It could have been a cash grab, but Jeremy Strong prepared for his Dunkin’ Donuts commercial like an actor getting ready to play Hamlet. He spent days thinking about how to make the Super Bowl spot unique before landing on the idea to send up his own reputation for going “full method.” The ad, which was directed by Ben Affleck and features Casey Affleck, finds Strong submerged in coffee grounds, refusing to leave his trailer to film his spot for the breakfast chain until the muse appears.
“I wanted to poke fun at this idea of me as this sententious, self-serious actor,” Strong says. “It was my response to the idea that I ‘don’t get the joke.’”
Ever since the New Yorker published a deep look into his intense approach, Strong has been perceived as one of those actors with a capital “A,” ostentatiously suffering for his art. That 2021 story, entitled “On ‘Succession,’ Jeremy Strong Doesn’t Get the Joke,” presented him as a performer whose punishing commitment to his craft was either admirable or infuriating, depending on if you’re a “Succession” fan or Brian Cox. But what’s undeniable is the extremes that Strong goes to results in mesmerizing performances, both on stage (he won a Tony last year for “An Enemy of the People”) and screen (he’s up for an Oscar for playing the flamboyantly amoral Roy Cohn in “The Apprentice“). That utter commitment is even on display in Strong’s Super Bowl ad, where he reveals an unexpected gift for comedy while dressing as a town crier and reading a proclamation about caffeinated beverages.
‘You have to be willing to make a giant fucking fool of yourself,” Strong says. “You have to go way out on that limb.”
As he prepared for his Dunkin’ spot to debut, Strong chatted via Zoom about “The Apprentice’s” long road to the Oscars, playing Bruce Springsteen‘s mentor in a new biopic about “the Boss,” and becoming a coffee pitchman while having the last laugh.
Why did you decide to make a Dunkin’ Donuts commercial?
I’ve been asked to do Super Bowl commercials before, but it didn’t feel genuinely creative or funny. It felt transactional and like you were just selling a product, which is fine, but not something I wanted to do. But then Ben sent me the script, which had Ben and Casey in tracksuits. At the end of it, I came out in a tracksuit and did a rap like I had done on “Succession.” I said no. I wasn’t interested in rehashing something I’d done before. I want to put distance between myself and that show and achieve escape velocity.
But, you know, it’s Ben Affleck. He’s a great director and actor. He’s somebody I greatly admire. And so I thought about it and texted Ben saying “I’ve never done anything like this before. This feels unnatural to me, but is there any latitude to create something? Is there any freedom here?”
How did the concept change?
My pitch to Ben was highbrow, lowbrow. I spent days just marinating, and came up with a bunch of ideas, which led to other ideas. I approached this the way I approach anything. So the macro of it is I thought there was a way to play it straight, which was that I’m this actor who takes what he’s doing very seriously, and I don’t want to rap in this commercial. So when they get to that point in the shoot, I’m not on set, and the PA says I won’t come out of my trailer and Ben comes to find me, and I don’t want to do the rap because I’m not feeling it. From there it tessellated into all these other ideas. I had this image of Marty Sheen from “Apocalypse Now” coming out of the mud. And first I thought I’d be steeped in tea, because that seemed highbrow, and then that became coffee.
I also had a memory of my dad. I grew up in Boston, and he used to send me into Dunkin’ Donuts to get one cream, two sugars. At some point that reminded me of the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem about Paul Revere’s midnight ride. And I thought, one creamer by land, two sugars by sea.
So it was your idea to send up your reputation as a self-serious actor?
I wanted to find a way to say that you can take your work incredibly seriously while not taking yourself all that seriously. At the same time, I’m a big believer in risking something every time you do a piece of work. This was its own form of risk, because it’s the Super Bowl. This is not my native element. This just felt like a limb to go out on with incredible collaborators on a big canvas. And I thought, if Ben’s going to let me do this on my own terms and improvise all of it, that’s a chance worth taking.
I had no trouble taking the piss out of myself. I’ve been accused of being this incredibly self-serious, pretentious person. And I do take my work extremely seriously. If you give me a piece of material, I won’t let anything stand between me and what I think I need to do to serve it. But I thought it’d be good to have a laugh at this idea of being a method actor, because I’ve never called myself a method actor, and I’m not a method actor. It’s all about imagination and commitment. And every time you do anything, you’re sort of finding your way in the dark and trying to have courage to stick with it.
Do you hope this ad diffuses the conversation about your acting methods?
That’s the hope. I’m tired of it. It doesn’t really serve anything. It’s false. We live in this age where there’s so much attention on all the other stuff that’s not the work, and we’ve become sort of conditioned now to talking about the work so much. It really takes away from it. We’d all be better off going back to a time where actors were able to disappear into their work, and they were more absences than presences. They’re present in the work and absent outside of that.
What was it like to shoot the “Apocalypse Now” homage?
