The primary thing that stands out about Jeremy Strong’s performance on Succession this season is the incredible, overwhelming, soul-crushing sense of a kind of despair that stems from fatherly emotional abuse, guilt over manslaughter, and the vicissitudes of capitalism. But secondarily, there’s the fact that Kendall’s still a real dork. Nowhere is that clearer than in this week’s episode, “Dundee,†when he gets up at his father’s big fat Scottish birthday and performs a rap number about Logan while wearing a Logan Roy baseball jersey, underneath a similarly in-character brown suit and bow tie. Like a lot of Kendall’s taste, the whole look skews very “rich white bro who doesn’t understand how to express his own taste but wants to make a big statement.â€
But watching that episode, the suit also stood out for another reason: It bears a striking resemblance to the brown tuxedo Jeremy Strong himself wore to the Emmys last Sunday. The texture is the same, the lapels are cut in the same way, event the bow tie looks identical. The primary difference: At the Emmys, Strong wore a vest underneath his suit, but on Succession, Kendall didn’t — presumably because he was hiding that jersey underneath his jacket instead.
Unless Jeremy Strong is utterly oblivious to the choices some stylist is making, there’s something more than coincidence at play here. Did he steal the suit from the Succession set and decide to wear it again at a fancy event? We can’t blame him, those clothes all look so nice, and at the risk of narcing on him for a wardrobe crime, we reached out to HBO to confirm whether that’s actually the case. (No answer to this important query as of yet.) Or did he simply want to pay homage to his own character? Was Jeremy Strong in character as Kendall at the Emmys? Does that explain his stone-faced poses? Maybe this is all multidimensional chess being played out to some mysterious end, which depends on us becoming obsessed with this one wardrobe choice at the expense of being able to think about any other television series. In any case, consider us Rhea Jarrell in this moment, because the Roy children are playing us.