SPOILER ALERT! This post contains spoilers for the series finale of HBO’s Succession.
Jeremy Strong revealed in the official Succession podcast last night that, yes, he actually tasted that disgusting smoothie concocted by Sarah Snook’s Shiv in Sunday night’s finale.
The finale included a scene of sibling bonding in which Shiv, Strong’s Kendall and Kieran Culkin’s Roman giddily celebrated their agreement to support Kendall’s claim to the Waystar Royco throne in the kitchen of their mother’s Babados home. During the late-night gathering, Shiv – apparently re-enacting a childhood game called “Fit For A King” – mixed some various ingredients into a foul-looking smoothie for King Kendall to drink.
In the episode, Kendall sips the concoction and then is rewarded by his siblings with the smoothie dumped on his head.
“We did it only a few times and then I went outside and retched and jumped in the ocean, and washed it off my hair,” Strong says in the podcast. “Yeah, I did drink it, yeah.”
The ingredients: Milk, bread crusts, Tabasco sauce, raw eggs, pickle juice, cocoa powder and Shiv’s spit.
“I wouldn’t know how not to drink it,” says the ever-committed Strong. “He wants it that badly, that he’s going to drink whatever that is. But it was disgusting.”
Strong also revealed one of the rejected takes filmed for the instant-classic final scene. In the episode as aired, the dejected Kendall, having lost his bid to succeed dad Logan in the top spot, wanders from Wall Street to Battery Park and, with the Statue of Liberty all but beckoning, looks out tearfully to New York harbor, likely contemplating his end.
In the take not used, Strong took the scene one step further, actually climbing onto the barrier only to be pulled back by bodyguard Colin (Scott Nicholson).
“I looked at these waves and it was so windy that day and so cold and there was some piece of metal clanging and it was this terrible sound and I sort of couldn’t bear it. I stood up and walked slowly to the barrier that was set up there and climbed over it,” Strong says. “I didn’t really know what I planned to do, and the actor playing Colin saw me and ran and stopped me from doing it.”
“I’m sure Jesse’s choice is better,” he says, “and in a way I think you see the intentionality in the character.”
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