[This story contains major spoilers for the April 9 episode of HBO’s Succession.]
It’s the final season of Succession, which means anything can happen. And something very big did happen in the third episode, “Connor’s Wedding.”
A second warning, major spoiler ahead. …
The patriarch of the Roy family met his end on the April 9 episode. Logan Roy, who has been played by Emmy winner Brian Cox for four seasons of the acclaimed drama, dropped dead on his private plane. As his final act, Logan picked business over family and chose to close the Waystar Royco-GoJo deal instead of attending the wedding of oldest son, Connor (Alan Ruck), a high-profile event all of his children are attending when they receive the shattering news that their father was found in the bathroom in bad condition and the outlook is tragic. (Read all about the episode with THR‘s deep dive into “Connor’s Wedding.”)
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Speaking in HBO’s behind-the-episode featurette, creator Jesse Armstrong explained that his decision to deliver the monumental death so early in the final season (seven episodes remain) was to surprise the audience, but also to have time to unpack the aftermath. “We don’t want to see people crying, have a funeral and be done with the show,” he said. “We want to see how a death of someone significant rebounds around a family.”
“Connor’s Wedding” was written by Armstrong and directed by Mark Mylod. The pair spoke together on HBO’s official Succession podcast, which released after the episode, where they dove into the creative decision and shared more behind-the-scenes details.
“He was always going to die. It felt like that had to happen,” Armstrong told host and journalist Kara Swisher. “That was always coded into it once we decided it was going to be the final season. Occasionally, when I was going crazy about what the end would be I would think, most tragedies end with the death at the end and we go back and look at that as a shape. But it really was this feeling of wanting to see how they would cope afterwards that was the prevailing one.”
Mylod explained their decision to have Logan’s death happen offscreen. “Big events don’t happen in a perfect way, do they? They happen sometimes in a hum-drum way. And this idea of taking away all the television cliché’s of the kind of ‘perfect’ TV death, I thought was really brilliant,” said Mylod of shooting the episode in a way that makes the audience feel “hijacked in the exactly the same way the siblings are when they hear the news, so we’re immediately parachuted into their emotional experience.”
Mylod and the cameras accomplished that by filming a nearly 30-minute unbroken take on the yacht, which served as Connor’s wedding venue. A 10-minute sequence follows the siblings as they receive the shocking news and offer up goodbyes to Logan in individual phone calls. “It felt like every time that you cut forward from the character or jumped forward in time that you kind of took your foot off the gas. It felt to me like the camera had to be sad*stic really, it had to be unflinching and keep looking at the pain,” said Mylod of the filming feat. “It felt like we were kind of going live on national television. We only did it once, and the results, in my opinion, were electric.”
The director also explained the decision to only briefly show the Roy patriarch’s body. “When we started shooting those sequences on the plane, I felt oddly kind of squeamish … with showing the character at all,” he said. “We made a choice to show him once quite specifically. And parts of his torso at certain points with the shock treatment. It felt oddly kind of disrespectful in some way.”
Armstrong said he felt “terrified” when delivering the news to Cox, which he did over an in-person lunch, and that the “sense of losing our No. 1 on the call sheet” made the table read for this episode as emotional as the one for the series finale.
But, ultimately, he felt the character of Logan Roy would consider “Connor’s Wedding” a happy episode. “I think this is actually how he would like to go,” said Armstrong. “He’s on a private plane flying to do the biggest deal, he goes out at exactly the right moment and he goes off pretty quickly and painlessly, and his kids whispering in his ear that they loved him. I think it’s a very happy episode.”
For his part, Cox said in HBO’s featurette that he was surprised to see Logan die at this point in the season and predicted of the audience: “I feel they’re gonna find it tough. They’ve lived with Logan for so long. They’re going to miss him.”
He elaborated on that in a separate conversation with Swisher for the post-show podcast. “I knew something would have to be done in order to complete the show. And I knew he would probably have to die,” said Cox, referencing Logan’s health being a focus since the very first episode, while also praising Armstrong and his decision to end the show on his terms. “I didn’t quite expect it to happen as early as it did, but then we were locked into the fact that each episode is one day, which we haven’t done in the seasons before. So he dies on day three. I was fine about it, as long as I was getting paid. (Laughs.)”
