In the years since his fame skyrocketed thanks to his Emmy-winning performance on Succession, Jeremy Strong has developed a reputation that doesn’t a
In the years since his fame skyrocketed thanks to his Emmy-winning performance on Succession, Jeremy Strong has developed a reputation that doesn’t always sit right with him. He never hides his earnest passion for acting, nor his exhaustive commitment to getting inside his characters. Just last year, Strong told me how tough he worked to play Roy Cohn in the Donald Trump origin story The Apprentice: “It was a disturbing, upsetting place to be—that heart of darkness.”
That said, Strong also thinks observers often draw the wrong conclusions about him. “I’m known as this pretentious, unfunny person—that’s the sense I get from some people, or from the media,” he tells Vanity Fair. “But a lot of people who know me know I’m not a very particularly intense person.”
Enter “The Bean Method,” a fresh Super Bowl spot for Dunkin’ Donuts that Strong shot opposite Oscar winners Ben and Casey Affleck. Strong plays a heightened version of himself, an actor impossibly committed to, yes, making a Dunkin’ commercial. The ad leads to the Affleck brothers finding Strong in his dressing room, soaking in a bath of coffee grinds before coming up for air, Apocalypse Now! style. “I’m just trying to find the character,” Strong says in the final spot, which aired Sunday evening. “I’m all in for Dunkin’.” In the full short-film version, which runs nearly seven minutes long (you can watch it below), we see what all of that exhaustive preparation leads to—both for Strong the actor and Strong the character.
In his first interview about the commercial, Strong describes how he came up with the idea for it after an initial pitch from Ben Affleck (who also directed) that left him feeling conflicted. From there, Strong committed to the bit with a level of research, detail, and ferocity that could only be expected of, well, Jeremy Strong. And yes, it’s especially amusing for him to do this on the heels of his first-ever Oscar nomination, for his powerful work in The Apprentice—a film that has taken on fresh resonance in the unsettling first weeks of the Trump presidency. But as Strong explains, there’s a richer link between his two most recent screen roles than you might expect.
Vanity Fair: How did this happen, Jeremy?
Jeremy Strong: [Laughs] “How did this happen?” is a great question. It’s not something I ever imagined myself doing. It was so uncharacteristic that it felt like a different kind of risk.
I’d been approached a year ago to do something else for the Super Bowl with my siblings from Succession, for a brand that I didn’t really have a connection to. That categorically was a no for me. I’ve been interested in achieving escape velocity from Succession, which was an incredible life experience, but not something I wish to stay connected to forever. Then I got a call saying that Ben Affleck was doing this Dunkin’ commercial, and would I consider doing it? I read it and it had me in a tracksuit coming out at the very end and doing a rap—like Kendall’s rap—to the other coffee brands. I said, “I can’t do that.”
So this premise was your idea?
For some reason, I had this image of Marty Sheen coming out of the mud in Apocalypse Now! I started to just formulate some ideas. I texted Ben saying, “Hey, I can’t do a rap, but you want to hop on a call and maybe can I pitch you some things?” We got on the phone and I said, “What if we just take the given circumstances as they are: that I’m meant to be doing your commercial, and I’m this actor who takes what he does seriously, and I’m not getting to show up on the set when I’m meant to come out and do the rap?”
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