It’s hot out the day I meet Jeremy Strong near his home in Brooklyn to chat about his return to the stage. “Unsettling” is how the 45-year-old Succession star describes the late October weather as we stroll along a waterfront dotted with sunbathers stretched out amid fallen autumn leaves. “Every year, it’s another ‘hottest year on record.’ How did we get here?” he muses. “That question—it’s one reason I had to do this play.”
The play Strong is referring to is An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen. In a new adaption by playwright Amy Herzog opening on Broadway March 18, Strong takes on the role of Dr. Thomas Stockmann, a man who discovers an inconvenient environmental truth and is pilloried by his community for revealing it. “It’s easier for them not to believe,” explains Strong of the villagers’ reaction to Stockmann’s scientific data. “Believing would be too disruptive—politically, economically. You don’t have to stretch to see the analogy between what Ibsen wrote in 1881 and what’s happened vis-à-vis climate change.”
Strong hadn’t been planning to embark on a grueling 16-week Broadway run. After the final season of Succession wrapped last year, he was ready for a break—which he got, courtesy of the SAG-AFTRA strike that allowed him to spend a mellow summer at his house in the Danish countryside with his wife, Emma, and their three young daughters. But the issues raised by An Enemy of the People felt too urgent to pass up when his old friend theater director Sam Gold urged him to read the play. “I texted Sam as soon as I finished it,” recalls Strong. “I was like, Yeah, we’re doing this.”
An Enemy of the People is an angry play. Ibsen wrote it in a fury of hurt and bewilderment, Strong explains, after his 1881 play Ghosts, about a woman whose son is dying of syphilis, was met with a scathing response from virtually every quarter of Norwegian society. Ibsen assumed, Strong says, that he’d be greeted as a hero for taking on such verboten themes as incest, euthanasia, and venereal disease; instead, his play was derided as “filth.” In some countries, the work was banned. “It was a real lesson in what happens when you rock the boat,” Strong notes.
Ibsen channeled his post-Ghosts sense of martyrdom into the hero of his next play. Stockmann is a whistleblower taking on his small town’s sclerotic power structure, represented by his brother, Peter, who is also the mayor. The village’s economy is reliant on its “healing waters,” and large investments have just been made in its municipal baths, the better to draw tourists. Stockmann discovers that the waters are poisoned—infected by runoff from the tanneries upriver. At first, the doctor has the press and the working-class public on his side, but when the costs of his proposed fixes become clear, they turn on him. Cue pitchforks.
You can see why the story put Strong in mind of the admirable scientists who began warning of the catastrophic effects of carbon emissions decades ago. On the other hand, I suggest to Strong, Stockmann cuts a somewhat less noble figure. “Stockmann is heroic, in certain ways, but he’s also an egotist,” agrees Strong. “He’s unequivocal in his certainty that he’s right, that no one else has a valid argument. And he gets more and more fixed in this identity as the lone man versus the mob as the play goes on.” Strong—and Gold and Herzog—are interested in exploring these nuances. “What feels so resonant about the play today, in these strange times,” Strong says, “is that it’s about speaking truth to power—but it’s also about what happens when people take sides, and communication breaks down.”
As it happens, Gold wasn’t pitching a project to Strong when he brought the play to his attention. Gold had no intention of staging An Enemy of the People; he’d simply come across the text in the small library of Ibsen-alia amassed by Herzog, his wife, in preparation for her 2023 Broadway revival of A Doll’s House, starring Jessica Chastain. “It was sort of a, ‘Hey, check this out,’ ” says Gold. “I saw a lot of Jeremy in the character of Stockmann, a man who’s willing to sacrifice for the sake of his convictions. That same commitment to truth is present in all of Jeremy’s work.”
Call it crossed wires, or call it kismet. Either way, those messages zapping back and forth between friends planted a seed—and in terrifically short order, the current production was mustered. It helped that Herzog, fresh off A Doll’s House, already knew how to shake the dust off an Ibsen classic and that the principal creative trio share deep bonds: Herzog and Strong met as undergraduates at Yale; Strong and Gold began collaborating early in their theater careers, teaming up for a 2010 off-Broadway production of the 18th-century play The Coward; Gold and Herzog are, as previously noted, married. (Remarkably, An Enemy of the People marks the spouses’ first production together.)
