There are a few actors we adore but probably wouldn't opt to play our parents because, well, of their deranged commitment to the bit: Daniel Day-Lewis is probably top of that list; no doubt Lady Gaga would spend at least a year in mom and/or dad's shoes, and is that an experience you really want to have? Jeremy Strong, incredible so he has been since the inception of Succession, is up there too — and yet, as unearthed in a New Yorker profile of the Method-loving (ahem, "identity diffusion," sorry) actor, arthouse auteur James Gray tapped him up to play his dad in his upcoming Armageddon Time.
As the New Yorker details:
This fall, Strong was shooting James Gray’s film Armageddon Time, playing a plumber based on the director’s father. Strong let his hair return to its natural gray—it’s darkened for Succession—and sent me videos of himself shadowing a real handyman for research, repeating back terms like “flare nuts” in a honking Queens accent.
Shadowing a real-life plumber to play one in a movie will hardly be the craziest thing Strong has done for a role, but we'd love to know what Gray's take is on the "honking Queens accent."
Little else is known about the film, other than its autobiographical story, and that it'll also star Anthony Hopkins and Anne Hathaway in leading roles. That it was filming in the fall is also something of a revelation, though the piece doesn't detail whether shooting on Armageddon Time has completed. At one point, Oscar Isaac, Cate Blanchett, Donald Sutherland, and Robert De Niro were all set to join the cast, but they've since dropped out.
Most will best know Gray for his last film, Ad Astra, which also tackled the subject matters of paternity and father-son relationships. (The real ones out there knew it by its better moniker: "Dad Astra.") The director was pretty spiky about some of the scientific fact-based critiques levied against the film, saying this about all the "space nerd criticism":
“We were trying to do a kind of fable or a myth in space… one of the things that troubled me about Ad Astra was when people said, ‘Well, in the actual science his hair would be floating in zero G or he wouldn’t be able to sail through the rings of a planet.' To me, it’s a very fatuous level of critique. You don’t read the myth of Icarus and say, ‘Wax on feathers wouldn’t allow you to fly.’ Of course that’s true, but it’s all about metaphor essentially. I felt that we were trying to get at, and [cinematographer] Hoyte van Hoytema understood, something mythic, almost like a fable.”
Armageddon Time does not currently have a release date. But you can catch Strong in Succession, which airs every Sunday on HBO, streaming on HBO Max.