Nicely, that was surprising. On Sunday, Succession ended 4 seasons’ price of Waystar-heir hypothesis by naming Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen) the corporate’s dark-horse successor—that means that he beat out Kendall (Jeremy Robust), the genetic frontrunner candidate; Roman (Kieran Culkin), the still-mourning Roy sibling; and his personal spouse Shiv (Sarah Snook), the lady who spent years humiliating him in private and non-private.
Macfadyen, the British actor who embodied this shape-shifting middle-class striver for 5 years, was simply as shocked by the end result as viewers possible had been. Halfway by filming the HBO drama’s fourth and last season, Macfadyen requested sequence creator Jesse Armstrong about Tom’s destiny, and discovered that Tom—not any of Logan Roy’s (Brian Cox) blood relations—would wind up American CEO.
“Nicely, that’s attention-grabbing,” Macfadyen remembers considering, he says on a Zoom with VF Monday morning. However Macfadyen shortly put the plot twist out of his head. “You don’t need to get hooked up to a storyline. They could very effectively change.”
Because the actor approached filming the finale, “With Open Eyes,” Macfadyen started accepting his character’s destiny—even when he figured that Tom himself could be blindsided by the flip of occasions. In spite of everything, in seemingly 24 hours, Tom goes from considering he might be fired by Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård) to studying that Matsson needs to anoint him.
“I don’t assume Tom was planning for it in any respect. I don’t assume it’s what he ever rationally thought would occur for him,” says Macfadyen. “He was largely involved about not being fired from ATN. He genuinely thought he was toast with Matsson—and [had to endure] all of those horrible hold outs with him at artwork galleries and dinners.” To be named shock successor on the sequence’ buzzer, Macfadyen says, “I believed it was fairly a neat factor.”
Together with his relationship to Shiv seemingly past restore after the balcony battle on this season’s “Tailgate Celebration” episode, Macfadyen agrees to maintain Matsson’s resolution a secret from Shiv forward of the Waystar board assembly. Requested whether or not he thinks that Tom’s relationship with the cold-hearted Shiv has helped make his character extra ruthless, particularly within the last two seasons, Macfadyen demurs. He thinks that beneath his bumbling exterior, Tom has all the time been this calculating.
“Regardless that he’s kind of annoying and ungainly in all the pieces he does—you understand, he doesn’t have the identical kind of cold-hearted sophistication because the Roys—he’s not with out ambition or a mind,” says the actor. “He’ll put up with a number of shit and humiliations from everyone, together with his spouse—you understand, she requested him to have an open marriage on their marriage ceremony evening—and with a view to keep within the household and close to his father-in-law Logan.”
Whereas some folks write off Tom as being a spineless shape-shifter completely happy to “suck the most important dick within the room,” as Shiv tells Matsson, Macfadyen sees crafty in Tom. He didn’t view Tom’s season-three supply to go to jail for Logan as strictly being “pathetic and obsequious,” though it was undoubtedly shades of that.
“He’s fairly courageous as effectively,” Macfadyen factors out. “I feel his backbone was all the time there, however he makes sensible choices actually on the finish of season three when he betrays Shiv in favor of Logan. He’s hitching his [cart] to the person who he thinks goes to win. There’s one thing unsentimental about it. He hopes for the most effective and hopes that it’ll all be okay, however he’s fairly ruthless about issues.”
“I’m typically requested about Tom popping out on high,” continues Macfadyen, disagreeing with the phrasing of the query. “I don’t assume he has a plan. None of [the Succession characters] have a plan. Proper? If they’ve a plan, it’s a kind of self-importance that inevitably goes flawed or modifications. I feel he simply retains himself within the sport. There are many these kind of believable males who find yourself in positions of nice energy as a result of they’ve been there all the best way, and hooked up themselves to different, extra charismatic folks.”
For Macfadyen, ever the modest gentleman, Tom being chosen CEO wasn’t essentially the most dramatic plot level of the episode. “What was terrible for me was Shiv’s reversal of her resolution to again Kendall as CEO and block the deal,” he says. “I believed that was an incredible dramatic second.”