“I’ve never had the stars align this way,” comments Gold. “Like, right after Jeremy said he wanted to do it, I called Circle in the Square, and the theater was available for the exact dates he had free.” Circle in the Square presents work in the round, and that 360-degree view is vital, Gold explains, for a play about competing perspectives. There’s the truth of fact, Stockmann’s truth, but there are other truths too. The town’s economy would be hard hit by the baths’ closure. Jobs will be lost. And what about the polluting tanneries? Must they be shut down? Forever?
Herzog gives such complexities airtime. It was important to her, for example, that the character of Peter, the mayor, not come across as a straw man or a totally cynical operator. Rather, he’s the political exponent of the collective will to unknow, when knowing threatens to unravel the fabric of society. “His arguments have to carry weight,” Herzog explains. “He has to believe in the thing he’s protecting.”
“If you think back to when Ibsen was writing, this science was new; it was like, What’s a microbe?” explains Sopranos and White Lotus star Michael Imperioli, who plays the role of Peter. “He’s asking, ‘You want me to stake the future of this town on some invisible bugs?’ In that light, his position is pretty reasonable.”
“It’s tricky, though,” says Strong. “Because at the end of the day, Stockmann is right. It’s not that he wants to bring this information forward; he feels like he has to.” But how do you do that, Strong goes on to ask, at a moment like our own, when the whole concept of “truth” is up for grabs? Gold, Herzog, and Strong all bring up Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World, in which the author launches herself into the orbit of anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers, and election conspiracy theorists. “History keeps repeating itself,” says Gold. “This dynamic Ibsen lays out, it recurs again and again. These ways we get polarized. And all the reasons people will look at someone armed with a set of cold, hard facts, and say, ‘Well, that’s what you believe. I believe something else.’ ”
There’s a TikTok of Strong that’s been making the rounds. You’ve probably seen it: A hotel in Milan, 4 a.m., and he and Jessica Chastain are dancing around in sunglasses to the Madonna track “Hung Up.” It’s very silly. And Chastain and Strong know it—they’re reveling in acting like goofballs, these two thespians we’re accustomed to seeing in “serious” mode. Like costarring in James Gray’s melancholy film Armageddon Time. Or doing Ibsen adaptations by Amy Herzog. “I was in London a while ago and these schoolkids started yelling at me—TikTok, TikTok! ” Strong recalls. “I had no idea what they were talking about—I don’t do social media, I had no idea I’d gone viral.” He laughs. Not a belly laugh, more like a chuckle of bemusement. “What a weird world. But—hey, new fan base!” Then he turns to me, pulling down the brim of his baseball cap a little sheepishly—or, perhaps, shielding himself from onlookers’ glances of recognition as we stroll the busy riverfront promenade—and smiles.
Smiling, you see the child in Jeremy Strong. His default expression—so familiar to fans of Succession—is a kind of hangdog look. The writers of that series seem to have shaped the character of Kendall Roy around Strong’s capacity to project world-weariness. He invented something new in that role: a man forever breaking his own heart. Strong comes across as less haunted than his Succession princeling, and much, much smarter—a thinker. Talking to him, you get the sense that he’s a man continually figuring things out and for whom every answer only prompts more questions. This makes him a lively conversationalist—a keen, sympathetic listener, quick to probe for deeper meanings, face hardening into furrowed intensity as he works through an idea. But then, when Strong smiles, you see the boy. “Playful,” as Herzog describes him. “Earnest,” as Gold does. It’s easy to imagine him bringing out that childish aspect of Dr. Thomas Stockmann—and his woundedness when people don’t live up to his expectations.
