If you want to understand the character of Tom Wambsgans, perhaps the most craven clown in Succession’s glorious parade, you could do a lot worse than start with his name. Wambsgans: it feels odd, awkward, rootless, a mistake, maybe? All of which, of course, you could also say about Tom, who is played, with a mixture of comic grotesquerie and hangdog pathos, by Matthew Macfadyen.
Jesse Armstrong’s multiple Emmy-winning drama returned for a third series last week. It follows the high-stakes squabbling of the super-rich Roy family, headed by profane patriarch, Logan (Brian Cox). As the four children – Connor (Alan Ruck), Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Roman (Kieran Culkin) and only daughter Shiv (Sarah Snook), Tom’s wife – jostle for position in Logan’s billion-dollar media and leisure empire, Tom occupies a profoundly uncomfortable hinterland as both Logan’s son-in-law and his employee – and not really acing either role.
The only person arguably below him in the pecking order is cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun), who most often bears the brunt of Tom’s frustrations. Both offer viewers an inside, if perplexed, perspective on life inside the gilded cage.
“Tom and Greg are outsiders, aren’t they? On the fringes,” says Macfadyen, who is dressed today in a brown corduroy three-piece suit and shiny lace-up brown boots that Tom would surely reject for being un-corporate. “They’ve had a much less weird upbringing and so you feel can relate to them more. We laugh with them.”
So far, series three has found Tom where he almost always is – in the room where it happens, but not quite at the big table. Instead, in the opening episodes, he is frequently locked in a toilet – “Plane toilets, Balkan hotel toilets…” says Macfadyen, a little ruefully – whispering on the phone to his wife about Logan’s machinations (“Who ends up King Potato?”) or hissing baroque threats (“You’d better find an animal’s corpse to crawl into and hide.”) down the line to Greg, who has aligned himself with Kendall as he plots to take over Waystar Royco.
“His perspective is an enjoyable one to write,” says Armstrong. “It’s easier for us to empathise with that outsider. So maybe as a writer you’re playing with a fuller deck – it’s not like you have to explain what it’s like to be the less powerful person in the room: most people have an instinctive sense of that.”
In series three, having narrowly avoided being Logan’s “blood sacrifice”, Tom knows that he is a likely candidate to take the fall for the sexual misconduct charges that have been brought against the company. “There’s a big threat,” says Macfadyen. “He’s getting his head around the idea of jail time.”
If Tom does end up in prison, it wouldn’t be all that surprising for a character whose humiliations at the hands of the family to whom he owes almost everything are frequent and soul-destroying.
In the very first episode of the show, he agonises over what to buy Logan for a birthday present, and eventually settles on a Patek Philippe watch (“It’s incredibly accurate. Every time you look at it, it tells you exactly how rich you are,” he says to Logan. “Did you rehearse that?” says Logan). By the end of the episode, Logan has given it away to a young boy he just met.
Tom just doesn’t quite get it – where “it” is being born into unimaginable wealth. “They don’t talk about money very much, it’s just the water they’re swimming in. I think after a certain number of noughts, it sort of undergoes a chemical change,” says Macfadyen. Tom has the wealth and the position of influence as Chairman of News at ATN, but he can’t quite walk the walk (at one point, Shiv teases him for having an “agricultural” gait) or talk the talk (“Ooh, king of edible leaves, His Majesty the spinach!” he squeaks at a high-powered dinner party) of the truly elite.
On his stag do, he is somehow peer-pressured by his future brothers-in-law into drinking his own semen. On his wedding night, Shiv asks him for an open marriage and tells him she has had an affair. At work, he is forced to play Logan’s sadistic power games (some, like Boar on the Floor, more literal than others) and is eventually pushed in front of the Senate to answer for the company’s crimes. And so it goes on.
“I think of Tom as Princess Diana,” says Georgia Pritchett, one of the Emmy-winning team of writers on the show. “He’s married into this powerful family that he will never truly understand or be part of. They’re always kind of laughing at him or shunning him.”
