Succession creator Jesse Armstrong has revealed he still struggles with ‘imposter syndrome’ despite earning praise for his work on the show.
The English screenwriter, 54, was honoured for the HBO series, which finished in 2023 after four seasons, with numerous accolades including nine Golden Globes.
The producer described the ups and downs of his writing process during a candid appearance on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs on Sunday.
Speaking to host Lauren Laverne, he said: ‘When a writers’ room is working well, it’s like you’re walking on the moon.
‘You’re suddenly released from the thing that could take you a week to figure out at your desk on your own.
‘You’re suddenly bounding around and picking up rocks and everything’s veined with gold and it’s like you can have these golden moments of the ideas coming from everyone and you’re all on the same wavelength and it can feel quite magical.’
Succession creator Jesse Armstrong has revealed he still struggles with ‘imposter syndrome’ despite earning praise for his work on the show (pictured in January 2024 at Golden Globes)
The English screenwriter was honoured for the HBO series, which finished in 2023 after four seasons, with numerous accolades including nine Golden Globes
He went on: ‘You can get really good days and hours working writing alone, but when it’s not working and you feel you’re not going to equal the best version of the thing you’re trying to make, I would find that very, very difficult.
‘You don’t know how possible it is for me to be a really bad writer because you don’t see all these drafts where it’s really bad.’
But despite the triumphant recognition of the show, Jesse revealed he still struggles with imposter syndrome, which is the persistent inability to believe that one’s success is deserved or has been legitimately achieved as a result of one’s own efforts or skills.
‘All the good writers I know that I’ve ever met are riddled with self-doubt and lack of certainty about whether what they’ve just done is good,’ he said.
‘I think you go in maybe with this 70% feeling that it’s like: ‘Oh, this is going to be a disaster and I’m going to be exposed as the fraud I always thought I was all along’.
‘You need that 10 to 20% – if you’re lucky, 30% – feeling of: ‘If I could do the version of this which I think it should be, it could be really great’.
‘I think maybe that little bit of confidence that you know that that’s how it feels, maybe that grows in you.
‘Also, knowing that the negative feelings are not necessarily true.’
On struggling with imposter syndrome, he said: ‘All the good writers I know that I’ve ever met are riddled with self-doubt and lack of certainty about whether what they’ve just done is good’
Brian Cox – who plays ruthless media patriarch Logan Roy – said his character was killed off ‘too early’ on the series and revealed how long he thinks the character should have survived
Jesse also shared how he forced himself to maintain a ‘distance’ from the Succession cast while he was writing the series finale.
He said: ‘I find it much harder to leave the actors, who I felt you had to keep a certain distance from. There’s a professional necessity.
‘You don’t know what’s going to happen in a TV show and I didn’t know what would happen at what point through the life of it, and so it’s kind in a way, to keep a certain respectful distance.’
Speaking on the hit drama show, Scottish actor Brian Cox – who plays ruthless media patriarch Logan Roy – said his character was killed off ‘too early’ on the series and revealed how long he thinks the character should have survived.
The star, 78, did not mind Logan not living to see out the entire four-season run of the show but he wishes he had clung on for longer than the first three episodes of the final series.
Speaking at the Oxford Union, he praised the show’s ending and said: ‘My only caveat to that, though I think I was happy to be killed off, I thought it was one episode too early because then you had more of those boring kids.’
Brian added that he believes creator Jesse did the right thing in understanding that ‘clearly less is better than more’, and ended the programme before it outstayed its welcome.
The veteran actor was a particular fan of the work of his co-star Kieran Culkin, who played his son Roman Roy, for having maintained ‘that child actors’ enthusiasm.
He added: ‘It would be terrible to curtail that…
‘The first series he would freak out if he had three alts (alternative lines), by the last series he was doing five pages of alts… it was wonderful to watch.’
