After a long and painful time apart, and with just a few weeks to go until we are reunited with HBO's most beloved and cruel family, more details are coming to light about what to expect from the highly, highly anticipated new instalment of Succession.
We now know the third season will pick up immediately after the mic-drop that was erstwhile prodigal son Kendall's betrayal of his father, with a clip showing him pegging it out of the press conference with PR guru Carolina and cousin Greg (the egg) in tow. "No comment, no comment" Greg splutters joyfully, to which said PR expert helpfully reminds him that he doesn't need to say no comment, he just needs to not comment.
While we wait the imminent return of power players of late capitalism gone wrong, here’s everything we know so far about season three of Succession.
Is there a Succession season 3 trailer?
“I dropped a bomb. The whole world is watching for my next move.” So begins the first full trailer for season three, which was released on 17 September.
Kendall, trending on Twitter following his bombshell press conference at the end of season 2, is mobbed by reporters and taken away in a car. Logan Roy is in battle mode – his knowing smirk from the finale has been replaced by fury and frustration. “My family has disappeared,” he says, “I need to know where everyone is and what everyone is thinking.”
Then, the difficult – or downright impossible – reality of Kendall’s plan is laid out to him. “As I understand it you want to take down your dad,” asks an advisor, “without implicating yourself and without damaging the company to the extent that you lose control at your shareholder meeting?”
But he’s confident he can do it. That he can “kill him”.
As protests rage, Logan doesn’t seem so confident that Waystar RoyCo can survive this. He says that there’s blood in the water, and that sharks are coming. Shiv fears that “We’re gonna lose the company.” Tom and Cousin Greg fret over their futures, while Logan attempts to recruit Shiv to his side. Then we see some clips of Roman talking with newcomer Alexander Skarsgård's tech founder and CEO Lukas Matsson, and Logan sitting down with Adrien Brody's Josh Aaronson, who has been described as a “billionaire activist investor who becomes pivotal in the battle for the ownership of Waystar"
Then Connor Roy pleads his case to Logan, as he seemingly attempts to help him in his pursuit to win back the business. “Roman is a knucklehead, Shiv is a fake, and Kenny is screwy. I’ve seen more than any of them.”
Then, as we saw in the teaser trailer at the beginning of July, shots of Italy, speed boats, penthouses, tantrums, bust-ups, medical emergencies, decadent parties and self delusion. Everything we’ve come to expect from the series.
What's the Succession season 3 release date?
After much teasing, we now have an official release date, so block out 17 October and get ready for the bickering and brawling to hit your screens.
Remind us, what happened in in the last season?
To get you up to speed: Waystar Royco was very publicly going down, thanks to the dodgy dealings over at Tom’s theme park and cruise department, and Logan (Brian Cox) wanted a blood sacrifice. His choice? Meat puppet Tom (Matthew Macfadyen), or until Shiv (Sarah Snooks) begged Logan to save her husband (and their floundering marriage). He moves on to Kendall, who owed him his literal life after daddy managed to make the whole accidentally-murdering-a-bartender thing go away.
Kendall was goaded by his dad that he had “no killer instinct”, then was pushed into a press conference. Just as we all thought he was going to roll over for Logan, he dropped the bomb. Branding his father “a malignant presence, a bully and a liar”, we then saw Cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun) on the sidelines, clutching those incriminating emails that he swore he’d burned).
You might have missed a couple of beats in the season two finale: Logan smiling when Kendall did his mic-drop announcement, which seems to suggest that the patriarch finally realised Kenny was as vindictive as he needed to be as a CEO – and the rightful heir to the company? More importantly, what’s his retaliation going to be?
Secondly, still shell-shocked from being held hostage in the Middle East, Roman (Kieran Culkin) was casually announced as the COO of the company. How will this shift the family dynamics, and more importantly, will he bring on Gerri (J. Smith Cameron) as the mole woman to his rock star?
What’s going to happen in the new series?
The concrete plot details of season three might still be under wraps, but it's clear from the trailer that the Roys have gone from sparring to all out war in season three. Brian Cox, who plays patriarch Logan, revealed that the new scripts are packed with more killer twists. He told The Hollywood Reporter: "I nearly fell off my chair because he [Armstrong] never tells you about the next series. We never knew from episode to episode what was going to happen. But then he told me. And it's jolly thrilling. That's all I can say."
Following Kendall's big Judas moment at the end of season two, the main animosity seems to be between him and daddy Roy, with the latter lunging at his former favourite son at one point in the trailer. Nevertheless we can clearly expect the other Roy siblings to be caught in the fray too, with new power allegiances forming within the family. Shiv is trying to coerce her siblings into handing power over to her in exchange for betraying Logan, as he pointedly reminds her that either she's part of this family or she's not. Roman is making his usual quips – has he already recovered from his brush with death ? – but there's no sign of Gerri so far, does that mean their bad romance is off?
As for Cousin Greg, could there be a clue in the photo he posted showing him in a tailored suit and giving the awkward man's salute of a double thumbs-up in front of an electronic sign for Waystar Royco? True, we might have gone a little mad from waiting for so long, but we're wondering whether the caption saying that he works for the company has inadvertently revealed something about the fallout of season two's explosive finale. In the trailer we see Greg running scared without any allegiances, worried about the consequences of having betrayed the family. In one scene Tom threatens him, which,"err sounds kind of dramatic", but also suggests he's still got some ammunition left.