What makes him so watchable is that for all of his sad-sack buffoonery, there is no doubt that Tom loves the money, power and influence being part of the Roys’ deluxe web brings him. Early on, he inducts Greg into the ways of the 1 per cent with a stirringly unpleasant speech: “Here’s the thing about being rich: it’s f***ing great. It’s like being a superhero, only better…”
“He is both punchable and vulnerable,” says Pritchett. “When we were filming the Thanksgiving episode [in the first series], Matthew looked very handsome in his black turtleneck sweater between takes, but as soon as he was Tom, he gave me the heebie-jeebies.”
Story of the scene: The Chicken Power Play
In “This is Not for Tears” (series 2, episode 10), as tensions run high on the family superyacht, Tom approaches Logan as he is eating his lunch, seemingly about to give vent to his feelings. When he gets to the table, he literally chickens out, seizing a drumstick from Logan’s plate, gnawing on it for several moments, before getting up and leaving again. Logan is nonplussed.
“I don’t think he knew he was going to do that. I don’t know what he thought he was going to do. I think he thought he was going to talk to him – ‘Now look here Logan.’ And instead he just took the chicken,” says Macfadyen.
“The first take I took too much chicken, I took a breast. There was too much in my mouth when I had to say, ‘Thank you for the chicken’”, says Macfadyen. “And Brian [Cox] just lost it, shrieked with laughter. So I was gone and it was very hard to get it together. Then I just took a drumstick so I had less in my mouth.”
Armstrong says: “You feel you could ask Matthew to do anything and his talent is such he could make it believable. So there’s a slight danger that you could allow yourself too much freedom. “The chicken is a good example of writing something that’s like, ‘Ok we’ve not seen him go there before, but I know he will.’ And then it’s a question of sitting back, rather like an audience, and seeing how he will achieve it. It’s pure pleasure.”
In the early years of his career, Macfadyen played the romantic hero, a staple of British period dramas – most famously Mr Darcy, opposite Keira Knightley in Pride & Prejudice, and Oblonsky in Joe Wright’s blockbuster Anna Karenina, also with Knightley. Armstrong suggested him to Succession’s casting director Francine Maisler and executive producer Adam McKay, on the strength of his performance as Sir Felix Carbury in the 2001 BBC adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now.
“He played a Victorian swell, a fake, one of those gambling, lascivious, rather pampered young men,” says Armstrong. “I always remember him giving a very comic but very nuanced portrayal. I thought I’d like to try and write something funny for him.”
Armstrong was worried that Macfadyen might not want the role but the actor was instantly hooked. “I thought it was brilliantly scabrous, original and acerbic. I just wanted to jump in and say the lines,” says Macfadyen. “It’s just unadulterated pleasure. I don’t learn the lines, they just go into my head because they’re all bangers and zingers.”
“I could write him anything and he could make it believable,” says Armstrong. “He has a great level of restraint. One of the ways you know the character is feeling so much is by how little he is showing. His position is low power compared to the others and often his desires for power and prestige are so obvious that can be comic or clownish. And yet he manages to hit real emotional depths.”
The way the show is filmed allows for these moments of nuance. Three cameras, zooming in and out, mean that each actor’s every reaction, twitch and glance is captured. “It’s very fluid and free-roaming. So you’re on all the time,” says Macfadyen. “And we shoot in great big 10-plus page scenes sometimes which is thrilling, it’s like doing a play.”
Story of the scene: The Beach Summit
In “This Is Not For Tears” (series 2, episode 10), Shiv and Tom escape from the superyacht for some time together, which quickly turns into a dissection of their marriage as Shiv suggests a threesome with a yacht employee and Tom brings up his hurt at having been “Shanghaied into an open-borders free-f**k trade deal,” on the night of his wedding.
