Warning - This story contains spoilers for the last episode of the final season of Succession. This article deals with mental health problems, including attempted suicide.
Actor Jeremy Strong says there was nearly an alternate ending shot for the series finale of Succession.
In the final episode, having lost everything, Strong's character Kendall Roy closes out the show by walking down to the river in Battery Park in New York. Fans were expecting him to walk into the river, but instead the series closed on him sitting on a bench.
Strong has revealed to Vanity Fair he had felt an urge to go off-script and walk into the river while filming.
Speaking exclusively in his first television interview after the finale aired, Strong told CNN's Anderson Cooper he ultimately held back because he respected Armstrong's writing for the show, though he admitted what had happened to Kendall Roy was an "extinction-level event."
"Your instincts for the thing become a part of you and are very alive," he said when asked about his apparent method acting for the role.
"Your job is to give the writing a heart, nerve, sinew, weight and density and all of that stuff.
If you're lucky something kind of ineffable happens and you enter into it," he told Cooper.
"The character has just been put through so much, has been through so much hell from the Chappaquiddick incident. In a way, to me the most heartbreaking thing is the revelation in this final episode of this moment when he was nine years old at the candy kitchen where his father says: 'One day this will all be yours' and the sort of curse of that, the sentence of that."
"So I felt that this is an extinction level event - he doesn't come back from this," he said before adding: "It's not for me to say how the show should end, it's for Jesse Armstrong."
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