I got there and they had prepared a porcelain white bathtub, which I felt was all wrong. I wanted it to be something cylindrical so that I could come out vertically. If I was in a bathtub, it would seem like I was in repose. Anyway, I found this didgeridoo music that I put on my iPad, and started setting up the room. I asked for tons of bags of coffee. I had a notebook full of notes about the Penobscot Expedition, and the Boston Tea Party, and Griffin’s Wharf, and statistics and dates, because you never know what’s going to come up in improvisation. And then I started writing things on the whiteboard, and they were just filming it. God knows what the coffee sludge was made from. They prepared it in a way that I didn’t have to get in it. But of course, I did anyway. It’s all really silly. The world is so dark now, and the work that I’ve been doing for a long time has weighed so heavily on me, it was nice to have a little burst of levity.
Do you want to do more comedy?
Not necessarily. This was the way I would want to do it — just having carte blanche to create something. I’ve never wanted to host “Saturday Night Live.” I’m someone who needs a certain degree of control in order to be free, and I need to do a lot of preparation. But this felt like a chance, in a way, to do a single “Saturday Night Live” sketch, just one that I could prepare for and do on my own terms.
You grew up in Boston, where Dunkin’ Donuts is ubiquitous. Was it a big part of your life?
I didn’t start drinking coffee until I was in college, by which time I had left Boston. But I grew up on those donuts. If I were to eat one of those donuts now, it would be like Proust dipping the madeleine in the tea. It would send me back to my childhood, to my roots.
To pivot away from donuts, congrats on your Oscar nomination for “The Apprentice.” How does it feel to get this recognition after all of the challenges the film faced in getting released?
It feels like vindication after the steep and thorny path the film had to travel. We made this movie for no money. It was a fast and furious shoot, and Sebastian [Stan] and I both tried to be as fearless and courageous as we possibly could be. For that to be acknowledged by a community of our peers is so meaningful.
My heroes are all chameleonic actors who transform and manage to transcend something simply mimetic. They disappear into it. Roy Cohn offered me a chance to attempt that. But to be nominated for the Oscar, that’s something you don’t permit yourself to think about. You have to be satisfied with doing your work well and feeling like you’ve gone beyond yourself. I feel a keen sense of my limitations all the time. And the exhilaration and terror of taking on something like this is that you have to go further than you’ve gone before and do something that you don’t know you’re capable of doing. There’s a Jungian scholar named Robert Johnson, who wrote that the spiritual experience begins at the point of insolubility, where one feels one can proceed no further. For me, you have to go to that threshold where you feel that you cannot proceed any further. When you cross that threshold into a place where you feel in peril, that’s where creative things happen.
You talk about being fearless in your acting. When presented with the opportunity to distribute “The Apprentice,” many companies acted fearfully. They were worried about getting on the wrong side of Trump.
It’s disheartening that the studios who should have released this movie — I won’t name them, but you know who they are — didn’t. It’s not because the movie isn’t good. It’s because they were afraid of repercussions, and probably have people on their boards who just said “no.” The whole thing was frightening. It felt like a harbinger of darker things to come, this sort of insidious, quiet blacklisting. The business of Hollywood did not show a lot of courage, but it does feel like the creative community is acknowledging it and affirming its right to exist and its value and importance. It’s just undeniable that the film has something to offer. A lot of what is happening now can be traced back to Cohn and his ideology. When I worked on “Succession,” I thought a lot about something that is attributed to Emerson. He said, “Behind every institution is the shadow of a man.” I feel like we are seeing that shadow cast over our government.
You argue “The Apprentice” explains our current political moment. But “Succession” with its portrait of the moguls who run these media conglomerates, also says a lot about the cultural climate.
Absolutely. Both are stories about power and its machinations. They’re stories about Machiavellian stratagems. It’s not intentional, but other films I’ve been in, like “The Big Short,” “The Trial of the Chicago Seven” and “Detroit,” speak to this time in a high voltage way. There’s a quote that Hamlet says to the Players that your job is to hold “the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.” And “The Apprentice” is doing that. It is showing us the form and pressures of our age.
You’re playing Jon Landau opposite Jeremy Allen White’s Bruce Springsteen in “Deliver Me From Nowhere.” What’s that experience been like?
Utterly life affirming. It’s a mentor story, like “The Apprentice.” But if Roy is Mephistopheles, Jon is a force of light. Spending time with Bruce and Jon and communing with Bruce’s music, which is a gospel of hope and faith and love, as opposed to a gospel of hatred and mendacity and nihilism, which is what Roy was, it was a tonic. It lifted me out of the darkness. Jeremy transformed brilliantly into Bruce. He sang brilliantly. Our director, Scott Cooper, gave me a lot of latitude to improvise and embroider.
There’s a real polarity between “The Apprentice” and the Springsteen piece, and nothing whatsoever to do with Dunkin’ Donuts, except that Pacino and I both played Roy Cohn. And Pacino did an amazing fake Dunkaccino commercial , and I did a real one. I’m gonna try to get him to team up with me and maybe we can do another Dunkin’ Donuts commercial next year.