“Typically with Matthew’s playing of Tom, there are moments where, in a very human way, he is policing his own borders. This scene is just brilliantly played by both actors but one of the things I respond to is his restraint,” says Armstrong. “It’s not a fireworks moment of marital discord but I find it tremendously affecting as much for what he doesn’t say and express as for what he does.”
When the show first started, Armstrong used to get asked a lot why on earth Shiv – successful, whipsmart, beautiful, unfathomably rich – would be with Tom. “I feel like I’ve seen quite a lot of high-achieving women, and you meet these guys who seem to be, slightly, lunks,” says Armstrong.
“They’re the equivalent of a trophy wife – very plausible in public, not much trouble and very happy to be there. Obviously as we know more about Tom, people are always a little bit more complicated than they seem, but there did seem to be a type – the accommodating husbands of accomplished wives.”
It makes sense that Shiv, a supreme operator, has rationalised everything in her life, even down to those imperfect variables, love and marriage. She doesn’t have to make time for Tom, he is always just there.
And so Tom, in turn, has found Greg, his sidekick/ whipping boy, who is in some ways the most significant relationship he has (the show’s costume designer Michelle Matland told New York Magazine that Tom’s suits are chosen to complement Greg’s clothing, not Shiv’s), perhaps because he is the only character who actually listens to him.
“His bullying of Greg comes from a place of deep fear and insecurity,” says Pritchett. “So even when he is being his most despicable, you feel love and sympathy for him.”
Story of the scene: The Wrong Panic Room
In “Safe Room2 (series 2, episode 4), Tom and Greg find themselves in a “lower level” panic room apart from the rest of the Roy family when a gunshot is heard at Waystar Royco HQ. When Greg takes the alone time to raise the question of him and Greg having a “business open relationship”, Tom loses it, pelting him with water bottles.
“Matthew played Tom’s reaction with such raw hurt that it became a much more interesting situation,” says Pritchett. “I thought it would be funny if Greg triggered Tom’s feelings of anger and jealousy towards Shiv and their open marriage, but Matthew played the scene with such emotion that it elevated the scene to a whole different level and was actually incredibly moving.”
Macfadyen says: “It’s funny, because it’s farcical he’s throwing water bottles. But actually, it’s awful, it’s like a second break-up. It’s the second most important person in his life, suggesting they have a sort of open marriage, again. That seemed the perfectly obvious way to play it. It’s a knife in the back.”
As series three opens, Tom is in the same raspberry-pink trousers as he was wearing at the end of series two, but something has shifted. When Shiv says: “I love you,” Tom says: “Thank you.” (Previously he would have called her something unthinkable like “honey badger”.)
The couple are, says Macfadyen, still processing the events of mere hours before – not simply Kendall’s betrayal of Logan but their tense marital summit on a beach, which culminates in Tom telling Shiv: “I wonder if the sad I’d be without you would be less than the sad I get from being with you.” Shortly afterwards, fired up, he sits down at Logan’s table, on Logan’s superyacht, and steals Logan’s chicken from off his plate. (“What’s next? Stick his c**k in my potato salad?” says Logan).
“He was sort of saying, ‘I’m not to be underestimated’ – in Tom’s way. And I think he’s probably right,” says Macfadyen. “I mean, he’s not a total dipstick. Even though he’s moronic at times, he’s running [what is] like Fox News. He’s right there. They could make him an interim CEO, and it wouldn’t be so weird… He’s in the mix.”
Tom of course has one advantage over the four Roy scions – unlike them he is not looking for Logan’s love. His approval, maybe, but he is at one step removed from the Roy psychodrama and that may be no bad thing. “It’s about power and respect, and attention and love, or lack of love. There are plenty of very wealthy, weird people in the world. But what’s interesting is the family dynamics,” says Macfadyen.
“If your dad doesn’t love you, it doesn’t matter if you’ve got 20 million in the bank, or nothing. That’s the compelling thing.”
Succession continues on Mondays on Sky Atlantic and NOW
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