Succession's James Cromwell 'Got Back' at Logan With That Eulogy

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for Season 4, Episode 9 of Succession, "Church and State." Read at your own risk!]

As Logan Roy (Brian Cox) was laid to rest in Succession's penultimate episode, he was remembered by a trio of emotionally loaded eulogies delivered in place of the effusive, flowery one Roman (Kieran Culkin) failed to give. The first, and the most damning, came from Ewan (James Cromwell), one of the only characters in the series fortitudinous enough to criticize Logan to his face while he was alive. The speech is arresting for all of its many layers: an evisceration of and a mournful tribute to his brother, as much of a look back at the tragedies that colored their childhoods as it is a denouncement of the dark legacy Logan leaves behind. "He fed a certain kind of meagerness in men," Ewan says. "Perhaps he had to, because he had a meagerness about him. And maybe I do about me, too."

Ewan's eulogy knocks the wind out of Roman, and it shapes the softer speeches Kendall (Jeremy Strong) and Shiv (Sarah Snook) deliver in response. And yet these children who saw Logan as a god can't unhear the things Ewan, the person who saw him for what he was, said. It's fitting that in a series rooted in the complicated hierarchies within a family, Logan's brother would be the one to get the final word.

For Cromwell, Ewan's eulogy was a full-circle moment for his character. He spoke to TV Guide about shooting the funeral in one continuous take, and he explained why it was important for Ewan to speak first.

I'm excited to be talking about this episode with you. It was harrowing to watch.
James Cromwell: It's a good episode. When you start off these series and they have a sense of the arc, where the arc is going — which really necessitated my having a part throughout the entire series, even though small — [it was set up] so that when it came for somebody to deliver from the inside an evaluation of who these people are, I was there. With most of my dignity intact.

I would say all of it is left intact. I was thinking back to Season 1 when they brought Ewan to Thanksgiving and he said, "You humiliated me." This was not that at all.
Cromwell: No, no. I think I got him back.

I read an interview with Kieran Culkin where he said that you shot the funeral in one take the first time.
Cromwell: Yeah, because there's no way, if you break it up into little scenes — not only is each little scene a setup, which takes days and days, which is why features go on for as long as they do, you also lose the spontaneity of whatever happens. You got five cameras who know where they're supposed to be, and they're in communication with the director sitting in video village, but it still allows him to say, "Cut to Shiv," because Shiv is doing something at that moment. So there are things you can think of, and you get this pace. Because we know what the lines are showing, but we have no idea where we are when we say them. So there's a little tension, which is very helpful.

With that tension added in, how did you approach Ewan's eulogy?
Cromwell: The first thing I noticed was when the script was given out, and I was doing another scene or something, everybody came to me and said, "Oh, God, we can't wait to see what you do with that!" And I'm like, "What? What do you mean, what I do?" It was five pages, because they made some cuts in the final edit of the speech that I did. It was either five or seven pages. Basically, I was under some pressure, because I'd been having, for the last year, problems with remembering lines. I know the scene perfectly well, I can do it, but the minute I leave it and walk away, it disappears. I thought I was losing my mind and that I would probably be fired. I said to [director] Mark [Mylod], "I can't guarantee anything. I don't know what's going to come out of my mouth." But my assistant, Joanna Shapiro, bless her heart, she and I were discussing it. I said, "What should I do? Should I call him and say I can't do it?" She said, "Oh, I think you have long COVID." An entire year where I'd had, even in small scenes in films, the same problem.

I had the speech. I wrote it out in my printing, like I had worked on it. [Mylod] said, "Hold it in your hands, and we'll cut away. Don't worry about it." But once I started, the thing that really was wonderful was as I stepped up to the podium, I put my cane down and I turned to them and I took out my glasses and I said, "Good morning." Somebody had told them — or maybe not, maybe they did it spontaneously — the entire congregation went, "Good morning." There was a connection now between the two of us, and they were on my side. So it started to come out of my mouth and it just came out. I did the whole damn thing, I didn't miss a line. Mark came up to me and said, "No, that's great. Listen, could you do another one?" I said, "Yes. Sure, I guess. I have no idea who's doing it." But I did the second one and that was also fine. Then he told me, "You don't have to do it anymore because we're going to now do coverage, but if you just put in the cue line." I think I messed up every cue line for the whole day. I could not get a word out properly. Evidently something had popped and I was back in long COVID. So my preparation was mostly terror.

You know, it's a long story. But when I came to the show in the first place, I had a quibble I discussed with Jesse [Armstrong] for about, oh, I don't know, an hour or two in my dressing room, because I believed that this guy, no matter that he was a Roy, had been to two tours in Vietnam. In my head, because I got out of going to Vietnam, I did not go to Canada, I just continued on with my career and I always felt badly about that — this guy took it upon himself to go, and he was a grunt in Vietnam. So I said to [Armstrong], "I cannot side with these people because they don't take responsibility for the horror that they have created around the world, which is a manifestation of who they are, what they care about, which are profits, the aggrandizement of power, and becoming a kingmaker." And I know in his head, he saw my character as the same. Only $100 million, and only a 10,000 acre ranch. I know in his head that he said, "He'll never know, but I'll show him in so many different ways." So when I got to the end, I realized, "Oh, Jesus. Of course."

