Jeremy Strong & Anne Hathaway Talk Getting Deep Into Character In New ‘Actors On Actors’ Interview

In the latest episode of Variety‘s “Actors on Actors” interview series, “Succession” star Jeremy Strong and “WeCrashed” star Anne Hathaway talk to each other about their acting process.

At one point, Strong brings up a particular moment from “WeCrashed”, when Hathaway plots her eyes while still conveying “pathos and soul.”

“That specific moment that you’re talking about, it’s got a history,” Hathaway tells him. “My very first job was on a TV show called ‘Get Real’. It was my senior year of high school. I was away from home. I was shooting in Los Angeles. I was 16. There were just a lot of feelings that I had that I didn’t really understand. I would have to go to set and 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 fold it in half and I would cry into the tissue.”

She continued, “After doing this a certain number of times, I 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 everybody always looked at me like I had three heads when I would suggest it. She has to cry without crying off her makeup, which is something that I think a lot of women understand. I just had a feeling that it would look really strong on camera to watch the tears just saturate the tissue but not fall.”

Hathaway also brings up Strong’s own process of acting, in which he tries to stay deep in character even when the cameras were rolling, including on the film “Serenity”, which they were shooting together when he found out he got cast on “Succession”.

“You are known for your immersive process, and I remember seeing you while we were on the beautiful island of Mauritius, walking around so deep in character,” she says. “And I remember one time sidling up to you and saying, ‘Listen, I completely respect what you’re doing, but I also want to be a human. So I’m going to just be wide open, if you ever want to talk.’ And you just nodded, because you were so deep in your character. A few weeks later, I remember you just appearing next to me, and you said, ‘I think I need to come up for air.’ And you came over for dinner and it was so fun. We talked about life. You remember what we drank that night?”

“We drank Penny Blue rum,” Strong recalls.

“A lot of it,” Hathaway laughs. “And you told me about ‘Succession’ and it sounded great.”

Talking about how he prepared to play Kendall Roy in “Succession”, Strong says, “I think each time, you’re starting from nothing. Right? It tells you how to work on it and you follow the line of your intuition. With Kendall, there’s nowhere to hide. It feels like it’s calling upon something else, which is a bone-marrow honesty, for lack of a better word. It should always ideally be honest in that way, but without any embroidery and without any spin. Of course, I read everything possible to read on the media-industrial complex. So there’s a lot of well water to draw from, but nothing for character. Very little for character.”

He adds later, “One of the things I love about being an actor is your only job is to have compassionate curiosity and try and empathically understand what this person’s struggle is. And you can’t be outside of a character or above, certainly, a character or enter into it with any judgment.”

“It’s no fun for the audience to watch someone that’s been prejudged,” Hathaway agrees. “That story can be told in a minute.”