Cox also offered up his own conspiracy theory about the death happening offscreen. “I have a secret sort of fantasy that we don’t actually see Logan die. We know about it, we hear about it. We don’t actually see it. We don’t even know if that body at the end is Logan’s body,” he said. “So there is a sort of mystery: Is Logan dead? Or has he just gone into somewhere else? Or is he just testing his family to see how they’re going to react when he’s dead? I’m much more imaginative than people give me credit for.”
Cox also shared some of the backstory he had created with Armstrong for Logan, revealing he was born in Scotland, transported to Canada during the war and then returned to Scotland, where he began his career in journalism, and that he didn’t start off being a right-wing media titan. “Life is taken away from him before anything is achieved. He doesn’t achieve what he wanted to achieve and he doesn’t know where it’s going to go to because he’s gone. And that’s life. We try to be in control and nobody’s in control,” he said. “He’s a tragic character. Jesse has created one of the great roles of television.”
Imagining an alternate ending for Logan, Cox said he’d return to Scotland with people who love him, like assistant Kerry (Zoë Winters) and body guard Colin (Scott Nicholson), and when he gets the inevitable call about his empire crumbling and is asked to come back, he would offer his signature “f*ck off.”
The death of Logan Roy so early on in the final season is sure to have a propulsive effect, as the battle over who will succeed him is sure to be resolved with seven more episodes of story still to tell. When announcing the fourth season would be the final one, Armstrong had delivered the biggest hint about Logan’s fate when he said, “there’s a promise in the title ofSuccession.”
Now knowing how Logan’s story ends (and will continue in flashback form), more can be gleaned by looking back at the first two episodes. When speaking on earlier episodes of HBO’s Succession podcast, Armstrong explained that answering the show’s biggest question effectively ends the series.
“This show has a bunch of things that I think the dynamics could just go on and on and on and we’d enjoy writing them, but there is a business, cultural, political heart to it,” he said. “If we try to extend the succession business stuff beyond its natural length, I think people would start feeling that we were a bit of a zombie. That the body lived on, but the heart had gone.”
He also unpacked the biggest tragedy of Logan: his isolation, as shown by his birthday party, which none of his children attended, and in the diner with Colin, where Logan offered up the most self-reflection seen from the character: “Those Sumner Redstone-, [Rupert] Murdoch-style deal-makers, I don’t think they love anything as much as the deal and the thrill of that chase. I think that’s seeping through all parts of his life. He’s getting a gold star in terms of the billions he’s going to earn, but he’s selling up, and that feels like it’s a sort of ending.”
Perhaps nothing better sums up the Roy father-children relationship than Logan’s message to the ones who betrayed him in business, Shiv (Sarah Snook), Roman (Kieran Culkin) and Kendall (Jeremy Strong), during the karaoke scene in episode two, “Rehearsal,” when he tells them that he loves them but they are “not serious people.”
When speaking to Swisher after Logan’s death episode, Cox called his character’s love for his children his Achilles’ heel. “He’d be a lot better off if he didn’t love his children. He’d be a happier man. But he loves his children and it’s a conflict,” he said. “He can’t deal with the pain of it. The fact that he loves his children and they don’t honor him. All they want is entitlement, avarice. That’s all they represent.”
How Logan’s offspring will unpack that as they grieve (also for Connor, who is now a newlywed) is sure to be explored once the shock wears off in episodes to come. When speaking to THR heading into the season, Matthew Macfadyen, whose Tom was present during Logan’s death and delivered the news to the kids, offered this insight when speaking about the breakdown of Tom and Shiv’s marriage: “The siblings lack real confidence because they don’t have the assurance of love that comes from their parents. It’s hinted that Logan had a very traumatic upbringing and he’s clearly unable to express love for his children in a healthy way, so you have three siblings that can’t settle or feel good.”
The final season of Succession releases Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO and HBO Max. Read THR‘s critic’s notebook on the episode.
