- Warning: There are major spoilers ahead for season four, episode three of "Succession."
- In a post-episode featurette, showrunner Jesse Armstrong explained killing off a major character.
The fourth and final season of "Succession" is only a few episodes in, but showrunner Jesse Armstrong has upped the ante by killing off a major character.
On Sunday night's episode, titled "Connor's Wedding," half-sibling Connor Roy's (Alan Ruck) wedding to Willa Ferreyra (Justine Lupe) gets rocked by the simultaneously anticipated, yet sudden death of the show's patriarch and Waystar Royco founder Logan Roy (Brian Cox).
"I was very nervous to tell him 'cause there's lots of anxieties about whether it's the right creative decision, and there's anxieties that someone who I love working with and who's been at the center of the show will feel rejected on a human level for not being in it anymore when he's been so central to the whole thing," Armstrong said in a post-episode interview as part of HBO's behind-the-episode featurette, "Controlling the Narrative."
Armstrong, who is also the creator and executive producer of the Emmy-winning HBO series, added that Cox "took it like a total pro."
"He was professional and decent and kind enough to make it a pretty good meeting but a sad and significant one," he said.
"When you work with the genius of somebody like Jesse, it's always sad when that comes to an end, there's no question about it, because you've had such great respect," Cox said.
Cox told Deadline and Vulture that he was aware prior to heading into season four that Logan would get killed off. He said he filmed the death scene back in July and was proud of himself for keeping the secret for so long.
"It's gonna be hard when the public see that he's gone in episode three," Cox said in the HBO featurette. "I think they're gonna find it tough 'cause they've lived with Logan for so long, so they're gonna miss him."
Logan's demise has loomed over "Succession" since its premiere in 2018. And in an interview published with The New Yorker in February, Armstrong promised that the final season would deliver on naming a successor to Logan's media empire.
But even so, Logan's death occurring so early in the season, with seven episodes still left to be released, managed to shock audiences and the Roy kids — who learned the news via a phone call.
His conclusion happened off-camera, in the bathroom of a private plane while en route to Sweden to discuss the sale of Waystar Royco to Lukas Matsson's (Alexander Skarsgard) GoJo.
Despite multiple attempts at chest compressions, Logan couldn't be saved and was pronounced dead upon the plane's return to Teterboro, New Jersey that afternoon.
In the HBO featurette, Armstrong said that Logan's death taking place off-camera was deliberate.
"We didn't really have a death scene for Logan, and that was obviously intentional," he said. "We wanted to capture a feeling of death that people experience in the modern era, of separation of communication over phone and email."
Armstrong said that narratively, this death happening at this point in the season keeps audiences on their toes and leaves enough room to explore the aftermath as the Roy siblings and the executives vie for control.
"There's a couple of factors in where Logan's death falls in our narrative trajectory," he said. "One is a sort of base one, that maybe it will surprise people. I am not immune from such thoughts as wanting to keep the show exciting and fresh."
Strong continued: "Much more prominent was the feeling that if we do this, we don't want to see people crying, have a funeral, and be done with the show. We want to see how a death of someone significant rebounds around a family."