Succession’s Jesse Armstrong ‘still experiences impostor syndrome’

Succession showrunner Jesse Armstrong has said a writers’ room can feel like “walking on the moon” when it is working well – but that he also experiences imposter syndrome.

The award-winning screenwriter was behind the hit HBO drama which starred Scottish actor Brian Cox as the global media tycoon and family patriarch Logan Roy, who sets off a power struggle among his children, played by Oscar nominee Jeremy Strong, Academy Award winner Kieran Culkin, Sarah Snook, and Alan Ruck.

Opening up about the writing process, Armstrong revealed he kept a “certain distance” from the cast to protect the series and the actors whose characters’ fates were still unknown.

He also added that he still experiences a level of imposter syndrome.

Speaking on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs with Lauren Laverne, Armstrong 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 are coming from everyone and you’re all on the same wavelength and it can feel quite magical.

“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.

“The theoretically consoling idea that ‘oh, it’ll be all right because you’ve done it before’, actually becomes another rod for your back.

“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.

“There might be 50 so-called drafts, but they’re not really draft.”

During its run, the show scooped 19 Emmys including outstanding drama series and nine Golden Globes, along with drawing large audiences and being critically well received.

Despite the numerous accolades, the writer said he still experiences 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.

“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 10-20% – 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.”

The hit series, which also starred Pride and Prejudice actor Matthew Macfadyen and The Perks of Being A Wallflower’s Nicholas Braun, came to an end in 2023 with its fourth series.

Opening up about the ending of the show, 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.”

The characters on the other hand he found less challenging to leave behind and said that he has not given the characters a seconds thought since the show ended.

He said: “The characters – honestly, I don’t feel this in a callous way, but I hardly give them a thought.

“They were very, very intensely real to me, but as soon as we leave, as we did in the final episode, Kendall (Roy), who’s the younger one of the sons, leave him on the tip of Manhattan, my interest in him, honestly, has ended.

“It’s not brutal, it’s tender. I love him, but creatively, the story is over and he’s not real to me any more in that regard.”

Armstrong is an Oscar nominee for co-writing The Thick Of It spin-off film In The Loop with Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci and Tony Roche, and has won TV Baftas for his work on Peep Show and Succession.

He was also behind the 2010 satirical comedy Four Lions and most recently worked on the film Mountainhead, which follows a group of billionaire friends working in tech, played by Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Cory Michael Smith and Ramy Youssef, as they get together amid a series of international crises.

The full Desert Island Discs interview can be heard on BBC Sounds and BBC Radio 4 from Sunday at 10am.