And I think it’s starting to get to him.” So the upside is, he’s never wanted for anything, but he has also never been needed. Now he’s in his 50s and he’s never had a job. And then he realised he didn’t have to do anything because there was this big pile of money in the account. Then, because he wanted his pop’s attention, he probably tried business school, lasted a couple months, then maybe tried art school and realised he had no talent. So between eight and 18, Connor was alternately at boarding school or with a very sick woman, so he started to develop a very active fantasy life and now he has a delusional disorder. This is good.’ Then his father divorced his mother, and there were hints in season two that she had psychological challenges. “I think with Connor, up until he was eight years old, he was a little prince and anywhere he went with his dad, people bowed down, and he was old enough to think, ‘Oh, Dad’s a big deal. “Big” barely does it justice, and Ruck relishes the storytelling. “When I auditioned for the show there was a line in which Connor says, ‘Dad, there’s this job I want: it’s president of the United States.’ I said to Adam, ‘He’s putting the old man on, right?’ And Adam said, ‘Oh no, he’s deadly serious.’ That gave me a big window into who this guy is.” “I can imagine Connor being attracted to that world,” he says. He describes his work on the show with charming discursiveness, referencing everything from John F Kennedy’s tragic younger sister Rosemary, who ended up being lobotomised (“Maybe Connor got a little stuck in the birth canal, like Rosemary did”) to a club at his college, the University of Illinois, called the Society for Creative Anachronists, where members would dress up like medieval lords and ladies. He is really terrific as Connor, the self-deluding eldest Roy child who can go from pathos to petulance in a blink, gazing at his smarter half-siblings – Connor was born from Logan’s first marriage – with a dash of discomfort. Instead, as with the Roy family, he was slightly on the outside looking in – he even auditioned for The Breakfast Club, but didn’t get it. He worked with Rob Lowe and Andrew McCarthy (Class), with Charlie Sheen twice (Ferris Bueller, Spin City) and, of course, he was in Young Guns II alongside Emilio Estevez, but he was never really part of the Brat Pack. As Captain John Harriman in Star Trek Generations, he had to deal with the loss of Captain Kirk as Rabbit in Twister, he was the dorky member of the tornado-chasing team, prissily fussing over the maps. Photograph: Cinetext Bildarchiv/Paramount/Allstarīy the time he was cast in Succession, Ruck, now 65, was well accustomed to playing the sad and the sorry. With Matthew Broderick in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. At one point, he makes a fleeting reference to “a western I was once in”, and I interrupt him to say he cannot casually refer to the great 1990 movie Young Guns II as just some western. And upstairs are my lovely children,” he says in his occasionally ironic, lightly mocking tone, although that mockery is always directed inwardly rather than outwardly. “Ha! No, I see what you mean, but this is my lovely kitchen. Alan, I say, are you actually sitting in Ferris Bueller’s kitchen? More than 30 years before Ruck played Connor, he was Cameron Frye, another neglected son of a cruel and wealthy man, in the 1986 John Hughes classic film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. It is, however, a little hard to focus on what he’s saying because the bright and spacious kitchen in which he’s sitting bears a striking resemblance to another kitchen audiences associate with him. Like all the actors on the show – as the Guardian’s unofficial Succession correspondent, I have interviewed Cox and Jeremy Strong – Ruck has thought deeply about his character and is very eloquent on the subject. Ruck plays Connor, the neglected eldest son of a media magnate, Logan Roy (Brian Cox). The present we are discussing is the forthcoming third season of Succession, the wildly adored HBO series about plutocracies and dysfunctional families, created by Jesse Armstrong, a co-creator of Peep Show. Alan Ruck is talking to me by video about the present, but he appears to be sitting in the past.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |