Jeremy Strong Fully Embraced His Role in the Dunkin’ Super Bowl Ad | Vanity Fair

In the years since his fame skyrocketed thanks to his Emmy-winning performance on Succession, Jeremy Strong has developed a reputation that doesn’t always sit right with him. He never hides his earnest passion for acting, nor his exhaustive commitment to getting inside his characters. Just last year, Strong told me how hard he worked to play Roy Cohn in the Donald Trump origin story The Apprentice: “It was a disturbing, upsetting place to be—that heart of darkness.”

That said, Strong also thinks observers often draw the wrong conclusions about him. “I’m known as this pretentious, unfunny person—that’s the sense I get from some people, or from the media,” he tells Vanity Fair. “But a lot of people who know me know I’m not a very particularly intense person.”

Enter “The Bean Method,” a new Super Bowl spot for Dunkin’ Donuts that Strong shot opposite Oscar winners Ben and Casey Affleck. Strong plays a heightened version of himself, an actor impossibly committed to, yes, making a Dunkin’ commercial. The ad leads to the Affleck brothers finding Strong in his dressing room, soaking in a bath of coffee grinds before coming up for air, Apocalypse Now! style. “I’m just trying to find the character,” Strong says in the final spot, which aired Sunday evening. “I’m all in for Dunkin’.” In the full short-film version, which runs nearly seven minutes long (you can watch it below), we see what all of that exhaustive preparation leads to—both for Strong the actor and Strong the character.

In his first interview about the commercial, Strong describes how he came up with the idea for it after an initial pitch from Ben Affleck (who also directed) that left him feeling conflicted. From there, Strong committed to the bit with a level of research, detail, and ferocity that could only be expected of, well, Jeremy Strong. And yes, it’s especially funny for him to do this on the heels of his first-ever Oscar nomination, for his powerful work in The Apprentice—a film that has taken on new resonance in the unsettling first weeks of the Trump presidency. But as Strong explains, there’s a richer link between his two most recent screen roles than you might expect.

Vanity Fair: How did this happen, Jeremy?

Jeremy Strong: [Laughs] “How did this happen?” is a great question. It’s not something I ever imagined myself doing. It was so uncharacteristic that it felt like a different kind of risk.

I’d been approached a year ago to do something else for the Super Bowl with my siblings from Succession, for a brand that I didn’t really have a connection to. That categorically was a no for me. I’ve been interested in achieving escape velocity from Succession, which was an incredible life experience, but not something I wish to stay connected to forever. Then I got a call saying that Ben Affleck was doing this Dunkin’ commercial, and would I consider doing it? I read it and it had me in a tracksuit coming out at the very end and doing a rap—like Kendall’s rap—to the other coffee brands. I said, “I can’t do that.”

So this premise was your idea?

For some reason, I had this image of Marty Sheen coming out of the mud in Apocalypse Now! I started to just formulate some ideas. I texted Ben saying, “Hey, I can’t do a rap, but you want to hop on a call and maybe can I pitch you some things?” We got on the phone and I said, “What if we just take the given circumstances as they are: that I’m meant to be doing your commercial, and I’m this actor who takes what he does seriously, and I’m not getting to show up on the set when I’m meant to come out and do the rap?”

I just went overboard with the idea, and Ben was absolutely amazing and wonderful and receptive to all of it. I would never want to do a commercial unless I could do it on my own terms, unless it could be genuinely funny and creative. It was tantamount to hosting Saturday Night Live, but for one sketch that I had time to really prepare for and do on my own terms. Then Ben and I started exchanging ideas, and then I had a memory that I told him about. When I was a kid, my dad used to send me into Dunkin’ Donuts in Sudbury where I was growing up. And he would say, “One cream, two sugars.” I didn’t really know the nomenclature of coffee, but “one cream, two sugars,” was something I really knew. And for some reason into my mind came Paul Revere saying, “one if by land, two if by sea.” Then I was like, “I found it.”

I ordered some books about Colonial-era men. I got everything I could: Colonial era grammar, Colonial era customs, Colonial era expressions and slang. I thought, well, I can’t do a rap, but maybe I could do something that is the equivalent of a rap for a Colonial-era man. Then I just started googling town criers. If you Google, “British town crier competition,” it takes you into this very wonderful land of these British town criers who have a modality where they hold a scroll, and it’s very presentational. I watched Ren Faire for awhile. Anyway, what is funny about this is that it is obviously art imitating life. I was bizarrely committed to this commercial. I think it’s the only way you can do anything—in for a penny, in for a pound.

There’s an element of you poking fun at yourself here, in terms of your public perception. But you still committed as you normally do.

Yeah. I’d listened to about a hundred tracks of Revolutionary War era fife and drum music. I found one called “La Belle Catherine 1775” and sent that to Ben. It was just a wonderful collaboration. Ultimately, the real reason I did it, as you can probably surmise, was to do a parody of myself—to really try to once and for all answer the accusation that I don’t get the joke, and have a bit of a laugh and put my kids through college. Take a piss at myself. But it simultaneously functioned as like—I’ve never called myself a Method actor. I’m not a Method actor. I’m someone who believes in whatever it takes, and I’m a committed actor, but so are most actors. This idea of “The Bean Method,” that’s as good a method as any other method. It’s no less ridiculous than the idea of being what the media has decided about me.