It is principled, but it is also envy. It is also childhood issues that Ewan and Logan never dealt with. I understood for the first time, because my dear friend was bombed out in the Blitz in London. His house was bombed three times, three times that kid came home from school and saw his house flattened and didn't know whether his mother and father had been in the house, or who was in the house, or whatever. And I realized that they had the trauma of the Blitz. They had the trauma of being abandoned at sea, with U-boats everywhere and no engines. They could have been just taken out on a whim. Getting into the new world, having to deal with this very eccentric aunt and uncle. My young brother taken away from me, sent to a boarding school, but I don't get to go to a boarding school. It's not about anything but trying to get him away from me because I'm having issues. [Ewan] was dissecting squirrels. He was morbidly obsessed with the disassembly, the deamination of real creatures. Now I see that he had all this, and he was passed over. He has such a mammoth amount of — sort of like me — a mammoth amount of crap to deal with, and is dealing with it by sharing his wealth. Giving it to Greenpeace, doing whatever he can to assuage the guilt that he feels. His anger and his guilt.

I want to talk a bit about the specifics of Ewan's eulogy. It seems to be the catalyst for Roman's inability to deliver his own eulogy, and then his eventual breakdown. Why do you think it was important to Ewan that he be the first to speak on Logan?
Cromwell: Once it got started, they would never have let him go up. He took advantage of that moment when the coffin has been wheeled down. They're all in the wrong place. Shiv is too far away to block me, Greg is too ineffectual to know what to do spontaneously. "What do you want me to do? Take his feet out? Knock the old guy down?" So I think he planned it. I think he thought, "There shouldn't be a word of mendacity uttered in this service until I get a chance to say, 'Yes, he went through all these things as a child. That's the sob story. However, what he did in life was a catastrophe.'" They would never have let me get up there and say that. And it can't be a goody two shoes from the outside. It has to be inside the family. It has to be somebody with some sort of moral and ethical core speaking what he believes in the face of just the disaster of [Logan] Roy and the paper and the ideology and what's happened to journalism.

He really rips Logan apart. But there is that moment of genuine sadness at the end, where he seems to reckon with the person Logan became. I'm interested in him saying "I try" in particular. What is Ewan trying to be and what did Logan stop trying to be?
Cromwell: The Panthers used to say, "You're either part of the solution or you're part of the problem." That would include the votes that he gave to Logan of confidence when he had no confidence. He knows his fortune is invested in this corporation, and if he destroys the corporation, he destroys that. As tenuous as it seems, because he's not a man of excesses — I mean, he doesn't drive around in a Rolls-Royce or a Ferrari or whatever the hell it is, but he's afraid that if he gives it all away, he will have no voice at all. He has a voice because he sits on the board. He has a voice because he's the CEO's brother. He has a voice because he has something to say. In other words, Logan did a lot to put us in the situation where we are now as a divided nation. At an international level, world level of confusion, misstatement, outright lying, propaganda, not telling the truth, manipulating the system, to serve them and their aggrandizement. He can give all his money to Greenpeace, but it doesn't seem enough. Ewan wants to do this. But you see how incapable he is of the relationship that would make it possible to forgive himself, because what he does to Greg is atrocious. He has no empathy for the position that this young man has put in, and he doesn't offer an alternative, because I never had to have an alternative because I had a trust fund. But Greg is there trying, it's his one chance. Under those circumstances, unless you have been through something like Vietnam, people tend to make those choices. You make the choice between, "Yes, OK, I'm gonna have to eat a lot of crow, but I'm gonna have money. I'm gonna be OK. I'll be unassailable." Of course, it's not true.

There's a great silent shot of you looking across the aisle at Kendall and Roman with Logan's casket between them when Shiv starts to give her speech. You mentioned his lack of empathy for Greg, and I'm curious about what Ewan feels for Logan's kids, if anything, after they deliver these eulogies that are in response to his own.
Cromwell: That's the part that's the hardest to communicate. Ewan is run by an out of control, in pain, traumatized child. Of course, he doesn't look like that. He looks like a man with some gravitas and dignity. But there's a torment inside of him. And I know that, in dealing with the issues that we're dealing [with] today, you cannot condemn the person, the human being, with the things that they say and do. Yes, they are responsible, but you must remember, as human beings, we have to have compassion. Those people got stuck in a system, not of their making, but they were encouraged to make it even worse. They're not making anything better. They're only making it worse, and they're stuck, and they know they're stuck, and they suffer like any human being these doubts and the pain and not knowing if anybody cares for them a whit, except for their money. I think at the end when he looks at the brothers — as I say at the beginning, it's not for me. [Logan] will be judged by history, who doesn't owe the human being anything. What did that character do in history, and did it protect and serve the people or did it protect and aggrandize the few? So I think he was looking over there and saying, "The pain for all of them is quite palpable." That's true, regardless of who they are, in the rest of their lives.

Succession Season 4 airs Sundays at 9/8c on HBO.

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