It’s harder—though not impossible—to imagine Strong in the role he shot before starting rehearsals for An Enemy of the People. In The Apprentice, he’ll play Roy Cohn, mid-century legal titan, master manipulator, and mentor to Donald Trump (played by Sebastian Stan). The film, which is still in production at press time, directed by Ali Abbasi (Holy Spider), centers on Trump’s rise to notoriety in New York City in the 1970s and 1980s—a rise orchestrated, in part, by Cohn. “Trump’s shadow, his long dark shadow, is itself a shadow of Cohn,” says Strong. “It’s like he gave him the playbook: Here’s how you shape the world in your image. You can say whatever you want, as long as you say it forcefully enough. Eventually, people will fall in line behind you.”
Roy Cohn was a man who believed in lies—as in, he believed you could, by sheer insistence, make them true. “I guess I’m fascinated by denialism,” Strong replies when I point out that the characters he inhabits in The Apprentice and An Enemy of the People seem to be in dialogue. “Stockmann and Cohn, they’re like inverses of each other—the guy who gets punished for telling the truth, and the guy who gets away with everything.” Until he doesn’t: As Strong points out, truth eventually caught up with Roy Cohn. He was disbarred, stripped of his clout—“the currency that mattered most to him”—and died in the closet, from a disease, AIDS, that right up to the end of his life he pretended he didn’t have. You can only deny facts for so long.
I ask Strong whether it’s taxing to play a character like Roy Cohn. Strong is well-known for his immersion, Method-style, in his roles; he lives inside the skin of his parts, offstage and between takes. For Kendall Roy, that meant, in effect, becoming clueless and entitled; playing yippie activist Jerry Rubin in the Aaron Sorkin film The Trial of the Chicago 7, he asked the crew to spray him with real tear gas, so he’d know how it felt. As Gold says, Strong is committed. In taking on Cohn, does he worry about the character’s toxicity seeping into him?
“I really don’t see it that way. Your task as an actor is to try to embody someone’s struggle and their needs; you have to understand the why and how of their actions,” Strong responds. “You can’t go into the process thinking, Wow, this guy’s deplorable, end of story.” With Stockmann, too, Strong is quick to point out the character’s layers, beyond his mulishness. He’s warm, he loves his family and is generous to his friends. He sees himself as a caretaker, and it’s that identity that fuels his desperate desire to fix what ails his community. Ultimately, he’s a tragic figure. But the play isn’t without hope.
“Anytime you’re adapting an old work, you have to make choices about what to leave alone and what to update,” says Gold. “If you update too much, you lose the resonance—that sense of, yeah, we’ve been here before. But you can also look for opportunities to apply a modern-day perspective.”
“For me, that opportunity is in Stockmann’s daughter, Petra,” Herzog adds, referring to the one character in the play who emerges unsullied and underanged. “Frankly, she’s a little underdeveloped in the original, but Ibsen has set up this fascinating possibility, this professional young woman, a schoolteacher, who’s determined to think for herself. I wanted to draw her out.” Played on Broadway by Victoria Pedretti, Herzog’s Petra provides the play’s horizon: The most admirable character onstage is the one teaching the community’s young people. Teaching them, you suspect, to do better. Present-day reality may be a mess, but there is, thank heavens, a future.
“I’ve got three kids, five and under, so I think about the climate issue a lot,” says Strong, as we make our way back toward his home, where he’ll be spending the rest of the afternoon playing the part of dad. The house is new, located on a leafy Brooklyn block, and as the SAG-AFTRA strike dragged on, Strong had enjoyed getting to know the neighborhood. He’s become an expert in the nearby playgrounds. Now, though, he’s ready to work. “I need a job, I need a focal point in my life, I need a challenge,” he tells me. “I like to feel like I’m walking the plank when I work. Going back to the theater after all this time, it feels very dangerous.” Strong’s last theater outing, The Great God Pan, also by Herzog, was staged in 2013. In that play, he starred as a man who comes to suspect he was a victim of childhood sexual abuse; here, too, Herzog and Strong were probing into the nature of knowing, of truth. It’s a rich, combustible theme.
“I think of Stockmann as a guy who’s somehow wound up with a live grenade in his hands,” says Strong. “One way or another, it’s going to blow up. So what do you do?”
Gold wears Billy Reid and A.P.C. Herzog in Proenza Schouler. Strong wears Loro Piana.