This initial spark to poke fun at yourself and “answer the accusation,” as you say—is it something you’d been thinking of doing for long?

Not really. I’m a very playful person. [Pause] Have you ever seen Liam Neeson do that sketch where [he says], “I’ve contracted AIDS?”

Yes.

I’m feeling a little bit like that right now. I’m like, “I’m a funny person!” But it’s both a comment on it and an object lesson of it. I take my work really fucking seriously. I don’t take myself really fucking seriously. There’s a difference. If you give me a piece of work and I enter into that arena, it’s like ride or die for me. That’s where I felt like I wanted to delineate a bit. I thought this could be a way of playing a pretentious, unfunny person in a really funny way. Honestly, it had been a long time since I felt that measure of joy working on something.

How well did you know Ben before this?

Not well. There’s a Nathaniel Philbrick book called Bunker Hill about the Revolutionary War that Ben, at one moment years ago, was going to do. Chris Terrio was going to write it and I knew about that. That probably put something of the Revolutionary War seed in my mind. Maybe at the end of the day, this was my audition for Ben to do the movie Bunker Hill. [Laughs] I know Casey better than I know Ben. I admire them both tremendously and have forever.

I mean, I wrote an entire proclamation, rhyming verse about Dunkin’ Donuts, in the voice of Paul Revere. Ben had never seen it or heard it. No one had seen it or heard it. I asked them to hire a fife and a drum player who I got together with secretly. We rehearsed, we figured out the syncopation, and then he just shot it with six cameras. I never imagined that working with Bob Elswit and Ben Affleck as a director would be in this way.

Wait, Bob Elswit shot it?

Yeah!

Wow. There’s something to this commercial coming out while you’re nominated for your first Oscar, for a role in which you did go to some pretty intense, dark places.

I read Pacino’s book, which I loved and thought about a lot. He says in that book, “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp.” That’s his thesis. And then of course, I watched from years ago, his Dunkaccino—his faux Dunkin’ Donuts commercial. Which on some level unconsciously probably gave me permission to enter the Dunkin’ cinematic universe. The two Roy Cohns—maybe we’ll join forces this next time.

Between your nomination and Donald Trump’s return to the White House, how are you reflecting on The Apprentice’s fraught journey?

There was a moment in August where we went to Telluride and the movie narrowly escaped the jaws of, effectively, censorship in America—a sort of soft censorship—where I was peripherally aware that Sebastian [Stan] and I were on all these lists. We’re in the conversation and we’re being considered and acknowledged. By October, late September, that was gone. We were nowhere. We weren’t on any of those anymore. I had relinquished hope that this would happen. So it’s been, in so many ways, a rollercoaster. And also, I’m sure you feel like this—the movie has taken on such a different valence now after the inauguration.

Very much so.

It becomes more of a horror movie, a much more harrowing thing to watch. I also think it makes the movie more important and relevant…. The thing that I find the scariest is something that Roy said a lot: “This is a nation of men, not laws.” He really believed that you could remake the rules, make your own rules, and that you could game the system and ride that all the way. And that’s what’s happening. We are stress-testing the thesis that this is a nation of men, not laws. I don’t think any of us really know where this goes.

On an artistic level, this was, for me, the highest level of difficulty—a role like this. I’ve always wanted to do transformational work. All my heroes are chameleonic actors. This was a role of a lifetime for me. If I was ever going to be nominated for the Academy Award, it’s incredibly meaningful that it was for this. At the same time, I feel it’s so upsetting. On the level of the living danger that this movie is exploring and the nihilism at the heart of it, I find it just harrowing to have been part of it. This confluence of the award stuff and the real-world stuff, I’d never quite experienced an intersection like this. It feels a bit difficult.

Sebastian had said before the nominations that some of your peers wouldn’t praise the film publicly, but they’d come up to him complimenting it.

What is incredible is this felt like a repudiation of the business of movies.

As in, you did not have the resources to mount the kind of campaign that normally would result in these nominations, right? Especially given how controversial the film was.

It feels miraculous. It gives me a lot of hope. You’ve got to touch the third rail in the work that you do, and this movie does that. The work that Sebastian did does that. And I tried to do that. It required us all to be as fearless as we possibly can be. And so for that to be seen is really vindicating when we felt so unseen for so long.

We’ve entered this time that is so binary, and there was this great resistance toward any humanization of either of these people. A desire to only see them as other and reptilian and not human. That has to do with a disavowal on our part of aspects of ourselves, of darkness in ourselves—it’s much easier and more comfortable to just put that entirely on someone else and demonize them. But these are not demons; these are human beings. Not understanding that is part of how we got in this mess.

Sebastian and I had to try to deeply and empathically understand these two men. The hope is the audience will gain a greater understanding and insight into what drives them and what they’re made of. There was a line in the film that was cut where Roy [says] the thing that links them: “You and I are alike. We would both walk over fresh corpses to get what we want.”

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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