Alan Ruck stars as Connor Roy, the oldest child of Logan Roy, in HBO’s critically-acclaimed series Succession. Connor is quite the oddball, and he remains a bit of a mystery to many viewers. HollywoodLife talked EXCLUSIVELY with Alan about playing such a fascinating character with many, many layers.
“I’ve played other damaged people, but Connor’s got a lot going on,” Alan told HollywoodLife while promoting his new LiftMaster campaign. “I really think that his emotional development kind of came to a grinding halt when he was 8 years old, and his parents got divorced. I don’t think he ever really recovered from that. And he’s not dumb. I mean, a lot of people say that Connor is so stupid. If you assess him by any business world metric, yeah, he’s a disaster. But he reads a lot. He knows a lot about 19th-century history. He’s a Napoleon buff. He apparently knew a lot about yurts because he was starting a yurt selling business. So he’s an eccentric dude, and he’s got some delusional disorder problems, but he’s interesting.”
Alan is well aware that Connor doesn’t get half as much of the attention as his younger siblings — Kendall, Roman, and Shiv — get from their father. “I call them the golden trio because the old man divorced my mother who it’s been alluded to had some mental challenges, and then he married the dragon lady and then had the golden trio,” Alan continued. “They could sort of do no wrong. Best in their class, member of all the clubs, blah, blah, blah. Then, Connor has been a little socially awkward. I think maybe there was some like ADHD stuff going on that wasn’t properly diagnosed. But he’s a 50-something mess.”
The actor doesn’t know anything about the storylines of season 3, which was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. “Our writers play it very close to the vest in terms of divulging any sort of forthcoming story arcs,” Alan admitted. “I couldn’t tell you what’s going to happen. I don’t know what’s going to happen with anybody.” However, Alan did say he personally has “high hopes for Roman, of all people. Potty mouth Roman, I think he might rise to the occasion.”
According to Alan, season 3 will start filming “in the middle of November in New York.” There’s no premiere date yet, but he presumes season 3 will air “sometime in 2021.”
Before Succession, Alan already had a storied career in Hollywood. His breakout role was playing Cameron Frye, the best friend of Ferris Bueller, in the iconic Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. In the film, Ferris persuaded Cameron to take his dad’s classic sports car out for a day of adventures. As we all know, shenanigans ensued. Alan spoke about his partnership with LiftMaster and the perks of having a smart garage with a view.
“They have this new product called Secure View,” told HollywoodLife while sitting in front of a “delightful recreation” of the garage from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. “It’s a smart garage door opener that has an integrated video camera, it has two-way communication, and you can control it on your smartphone with this app called myQ. So you can have packages delivered to your house, and it’s just sort of an extra line of security you can add to your house. It’s innovative, and it’s a really cool product.” Alan admitted that he never imagined back in 1986 that technology would be where it is today.
“It’s moving way too fast for me,” he said. “I’m old school. I think we should go back to landlines and snail-mail. It scares me. But this is cool. This is a very useful device.”
