SPOILER ALERT: This interview contains spoilers from Season 4, Episode 2 of “Succession,” now streaming on HBO Max.
Kerry Castellabate is the most ambitious assistant on “Succession.” She’s been hovering over Logan Roy’s (Brian Cox) shoulder since Season 2, and now she’s making a play at being an ATN news anchor as a major presidential election looms. Unfortunately, Kerry’s inexperience makes her as more of a laughingstock among the Roy family than a serious power player.
As played by actor Zoë Winters, Kerry has some breakout moments in Sunday night’s episode of “Succession.” On the news front at Waystar Royco, Logan rallies the ATN troops during a surprise visit, after Kerry has filmed test footage of herself as a newscaster. Her tryout is rough, to say the least. She stumbles over her words, and can’t seem to figure out what to do with her arms, as Greg (Nicholas Braun) later points out. In a hush-hush meeting, Logan slips the idea to Tom (Matthew Macfadyen) that he needs to let Kerry down gently — and Tom them appoints Greg to awkwardly deliver the bad news to her.
Later, the Roy siblings try to raise Conner’s (Alan Ruck) spirits at a karaoke bar the night before his wedding to Willa (Justine Lupe) — who’s ditched him at the rehearsal. It turns into an impromptu family reunion, as Logan shows up to mend the impending GoJo deal, and he uncharacteristically tries to apologize to his kids for how he’s treated them. The attempted sweet gesture (unsurprisingly) turns sour, and Logan storms away — but not before Kendall (Jeremy Strong) breaks it to Kerry that Logan will inevitably betray her. In the final scene, Logan hosts a secret meeting with Roman (Kieran Culkin) to try to convince him to rejoin the company, and oversee ATN.
With Variety, Winters reveals that she studied conservative commentators like Laura Ingraham and Tomi Lahren to nail Kerry’s anchor video and explains how, uh, personal her relationship with Logan is.
How many takes of Kerry’s newscaster video did you film?
We went into a real newsroom, so we had a whole setup, prompter, multiple cameras and screens — and it was really fun. They had written these really fun pages. Becky Martin, who directed it, just has a wicked sense of humor. She’s so funny, and such a joy to work with.
We jumped right in and did a number of takes of it. We also did a scene that didn’t make it into the show, which was Kerry on a panel with other news people trying to see how she can get along with other people. Of course, Kerry doesn’t really care to get along with other people, so she didn’t succeed. I had watched Tomi Lahren and Laura Ingraham, and tried to collect a number of ideas. What’s really fun about these things is when the camera stops rolling and you see people switch into their real personalities and be horrible and flip out on makeup and hair people, or complain about the speed of the prompter. It was fun to go from this public presentation of presenting the news and doing this audition and then have it cut, while our cameras were still rolling, and switch into just atrocious behavior the way people treat each other.
What did you take away from watching Ingraham and Lahren?
I made it Kerry’s own. She thinks it’s a formality. She doesn’t think it’s a real audition. She feels like she’s a shoo-in, and that she’s just doing this because it’s not a favor hire, so they’re trying to prove that she wasn’t just given it, but that she earned it. I watched them, and I took some things from them, but I think in general for women, there’s this pressure to have charm. That pressure is obviously magnified for television. I don’t think Kerry is interested in charm, which is part of the reason that I like her.
In these tapes, we see her wrestling to present her idea of charm, or what she thinks charm looks like, and she fails. She’s in this bubble-gum pink dress trying to act as though she has charm, and I think it just comes off as really uncomfortable. I watched a lot of Laura Ingraham when the camera cuts, mistreating people, getting different information in her ear than she is from the prompter. Tomi Lahren has this very loud, heightened, fast way of presenting. I just took little bits and pieces from conservative political commentators. I didn’t want her to be good. I wanted her to be trying.
What’s so painful about Kerry in this episode is that with the Roys, one of the worst things you can do is to try and to fail. It’s all about winning, and Kerry does not win at this. I thought about Nina in “The Seagull” when she realizes she was a bad actor because she didn’t know what to do with her hands. That became a big part of it is. I just didn’t know what to do with my hands.
Greg points out that her arms weren’t right.
They say in “Succession” that the writers are really watching and observing and taking things from actors, and using what we bring. So when he suddenly had this monologue about how my arms hang, I knew it was just them being funny, but I definitely thought for maybe a day and a half, “How do my arms hang? Are they seeing something here about the way my arms hang?”
I love when she tells Greg she’ll tear him apart like human string cheese. Were there any other lines you used in that moment?
She really comes for him in that scene. Nick Braun and I had so much fun working on that scene, and there were many different versions of it. They threw me a couple of alts for that last dig that she gives him, but essentially, a number of versions of, “I’m fucking coming for you.”
Why doesn’t Logan tell Kerry himself that she can’t have the ATN job?
It’s too complicated for him. We have too intimate of a relationship for him to openly betray me like that. That’s what feels so underhanded and so embarrassing about it. Up until this point, we’ve seen the kids talk poorly to her, and she to the kids. But this is the first time that we’ve seen Logan undermine her, and that distance begins for her that she didn’t know was there before. But also she has to stay alive, and she relies on him.
Who would be more embarrassed about Kerry losing the job: Her or Logan?
I think Kerry. There’s this big deal going on, and a caveat of it is that they’ve carved out ATN. Everyone is scrambling to find their place. Maybe Kerry gets other things from him, but Kerry’s very ambitious and what she wants is power. We have the seminal election coming up, and if she has a voice in the narrative and on the international stage when this election is going on and she can be an ATN anchor, that’s going to be a huge position of power for her. That is what she’s after. She needs this deal to go through because she needs this position, and she’s holding on to this. This is extremely important to her.
To find out that she may not get it, and from Greg of all people, she’s on the defensive in that scene. Internally, she’s hugely disgraced, embarrassed and trying to put the pieces together of, “Who did this come from?” Obviously Greg doesn’t have the power, and Tom wouldn’t fuck himself with Logan. So that leaves Logan, and I think she puts the pieces together. Then, in the karaoke scene, Kendall names it — how the fucking will come.
What is her and Logan’s relationship like behind closed door?
One of the reasons why “Succession” is so successful is there’s no exposition and writing giving the audience more than they need. There’s this constant side-eye glance of “Who’s betraying me? Who’s my ally and who’s my enemy?” The audience feels the same thing, because they’re not being given any sort of plot that they don’t need to have. I always keep it a secret of what the dynamic really is. I have a strong feeling, and many people and other characters do, too. I think you can trust your gut.
They don’t seem like a great match to me.
They’re both so ambitious. A choice I made this year was that she smiles at him so much. When he’s being testy or provocative, or when he’s complaining, I think she finds him kind of charming. There’s something about the fact that some of Logan’s shortcomings are in his personality, and maybe she believes it’s part of the reason that he’s a winner. I think she’s drawn to that, and she also lacks personality. I think she has a reverence for him. So much of this huge media conglomerate culture is about fandom, and I think that Kerry’s a huge fan of Logan.
This interview has been edited and condensed.