Who's afraid of Jeremy Strong?

GQ runs an online series called Ten Things I Can’t Live Without, in which a celebrity shares their ten most valued possessions. It’s light and fun – Formula 1 drivers talking about travel pillows, pop stars enthusing over their AirPods. Or at least, it was, until Jeremy Strong showed up.

Gone were the sneakers and noise-cancelling headphones. In came a series of deeply personal artefacts – each essential to his process as an actor. A cup from his first play. A handwritten note for an ad-libbed bedtime story he’d planned to tell his on-screen children in Succession (the scene never made the cut). A pair of dog tags he’d commissioned himself, engraved with a line from a Vietnam War letter he’d found in his research.

Then came the books and music. Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations. A collection of work from English painter Howard Hodgkin. Wallace Stegner’s The Spectator Bird, Rilke’s early letters, Alma Mahler-Werfel’s diaries.

Halfway through, he clocks the film crew’s stunned silence. “Are people normally doing face cream and stuff like that? Is this really heavy?”

Strong finishes with his final book: the first in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. “The most honest expression of life I’ve ever read anywhere,” he says.

“He writes in an incredibly granular way. He’ll spend forty pages talking about taking his daughter to a party. The cumulative effect of it, by being in such granular detail of life, is you see the beauty and sacredness in those small moments. And you realise: there are no small moments.”

Then the video ends. What’s clear – not just from watching it in full, but from Strong’s interpretation of Knausgaard – is that he isn’t merely talking about books and records. He’s articulating a philosophy of work. It’s one that unsettles many.

Strong, when nominated for an Oscar earlier this year, issued a statement. Instead of the usual self-deprecating tweet or Instagram story, this was a full, unguarded declaration of his belief in genuine, dedicated work:

“I remember spending the night on cold metal bleachers outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in 1993 with my father to watch the actors and actresses arrive at the 65th Academy Awards. I remember being unable to sleep because of how exciting it was to be close to that world. I have not lost that feeling of excitement; I feel it every time I go to set or drive onto a lot or begin rehearsals. I have devoted my life to the attempt to do genuine work that would be worthy of this honor.”

This approach to work is unsettling to many. Famously, the actor was subject to a 2021 New Yorker profile that was, to put it mildly, unkind about him and his process. Even those who defend him usually feel the need to do so in a slightly ironic, knowing way.

It’s not exactly his seriousness that sets him as an outsider. In fact, as a society we love seriousness more than ever.

Just look at the responses to actors geeking out in the Criterion Closet, Jon Gruden gazing lovingly at quarterback Andrew Luck drawing up a play from memory, or Timothee Chalamet’s declaration at the recent SAG awards of his desire for greatness.

The issue we have with Strong is a different one. He shows us what seriousness actually takes: and so disabusing us of the notion that it can be achieved without a significant personal cost.

Because seriousness is more than a state of mind, or simply having the belief that the work you do is important.

It’s something, as Strong says about Knausgaard, to be practiced every single day - in each small moment.

Here’s how Strong approached a 30-second ad for Dunkin’ Donuts:

“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.”

For most of us there’s a spectrum of seriousness. For Strong, there is not. He gives every piece of work equal importance.

Seriousness doesn’t necessarily mean being a serious person. Indeed, it’s often the least serious people who are most serious about their craft.

Take the host of this year’s Oscars, Conan O’Brien: a William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor obsessive who channels his creative genius into dancing on-stage next to a worm from Dune II playing chopsticks on the piano.

Returning back to Strong:

“I wanted to find a way to say that you can take your work incredibly seriously while not taking yourself all that seriously.”

This sensibility, and philosophy of work, matters to the rest of us because - as I wrote last week - the creative economy Strong and Conan inhabit is coming for the rest of us.

And when we talk of knowledge work becoming more creative, or more human - we never take the next step and ask what this kind of work actually looks like. If you want to know, watch Jeremy Strong’s GQ video.

His is a discipline where obsession isn’t just rewarded but required.

Scratch the surface of anyone doing great, human work – from comics like Conan to NFL quarterbacks – and you’ll find the same thing. Some are just better at hiding it.

In a world that discourages taking things seriously, it takes courage to say, I care about this. It matters that I’m doing it.

Strong might seem like an outlier, but in the years ahead, producing anything of value will likely require all of us to become a little more like him.

That’s not to say you need to go to the extreme lengths of Strong or those he namechecked in his GQ interview. In My Struggle, the author often takes seriousness about life to a near parodic level - one of my personal favourites is Knausgaard’s refusal to use the wheels on a wheely suitcase.

The reason? "Why should you live in a world without feeling its weight?"

This might all seem a bit heavy. But the transition to a new kind of work in the age of AI will be easier than we think, because we already have a wealth of material on what it takes to do great creative work.

Indeed, shortly before his Oscar nomination, Strong finally did something he’d wanted to do for years: he met the noted wheely-suitcase-hater himself at an event in Copenhagen.

In their conversation, it was Knausgaard’s turn to confess.

His great mistake, he realised, was thinking he was alone in his struggle:

"The feeling of being incredibly private and realising that your experiences are incredibly common. It was almost shocking to me.”

So here’s to Jeremy Strong.

No small people. No small moments. Just a whole lot of weight.

aled@ashore.io