What I Learned From My Guest Role on Succession
Behind the scenes of the show’s big Election Night episode
It was Election Night, and something had gone wrong with the vote counting in Wisconsin.
I was sitting in front of cameras at a cable-network-news desk, as I’ve done many times in my career, with a hunk of plastic in my ear and my hair coated with product. The walls were lined with television monitors that occasionally showed my Very Serious Face glowering down on the busy room. I was on a panel with two impossibly attractive women and our host, a charismatic and controversial young man, and we all knew exactly what was going on: The liberals were up to no good. They were trying to steal the election.
Our host launched into a tirade about how our betters in the Establishment were trying to silence us for noticing this obvious leftist conspiracy. His fury built to a crescendo. “You just stay quiet, and we’ll tell you what we think was on those ballots! We’ll decide, yeah? … SHUT UP, INNUMERATE RESIDUUM!” he thundered with classics-inspired rage. And there I was, nodding along, exchanging knowing looks with my colleagues. This is the good stuff. Preach it, brother. Own those libs.
Except it wasn’t Election Night, and I wasn’t really me. I was playing the role of Ben Stove, a right-wing Republican political analyst, on the set of HBO’s Succession a few weeks before last Christmas. As Ben, I had a small part in one of the most critically acclaimed dramas in American history, and I was trying my darndest to act.
It was a surreal experience. I learned two things during my several days with Succession. One is about television, the other is about politics.
First, however, I realize that you might wonder how real-life commentators and reporters end up in gigs like this. Shows such as Succession use actual journalists and pundits because we’re not actors. There’s a bit more verisimilitude because the viewer sort of recognizes us, and we sound more authentic than actors trying to sound like us would. In my case, the show needed someone to play a curmudgeonly, middle-aged, white conservative on Succession’s fictional news network, ATN. One of the producers called someone who had worked with me in other media, who immediately said: I’ve got your man.
A few days later, I was on my way to New York, having signed an agreement to accept union scale as payment and an NDA that said my soul would burn like a script on fire if I revealed any of the plotlines.
I was teamed up with local and national news professionals you’ve seen on your televisions for years—Dave Briggs, Danny Cevallos, Sharla McBride, Kelly Nash, and Ashley Rowe, with David Kerley as our paterfamilias, the rich-baritoned Walter Cronkite–like anchor. And let me tell you something about folks who work in broadcast journalism: If you think reading a teleprompter while making it seem as if you’re having perfectly natural thoughts isn’t difficult, just try it sometime. I was a rank amateur among these experienced hands, and they were very supportive when I occasionally turned to stone as the lines on the screen transformed into glowing alien symbols that I couldn’t parse.
Our ringleader over at the pundit desk was Mark Ravenhead, the creepy crypto-Nazi commentator played by the professional actor Zack Robidas. (We all spent hours seated at the same table with nothing but time on our hands, so I feel compelled to tell you that Zack is a hell of a nice guy and nothing like Ravenhead.)
Watching these professionals is how I learned the first lesson, the one about entertainment, of my time with Succession: It is a gigantic amount of work. The hour of television you see represents days and weeks of shooting. Even for my tiny role, I reported for multiple days of work over three weekends, sometimes being on set for eight or 10 hours, and yet my total screen time in my one episode is probably measurable in seconds. Add to this everyone behind the cameras, including directors, caterers, production assistants, makeup artists, wardrobe assistants, and so many others, and the whole thing feels like a military operation.
In fact, Succession did basically take over a media complex in New Jersey to create the ATN headquarters. The show used CNBC’s studios—which, as you can imagine, are pretty quiet on the weekends—and transformed them in a matter of hours. A fleet of trailers colonized the parking lot, and giant tents went up overnight. Corporate meeting rooms became sets. Hallways just off camera were cluttered with crates of water and pizza boxes and directors’ chairs. The level of detail was impressive: I walked around the ATN newsroom and saw that every scrap of paper, every coffee mug, every monitor, on every desk, in places you would barely notice even on a large television, carried an ATN logo. (I was too honest to swipe any of this fake swag, but I was sorely tempted.)
I had a few pages of lines, but really, all I had to do for each take was look serious and nod here and there. And yet doing that for a full day was actually kind of exhausting. Meanwhile, I got to witness two of the show’s stars, Matthew Macfadyen and Nicholas Braun, work through take after take after take—in some cases, trying to get something right that never made it into the final cut. (One of my favorite lines, however, did survive. Minutes before ATN’s election coverage begins, Macfadyen’s Tom Wambsgans says to Braun’s Greg Hirsch: “Information, Greg, is like a bottle of fine wine. You store it, you hoard it, you save it for a special occasion, and then you smash someone’s fuckin’ face in with it.”)
I learned a lot about who does what on a set, how actors and production people work, and even picked up some of the lingo. (“Checking the gate,” for example, means the director liked the take and you probably won’t have to do it again.) But I also had a realization about politics and television that made me uncomfortable. I was “reporting” the show’s events with lines meant to imply racial animus, gravely agreeing with offensive, right-wing conspiracies, and it occurred to me how easy it was to fall into that persona. In real life, I was once a Republican, and I know some of the steps to that waltz, but now we were dancing a mad tango, and my footing was just a bit too sure.
Perhaps if the show had been mimicking a left-leaning network, goofy socialist tripe would have flowed from me just as smoothly. But I’m not so sure. When we were all asked to improvise (in part so that we would look like we were, in fact, having natural conversations on live television), rightist delusions came to us fluidly because they allowed us simply to ignore facts and run with the incendiary stuff.
If you haven’t seen Episode 8, stop right here.
In “America Decides,” ATN gets drawn into a literal hot mess: A fire at a vote-counting station in Wisconsin has made the state’s true presidential-election tally unknowable. By every projection, the Democratic candidate Daniel Jimenez likely won the state, but with so many Democratic ballots burned, ATN decides, for many reasons, to give Wisconsin, and thus the electoral count in a close election, to the Republican Jeryd Mencken. (The GOP candidate, played with charming menace by Justin Kirk, is a nasty piece of work—a “fascist,” even, in the eyes of Shiv Roy.)
And there I was, riffing along about how the lefties probably set the fire that destroyed the ballots and how our democracy was in danger. This makes no sense at all; indeed, having now seen the completed episode, I think the show’s implication is that the Wisconsin fire was either an accident or perhaps the doing of the Republicans, who knew that it would make calling the state for Jimenez impossible. But in the moment, the words tumbled out naturally. Facts be damned, let’s go with the knowing smiles and the cynical laughs and the accusations.
In the same way that the immortal mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap showed what a facile genre hair-band heavy metal was in the 1980s, my short time on Succession helped me understand how mediocre hosts on Fox and other right-wing networks in the 21st century can get carried away with their brainless rants, even to the point of possible defamation: Because it’s easy. And really, it’s even fun. Once you don’t care about the facts, and you’re just trying to play “Can you top this?” with the other guests, you may easily find yourself saying utterly nutty things.
At the end of it all, Ben Stove was able to hand his flag pin back to the prop master and shampoo the lacquer out of his fascist-curious hairdo. I was just playing a role. But part of the reason America is inundated with so much poisonous and hallucinatory commentary is because there are so many other Ben Stoves whose limited abilities are no obstacle to cavorting every night on national television. They have disappeared into their roles, and try as they might, they can’t just wash it all out of their hair when the cameras are off.