Jeremy Strong: ‘The Trial of the Chicago 7’

This week on The Treatment, Elvis Mitchell speaks with Emmy-winning actor Jeremy Strong about playing social activist Jerry Rubin in Netflix’s “The Trial of the Chicago 7.” Strong won an Emmy this year as lead actor in a drama for his role as Kendall Roy in HBO’s “Succession.” Strong discusses the differences between playing the theatrical activist Rubin and the tightly wound Roy as well as the contrast in storytelling styles between Aaron Sorkin, who wrote “Chicago 7” and Jesse Armstrong, creator of “Succession.”

The following interview has been abbreviated and edited for clarity.

So I got there ready to go. And I revved up and peeled into the Four Seasons as fast as I possibly could, kind of burned rubber, and then tossed my keys very carelessly, at a valet without looking. Then I waited for Aaron having seen that moment, and of course, he had gone inside to use the bathroom. So the moment was missed.Then he offered me the part, and I got to do that with him and had a great time. He's someone I've obviously revered as a writer, and that led to "Chicago 7."

It might just be my own capacity for self delusion, but I need to get to a place where I really believe that I am this person, whoever that is. So I'm so interested by that observation. It would make sense to me that they take in information and release information differently, because of course, their essences and their metabolism are different and their apertures are more or less open to the world in different ways. And I guess that's your task as the actor, I think. It's different every time, and I don't have a set way of doing any of this.

For example, with "Molly's Game," there's a wealth of material about the character in Molly Bloom's book, and I got a lot of clues from that and a sense of this certain kind of guy. And then I ended up watching some Los Angeles realtors who give these web videos and certain people in Las Vegas. Then I went and spent a lot of time in Las Vegas, so I could work on poker and really the behavior, handling chips and everything. From the moment you engage with it, you're kind of absorbing from everything. And for me, I find that certain things just kind of click, and then that becomes part of what you do.

But what I love about it is that you know nothing at all going into it, and it all kind of reveals itself to you, as you go further into it. And then at a certain point, you're sort of inside of it, which I can never imagine happening. I'm about to start working again, and I'm working on a film later this year that I'm glancingly preparing for, and I feel very far from being inside of it. But I know at a certain point, you sort of cross that rubicon, and it's not something I really understand. But it's sure something that I love.

Coming from trying to have inhabited a character that is very controlled and has a great deal of tension and tensile strength that is wound very tightly with the character on “Succession.” And then Jerry, who's sort of the diametric opposite, who was very loose and open, as you say, and had a wonderful sense of humor. He went in front of the House American Un-Activities Committee, dressed as Santa Claus, and he handed out jelly beans in the chamber. He went and found a pig on a farm outside of Chicago, and he brought the pig down to City Hall, and he tried to enter the pig who he named Pegasus, into the presidential race, because he felt that neither of the candidates in 1968 would do a better job than Pegasus. Then he went to jail for it and got out again, and kept hammering away at the establishment.

But what I love about Jerry Rubin, is that underneath his colorfulness, especially the way that Aaron has written him and rendered him in the film, Jerry was the real deal. He was the one in his early days laying down on the train tracks to stop the troop trains going from Oakland. What he really cared about was what he felt was this genocidal war going on in Vietnam, in our government's foreign policies of aggression and oppression at home, and oppression abroad and racist aggression. So what he really sought, and I love this term, was what he called an interracial humanhood. And so I loved how much he cared and how much he was willing to put himself on the line for his convictions.

Like a lot of the characters in that film, like Tom Hayden, like Abbie Hoffman, like Bobby Seale, and Dave Dellinger, he just had a different way of expressing it, but I guess just to bring that around full circle, the great and liberating thing for me was how expressive Jerry Rubin was. And that allowed me to live in a different place really for the few months that we were filming it, where I felt free, I was able to be more expressive, and my instincts were able to fire in a different way. And I enjoyed the experience much more than I'm able to enjoy some other things.

And what's been so powerful for me, is the way in which that energy existed in 1968. We filmed last October, and we were marching down Michigan Avenue at Balbo Street, where the riots took place across from the Hilton Hotel, Grant Park in Chicago. And we were filming scenes where we were marching down the street, and the police extras and the activist extras, but the police were played by mostly real Chicago policemen and women. And we were chanting "no justice, no peace," and "the people united will never be defeated." Even then, having watched the videos of the carnage that happened in August 1968, it was quite harrowing to be in that actual place and recreate those events. And then of course, the way things have unfolded in our country in these last months and hearing people chant those same chants in cities everywhere. It made this of course resonate in a different way but amplified and doubled and tripled the power of having had that experience for myself.

Certainly, Jerry was a curious man and a passionate and robust and expressive and courageous man, and then I try and just be worthy of walking in his shoes, really. My heroes have always been character actors who are chameleons, and who transform and kind of disappear into a role so that you don't see the actor, hopefully, you just see the character, and Jerry Rubin felt like a real chance to attempt something like that, physically, vocally, behaviorally. It also took me to a playful place, almost a childlike place.

Early on, when I was reading and preparing and thinking about the courtroom and reading about the ways they amused themselves in the courtroom, but also the ways that they try to antagonize the marshals and antagonize Judge Hoffman, who they really saw as the embodiment of everything that was bigoted, authoritarian, despotic and odious in American government. Judge Hoffman and Mayor Daley really are not a far cry from the leadership of our country now. So anyway, I came loaded up with a lot of noisemakers and kazoos, and a fart machine with me. I had a remote control one that I set in the judge’s dais, where he couldn't find it. Then I had one that I kept on me, and so if ever the judge addressed me, and I wouldn't prescribe this or know when I was going to do something, but every once in a while, I would set one of these things off, just to inflame and really get under his skin. And it was good; it created some tension in the room, and it felt true to the people in the circumstances.

I remember Mark Rylance turning to me after one of these little gags and feeling like, "now we're in it. Now we're really here." And then I get a dressing down from Aaron. My favorite direction that I've ever been given by anyone was a contained but somewhat irate Aaron Sorkin, who I love, by the way, who said to me over a bullhorn, "Can we have one more without the cowbell, please, Jeremy?"

You talk about "Hamlet," and Aaron writes very clear vectors of a character. Aaron says that he, as a writer, worships at the altar of intention and obstacle. So, the intention is very clear, and the obstacle is very clear. The music that you are playing or that you are the instrument for is very clear, and you marry that with character, whereas Jesse Armstrong's writing, I think, exists in a much more opaque and ambivalent gray place. And the "Hamlet" reference is really apt for me, because I think about Hamlet and his puzzled will. Kendall really is standing baffled at the center of this thing. That thing that Hamlet says, "I do not know why; yet I live to say this thing’s to do, sith I have cause and will and strength and means to do it" is a bit like Kendall's predicament. He has ostensibly everything you would need and yet he's locked up inside. His will is puzzled, and he feels, I think, both thrust into this position of responsibility and power that he's unequipped to exercise and to handle. What I love about that is the size of that struggle and the amount of peril that the character is in is a very, very rich and difficult place to be as an actor, but it's very rich.

Working on Aaron Sorkin's material is quite different. It's more like a perfect classical symphony, that your job is to try to shoehorn in some dynamics, and some embroidery and some jazz into the extreme precision of what Aaron has written. Whereas the work on "Succession" is much messier, and in a way, truer to my experience of life, in the sense that it's very much a going forward into the unknown, and the characters are always caught between a rock and a hard place. And, Jerry vanquishes that rock and just doesn't accept it; Jerry frees himself.

I'm a pretty cerebral person, as you probably know, and that is the last thing I need when I go onto a set or onto a stage. And so, any part of your understanding on an intellectual level, I find doesn't serve me. So I'm not engaging with things conceptually or thematically. I'm trying really just to engage empathically and really put my mind on airplane mode, so that I can be present and see feelingly through the eyes of the character.

So, I just took that and ran with it, and I would walk around on set, yelling that out. I remember our first day of filming, we were in Chicago. Jerry had often said that he would walk around and go up to people saying, “excuse me, excuse me, did you know the sun is shining?” So I remember on that first day, chanting “the sun is shining, the sun is shining” and getting the whole crowd to chant, “the sun is shining.” And so he's a different person than I am. You're trying to find where he lives. And, to me, it seemed like he really relished in the event of protests and in the act of patriotism, and was less concerned on a certain level with the end game. And that's kind of what Tom Hayden's criticism of them was really.