Jeremy Strong

Jeremy Strong (born 1979 (age 43)) is an American actor.

His accolades include a Primetime Emmy Award and a Golden Globe Award.

In 2022, he was featured on Time list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Strong was interested in acting from a very young age, when he became involved with a children's theater group and started performing in musicals.

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.

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.

Strong had small roles in plays for most of the 2000s.

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.

His first off-Broadway performance was in John Patrick Shanley's Defiance in 2006, with his Broadway debut coming two years later, as Richard Rich, 1st Baron Rich in a revival of A Man for All Seasons.

Strong made his film debut in Humboldt County (2008) starring as medical student Peter Hadley.

On television, he had recurring roles in The Good Wife (2011–13) and Masters of Sex (2016).

He continued his work in film by portraying 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 played supporting parts in acclaimed films such as Zero Dark Thirty (2012), The Big Short (2015), Molly's Game (2017), and Armageddon Time (2022).

Strong had his breakthrough in 2018 with the role of media conglomerate heir, Kendall Roy, in the HBO drama series Succession (2018–2023), for which he won a Primetime Emmy Award in 2020 and a Golden Globe Award in 2022.

He returned to Broadway in the revival of the Henrik Ibsen play An Enemy of the People (2024).

Strong was born 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.