In an interview with The New Yorker, series creator Jesse Armstrong shared that the opening of of season three will pick up straight after the bombshell which they left us on. “This is the moment at which you get the sense that Logan is worried,” he said of the tumult which the Roy patriarch finds himself facing. Elsewhere in the interview it was confirmed that the Roys will travel to Italy in the upcoming instalment, with scenes shot both in the Tuscan countryside and around the lakes in the north of the country. Armstrong also teased that there would be a "successor scene" to Tom and Shiv's very sad beach picnic in season two, this time shot in a café in a quaint Italian hamlet, though we imagine made similarly depressing through dialogue.
In a recent set visit in Tuscany region of Italy, Vulture writer Hunter Harris witnessed the filming of the final two episodes of the series. Before a key scene, she describes how she saw Nicholas Braun (Cousin Greg) and Matthew Macfadyen (Tom) having an intimate conversation.
“They run the sequence a few times, growing increasingly loose and silly as the night goes on. Tom is married to Shiv, but Greg is his real partner on the show. (When I asked costume designer Michelle Matland about pulling everyone’s looks, she said Tom’s suit was selected to complement Greg’s clothing, not Shiv’s.)”
Another filming location was the iconic Plaza Hotel in New York, which reopened in May. The Succession team reportedly shot in a selection of glitzy settings across the hotel, including the Palm Court, the Terrace Room, the Grand Ballroom, and the Royal Suite. It followed a casting call in April 2020 that called for “high-end party guests,” between the age of 23-45, including “artists, actors, models, sports stars, and more."
The hotel has been used in plenty of films and TV projects before, including two version of The Great Gatsby, North by Northwest and Sleepless in Seattle.
Don’t be expecting too much personal growth from any of the characters, by the way.
“Each of the characters in Succession gives you the capacity to hope that they might snap out of the trap of their own existence,” writer and director Chris Morris told The New Yorker. “Jesse is the perfect sadist, because he is horrible to each one in turn, and yet he offers the audience just enough to hope that the characters might this time not disgrace themselves in the way that we kind of know they will.”
Who’s starring in it?
We’ve thankfully got most of the key players returning, and three of the minor characters have just been confirmed as series regulars: Willa Ferreyra (played by Justine Lupe), shady chief financial officer Karl Muller (David Rasche) and Waystar Royco’s senior comms exec, Fisher Stevens (Hugo Baker).
There's also the news that the cast will be adding new faces in season three, with HBO announcing that Sanaa Lathan will play Lisa Arthur, a high profile New York lawyer. Meanwhile K-pop star Jihae Kim has also been added to the mix, here playing PR guru Berry Schneider, and Linda Emond will play senior White House aide Michelle-Anne Vanderhoven.
These three new figures offer some clues about the direction the next instalment could take us, as it seems possible the PR figure may be brought on by Waystar in order to deal with the fallout of Kendall's mic-drop moment moment at the end of season two. That might also explain the introduction of a lawyer with connections that can help get the family, or a newly isolated Kendall perhaps, out of a tight spot. What we're more curious about is how the White House could become embroiled in the Roy family drama. Perhaps there's some high level corruption that'll make us nostalgic for the great swindles of the Trump era coming.
In February, HBO also announced that Your Honor's Hope Davis would appear for a multi-episode arc as Sandi Furness, daughter of the Roy's media arch-rival Sandy Furness. Quite how she slots in will be interesting to discover – in Succession, everyone's an antagonist. Will she side with daddy and the hostile takeover attempt?
At the beginning of May, it was reported by Variety that Alexander Skarsgård, star of The Legend of Tarzan, True Blood and Big Little Lies had been added to the cast. The Emmy award-winning Swedish actor will be playing a character called Lukas Matsson, “a successful, confrontational tech founder and CEO”. This was followed by another high profile casting in the news that Adrien Brody was also joining the show. The Peaky Blinders actor will play Josh Aaronson, a billionaire activist investor who becomes pivotal in the battle for the ownership of Waystar.
Will they reference Coronavirus in the new series?
In the same New Yorker interview, Armstrong confirmed that the pandemic does not make it into the new season of Succession, after debating whether it might come into the story, "as a whiff or a stench".
A recent report from Vulture revealed that Armstrong started writing the series pre-pandemic, and Sarah Snook (who plays Siobhan “Shiv” Roy) went into more detail on why Covid doesn’t play a role. “These are really wealthy people,” she said. “And unfortunately, none of the world’s really wealthy people were going to be affected by the pandemic.”
That said, there is an added complication due to the pandemic in the fact that Mark Blum, the actor who played cruise division operator Bill Lockhart in seasons one and two, died due to complications from contracting Coronavirus last year. Whether the show will find a way to write him out, make a formal dedication or choose not to address his departure remains to be seen.
Will there be a Succession series 4?
The opening sequence of series three hasn’t even aired yet, but Armstrong has revealed that, like all iconic TV series, he knows when to quit and go out on a high. "I think it's not the sort of show which should go on forever, because there's a question set up in the title of the show and I think it’s a question you eventually want answered," Armstrong told Entertainment Weekly.
"So, I wouldn't say that it should go on forever, but we certainly haven't run out of ideas when we've met in the writers' room so far."
As Kendall might say: Dude be the O.G.
'Succession' Season 3 returns to Sky Atlantic and NOW this Autumn. Seasons 1-2 are available to catch up now on Sky On-Demand and NOW
