The 81-year-old actor, best known for his roles in The Green Mile, Babe and LA Confidential, as well as the TV series Six Feet Under and ER, plays Ewan Roy, the older brother of Brian Cox’s media mogul Logan Roy. Ewan is largely estranged from his fractured family on political grounds, though he retains a fortune worth $250m (£180m).

But Cromwell said that, over an hour-long conversation with Succession creator Jesse Armstrong before signing on to do the show, he insisted that Ewan’s objection be made a moral one. Ewan is a veteran of the Vietnam war; Cromwell’s political activism began when he was arrested at anti-war demonstrations in Washington DC in May 1971.

“Jesse’s position was all these people are culpable, they are all the same … I said, ‘You can’t take the guy who’s fought in Vietnam, and seen what he has seen, and think that he is going to be the same sort of asshole that the rest of his family is’. Yes, of course, he’s privileged, and everybody is flawed – but he will have seen the truth.

As an actor and an activist, Cromwell has long been a vocal critic of “the cancer” of capitalism. He said he hoped that the immense popularity of Succession did not normalise exorbitant wealth or abuses of power and privilege, drawing a comparison with Donald Trump’s move from reality TV to the White House.

“There’s no morality, they’re just in it for themselves, and I hope that the programme does not normalise that behaviour like it normalised it when Trump was on The Apprentice and people looked at it and said: ‘He’s got power, he makes decisions and he follows through. That’s the kind of guy I want [as president].’”

Cromwell said that his activism had been to the detriment of his prospects in Hollywood. “Of course I’m getting older, but I also think that [film-makers] understand that by employing me, they are giving me the bully pulpit to address issues.”

Even his insistence that his character on Succession be positioned in opposition to the Roys had limited his scope within the show. “Now I think they don’t really know what to do with me, because I always have to be up against them,” Cromwell said. “I’m on the other side – but I wanted to be there. I didn’t want to be a schmuck.”

“He points out that Logan may be the single human being most responsible for destroying life on this planet, and he’s not wrong … it’s worthwhile to hear every so often that they’re really rotten people, who are tearing the planet apart for no real reason beyond their own self-regard.”

“The writing is wonderful, the acting and direction superb – and we are all aware that we live in a society where there is such wealth inequality that we would sort of like to know: ‘Who are these people?’ I think what Jesse is saying is: ‘Take a good look.’

“You want to know who? When they testify in front of Congress, or they show up at your favourite charity, or they’ve got a wing of a hospital named after them, or they’ve gone off in their spacecraft … now we know that there’s another side to that, the side that makes that kind of wealth possible – and it is not done honestly. It is a criminal enterprise.”

Source: The Guardian

Powered by NewsAPI.org