The unimaginable has finally occurred. Logan Roy, the unblinking, ferocious patriarch of the Roy family masterfully played by Brian Cox, drops dead at the beginning of the third episode of the final season of Succession.
On this week’s episode of Vanity Fair’s television-analysis podcast, Still Watching, hosts Richard Lawson and Chris Murphy process what Logan’s death means for the Roy family, Waystar RoyCo, and the series as a whole. “It’s HBO’s playbook. We’ve seen the Red Wedding. We know that they like to sort of pull the rug out from under us when we least expect it with major character deaths,” Murphy notes. “But for Logan to die [during] episode three of a 10-episode final season? I was not emotionally prepared for it to happen.”
Logan’s death was both rather quick and undignified, with his heart stopping on the toilet of his private jet. “What I love about this episode artistically is the choice that Jesse Armstrong, who wrote the episode, made to have this death so unceremonial, so off-camera,” says Lawson. “That’s how it is for a lot of people in life. You get a phone call while you’re distracted by something else.”
That something else happened to be Connor’s yacht wedding to Willa, played by Justine Lupe. Lupe dropped by Still Watching to chat with Vanity Fair Hollywood correspondent Julie Miller about Willa’s big day, her cold feet, and shooting the final season of Succession. “I just thought that it was incredibly sweet, and loved that they were kind of alone [for the actual wedding],” Lupe said. “It felt intimate. I root for them.”
While Connor experienced some modicum of joy on that fateful boat ride, his siblings were reeling processing the death of their father, each in their own way. “For each of the siblings, the biggest person in their lives is Logan, right? The towering monster-daddy figure,” says Murphy. “To burst that bubble with [Logan’s] death…they all sort of didn’t think that was ever gonna happen, even though it was always going to happen. That’s the thing about our human emotions and our brains—we can hold these two things to be true that are contrasting and conflicting. Of course he was gonna die, but he was also never going to die.”
In any case, it’s clear that the Roy family will never be the same after the events that transpired around “Connor’s Wedding.” Listen to Still Watching to hear Lawson and Murphy discuss the third episode of Succession season four and what’s to become of the Roy family. For your own questions, comments, and final-season theories, please email [email protected].
Chris Murphy
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