Jeremy Strong Popular Books

Jeremy Strong Biography & Facts

Jeremy Strong (born December 25, 1978) is an American actor. His accolades include a Primetime Emmy Award and a Golden Globe Award, which he won for his breakout role of Kendall Roy in the HBO drama series Succession (2018–2023). In 2022, he was featured on Time's list of the 100 most influential people in the world. A graduate of Yale University, he continued his acting studies at both the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London and the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago. His first off-Broadway performance was in John Patrick Shanley's Defiance in 2006, with his Broadway debut being in the role of Richard Rich, 1st Baron Rich in the 2008 revival of A Man for All Seasons. In 2024, he returned to Broadway in the revival of the Henrik Ibsen play An Enemy of the People earning a nomination for the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play. In film, Strong has portrayed real life figures such as John George Nicolay in Lincoln (2012), Lee Harvey Oswald in Parkland (2013), James Reeb in Selma (2014), and Jerry Rubin in The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020). He has also played other supporting parts in films such as Zero Dark Thirty (2012), The Big Short (2015), Molly's Game (2017), and Armageddon Time (2022). Early life and education Strong was born on Christmas Day 1978 in Boston, Massachusetts to Maureen and David Strong. His father's family is Jewish, and his grandfather worked as a plumber in Queens. His mother worked as a hospice nurse, and his father worked in juvenile jails. He lived in a "rough neighborhood" in the Jamaica Plain area of Boston, a place he often regarded as "somewhere I just wanted to get out of". His family was working class. Since his parents could not afford to go on vacations outside the Boston area, they put a canoe on cinder blocks in the family's backyard; Strong and his brothers would often sit in it and pretend to take trips. His parents had a tumultuous relationship throughout his childhood and eventually divorced. When Strong was 10, his parents moved the family to the suburb of Sudbury, Massachusetts, for better schools. Strong recalled Sudbury as "a kind of country-club town where we didn't belong to the country club". His interest in acting began there, as he became involved with a children's theater group and performing in musicals. Among his costars in the children's theater group was Chris Evans' older sister; Evans remembers being impressed by Strong's performances. Later, Evans and Strong acted with each other in a high school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Strong particularly idolized actors Daniel Day-Lewis, Al Pacino, and Dustin Hoffman—all famous for the lengths they went to preparing for roles—putting posters of their films on his bedroom wall and avidly following news of their careers as well as reading every interview they gave. When the 1996 film version of Arthur Miller's The Crucible was filmed near Boston, starring Day-Lewis, Strong got a job on the film's greenery crew—at one point holding up a branch outside a window during the filming of a scene. Strong worked on the sound crew for Amistad, holding a boom mike over Anthony Hopkins as he made a speech, and he helped to edit Pacino's directorial debut Looking for Richard. After high school, Strong applied to colleges with a letter of recommendation from DreamWorks, which had made Amistad. He was accepted at Yale University and granted a scholarship, intending to study drama. On his first day in class, he found the professor's discussions of Konstantin Stanislavski and accompanying blackboard illustrations so alienating that he decided immediately to change his major to English. Strong continued to act and starred in a number of plays at Yale, all of them produced through the student-run Yale Dramatic Association, known as Dramat. The plays were all ones that Pacino had performed, such as American Buffalo, The Indian Wants the Bronx, and Hughie. Strong arranged an offstage visit from Pacino, which did not go down well with other members of Dramat, because it was budgeted so extravagantly that it nearly bankrupted their organization. Despite claiming not to remember the cost overruns, Strong admitted to being a "rogue agent" in planning the event. During one summer at Yale, Strong received an internship with Hoffman's production company. He also studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago. Career 2001–2008: early years on stage After Yale, Strong moved to New York in 2001. He lived in a small apartment in SoHo, above a restaurant where he waited tables. Strong described it as a state of "gilded squalor" in the words of Francis Bacon, with little but his bed, books, and a closet with expensive clothing. When not working he persuaded local FedEx offices to give him some free envelopes in which he put headshots and recordings of himself performing monologues to distribute to talent agencies. For almost a year, he got no calls for auditions. In an attempt to get representation, Strong contacted his former high school classmate Chris Evans, who had become successful after Not Another Teen Movie. Evans set up a meeting between Strong and his agent at Creative Artists Agency, who chose not to sign Strong. The following summer, Strong got a spot in the summer company at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in western Massachusetts. Strong continued to work offstage in theater and film. In 2003, his position as an assistant at an independent film production company led to his service as Day-Lewis's personal assistant on The Ballad of Jack and Rose, released two years later. On set, he was so devoted to attending to Day-Lewis, who lived apart from his family during the shoot, that crew members nicknamed him Cletus after the character from The Simpsons, for his focus on menial tasks. Strong has stated that at the end of the shoot, Day-Lewis wrote him a note "that contains many of what have become my most deeply held precepts and beliefs about this work". He has not publicized the contents of the note out of respect for Day-Lewis. Strong returned to Williamstown in 2004 when he was cast with Jessica Chastain, Chris Messina, and Michelle Williams in The Cherry Orchard. He became friends with all three actors, and for intermittent periods in the late 2000s, he lived in the basement of Williams' townhouse in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Boerum Hill when he could not afford to live anywhere. During the mid-2000s, he worked as a typist for playwright Wendy Wasserstein. At night, he performed the role of an alcoholic Irishman in a one-man Conor McPherson play in a small bar in Midtown Manhattan. After Wasserstein discovered how much time Strong was spending observing her building's Irish doorman for the part, she considered writing a play based on Strong and the doorman but was unable to proceed with it before her death in 2006. Frank Rich, one of Wasserstein's close friends, said Strong was "her assistant, slash—to some .... Discover the Jeremy Strong popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Jeremy Strong books.