he has “no trouble taking the p**s out of myself” while discussing his appearance in Dunkin Donuts Super Bowl ad.
The 46-year-old actor has previously been criticised by some, including co-star Brain Cox, for his intense devotion to his roles.
Strong received widespread acclaim and numerous awards for his starring role as fictional media empire heir Kendall Roy in the celebrated HBO series.
He has also received a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nod for his role as Donald Trump’s sinister mentor, Roy Cohn, in The Apprentice.
However, the 46-year-old has also garnered a reputation as a method actor with an intense commitment to his roles.
Actor Brian Cox, who played his onscreen father in Succession, had previously described Strong’s practice as “f****** annoying” and called on him to drop it to be an “even better actor”.
Now, Strong has attempted riff on his reputation by appearing alongside Ben and Casey Affleck in a Duncan Donuts ad for the Super Bowl.
In the commercial, also directed by the Afflecks, they enter Strong’s dressing room to find him submerged in a vat of coffee.
In a self-professed homage to Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now, Strong slowly emerged from the goo to the horror of the brothers.
“I’m just trying to find the character… I’m all in for Duncan,” he declared before sinking back into the brown sludge.
Reflecting on the ad, Strong said he “wanted to poke fun at this idea of me as this sententious, self-serious actor”.
“I had no trouble taking the p**s out of myself,” he explained to Variety, adding he was “willing to make a giant f*****g fool” of himself.
Even still, the 46-year-old admitted: “I do take my work extremely seriously. If you give me a piece of material, I won’t let anything stand between me and what I think I need to do to serve it.”
That attitude even extended to Strong’s donuts advert, where he revealed: “I wanted to find a way to say that you can take your work incredibly seriously while not taking yourself all that seriously.”
Accordingly, he spent time “marinating” on the role and how to approach it searching for the “latitude to create something”.
In the end, Strong was pleased with the output as: “The world is so dark now, and the work that I’ve been doing for a long time has weighed so heavily on me, it was nice to have a little burst of levity.”
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It has taken some work to get Strong to appear as he had previously swept away ideas that “didn’t feel genuinely creative or funny.”
The Afflecks had originally planned for Strong to recreate his infamously excruciating but strangely magnetic rap performance from Succession.
Strong explained: “I want to put distance between myself and that show and achieve escape velocity.”