How Succession's Alan Ruck Completely Evolved The Character Of Connor
After co-starring in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," one of the most memorable and beloved teen comedies of the 1980s, Alan Ruck carved out a terrific career as a character actor in projects like "Speed," "Twister," and "Spin City" before being cast in one of his most career-defining roles: Connor Roy on HBO's "Succession." Over the course of four seasons, Connor has evolved into a compelling combination of privilege and delusion, a man living in the shadow of a towering father figure who desperately wants to gain his own little foothold in the halls of the ultra-powerful.
But that wasn't always the case. Looking back at the pilot episode, Connor feels like the Roy child with the least amount of personality, and in an interview with Rotten Tomatoes, co-star Kieran Culkin (who plays Roman) specifically praised Ruck for breathing life into that character in a significant way. After they actors filmed the pilot, Culkin said, "there was room for us to sort of fill in our own gaps," and he thinks Ruck did that more effectively than any other actor.
"Between the pilot and them writing episodes 2 and 3, it seemed that they had [been] paying pretty close attention with what the actors had done with the material that [showrunner] Jesse [Armstrong] gave us and started writing a bit toward it. The biggest example of that, I would say, is Connor." Culkin had a front row seat to seeing how Ruck evolved the character, and recounted how over a relatively short period of time, he saw the character change to fit more with Ruck's performance.
'That was just something Alan brought'
"If you look at the pilot script, Connor is a pretty blank slate, and could have just been the older brother who's around occasionally, normal guy," Culkin pointed out in the interview. "And Alan came in with something I did not see on the page at all, and this very eccentric, odd man — almost spooky to be around. That was just something Alan brought, and by the time we got — about a year later, I was like, 'Oh, this is Connor now. It's different. They have Alan's voice now, and they have whatever Alan was doing, which was weird, they started writing to.' So he really helped create that character, I think, with the writers...."
While the crux of the show is about which of the Roy children might succeed their father Logan (Brian Cox) as the head of media conglomerate Waystar Royco, Connor never really showed any serious interest in running the company. Instead, his more aloof persona allowed him to sort of hover around the main action while dipping into his own world of failed schemes before settling into his funniest long-running storyline: His clearly doomed run to become the next President of the United States. As of this writing, the outcome of the election in season 4 has not been revealed yet, but let's just say things aren't looking too good for all the ConHeads out there.
Still, while Connor's siblings are tearing themselves apart in their vicious quest for power, Connor and his wife, Willa, may weirdly be the happiest couple on this show. Considering the odd power dynamic that kicked off their relationship and some of the bizarre interactions they've had over the years, that says a lot about just how twisted everyone else's love lives are in the world of "Succession."