Can the American mind comprehend Matthew Macfadyen? It’s doubtful. Consider some of the comments left beneath YouTube clips of Macfadyen describing what it was like to become Tom Wambsgans, television’s favourite midwesterner on the make.
omg hes not american? wild
why is he british
His voice, his EVERYTHING
The British are famously nice people and he played such an incredible American jerk.
Of course Payton Manning is British
We’re being ironic, we might add. It was one of the defining qualities of Succession, HBO’s pitch-black satire of U.S. familial wealth and power, that Macfadyen should disappear absolutely into his role as Tom, the peasant who would be king of the Roys. And a confession: so accustomed had The Rake become to seeing Macfadyen as Wambsgans — clean-shaven, besuited, calculating, corporate — that when we met Matthew on a bright spring day in south-west London, we needed a moment to adjust. Macfadyen had grown a beard (in preparation for his next part); his hair was not combed but ruffled (intentionally or otherwise); and he was dressed in casual attire of denim slacks and a comfort-fit Henley. Over the course of an hour by the Thames, he sprinkled our conversation with the rather un-Tom-like adjective ‘lovely’, and he exuded the opposite of Tom’s nervous energy; his imposing frame (he is 6’3”) was never imposed.
“The world is absurd and awful and hilarious and full of love and everything, so Succession worked.”
It’s possible he was feeling that frame a little more than usual on this particular morning: he’d just returned from a three-night visit to New York, where he and his wife, the actress Keeley Hawes, had attended the Met Gala. Those are the kinds of circles Macfadyen moves in now, aren’t they, now that Succession has elevated his profile far beyond British shores? He laughed. “It doesn’t feel glamorous — you’re sweating in tight clothes,” he said.
“But it was great. Sort of bonkers. There are so many very famous people, it’s exhausting in itself trying to get them all into your eyeballs. You arrive and we walked up this huge staircase, and at the top is Anna Wintour and the hosts, Chris Hemsworth, Jennifer Lopez, Bad Bunny… The entrances are staggered, so you feel as though you’re the only ones there. It’s completely surreal. And the Met is empty and beautiful. It feels like a real magic trick.”
is no more: it ran for four seasons between 2018 and 2023, cannibalising , and 2024 should also see the release of , a dark thriller for Amazon in which he joins Nicole Kidman and Gael García Bernal. He’ll spend the summer shooting , a Netflix series that tells the wild story of President James Garfield’s assassination at the hands of Charles Guiteau in 1881. Macfadyen plays the killer.
