Nicholas Braun arrived on Long Island by train, and then he took a car to the compound. This was three years ago. Braun had been invited to a weekend-long party at a fancy home owned by friends of the American actor Jeremy Strong, who Braun knew from the set of the Emmy Award-winning television show Succession, in which they both star. At the compound he was patted down by members of the secret service, which startled him at first, and then delighted him. (He later referred to the agents as “my boys”.) As guests flashed around, Braun remembers thinking, “How is it I’ve ended up here, at a party in a locked-down compound that has a federal agency working the door?” And then the Clintons arrived.
By this point, Braun had filmed just one series of Succession, the HBO juggernaut, which revolves around and pillories the Roy family, a venomous media dynasty in the mould of the Murdochs. (Perhaps you’ve heard of it.) Braun plays Greg Hirsch, a distant cousin and Roy family satellite who, as the show progresses, finds himself increasingly surrounded by powerful and prestigious people and the mucky opulence in which they operate, and becomes both seduced and confused by his new surroundings, often to comic effect.
The compound party, then, could have been one attended by Greg, but was instead attended by Braun, a nod to the fact he’d newly become famous. He and Hillary spoke for a few minutes before she made her excuses and moved on. But Bill and Braun chatted intimately, on first-name terms, for half an hour. At least part of their conversation involved Bill, a former president of the United States, pitching ideas about which high society families Succession’s writers should lambast next. When Braun later recounted the story, drily but sincerely, on an American late-night show, it was with disbelief that the host asked, “You called him Bill?”
“Yeah,” Braun said, smiling gamely.
“And he liked that?”
“I think so!”
Braun and I first talk on a fine Tuesday morning in August, while he walks around lower Manhattan, where he lives, and I appear on his phone. I’ve asked him about the Clinton episode, to understand how his life has changed over the past few years, now Succession has become one of the most talked-about shows on television and Cousin Greg one of its most popular characters.
“You know,” he says, “I saw Bill again this weekend.”
He’s smiling but ever-so-slightly bashful.
“Where?” I ask.
“At the same party I met him three years ago. And Hillary was there, too. He’s a kind guy. And he said some nice things about the show. Because he’s seen it now – he hadn’t seen the show back then. So it was nice. Nice of him to remember me, to have seen it, to have nice things to say. I mean, I reminded him. I said, ‘Hey, Bill, we met at this party a few years ago.’ And he grabbed me by the shoulder and he brought me into his conversation…” He shakes his head in disbelief. “It was wild.”
Braun is still adjusting to his newfound status. He finds it difficult nowadays to walk down the street without someone shouting, “Greg!” or “I fucking love Greg!” or, as happened recently, girls shrieking at him. It doesn’t help that, at 6ft 7in, he is not inconspicuous in public. Part of Braun’s allure is his accessibility, in real life and online. (To organise this interview, I sent him a message on Instagram, which he read and forwarded to his publicist, a non-Hollywood move.) In a recent New York magazine article, Braun was described as “Succession-famous, but also, like, every-woman-I-know-under-40-is-trying-to-kiss-him famous.” Brian Cox, who plays Logan Roy, Succession’s noxious family patriarch, told me: “Nick has quite a following among the young female fans, who adore him and either want to marry or mother him.” A fortnight ago, a round of news stories revealed the sudden arrival of a Cousin Greg-inspired sex toy, which, it was noted, gave alternative meaning to the label “Succession-head”, a sobriquet used by devoted fans of the show. Braun is finding his position as sex symbol and cultural antihero tricky to come to terms with. “It’s great on the one hand,” he says. “It means, ‘Oh, I can probably get more work.’ Better prospects for me, because of the success. The other part of it is, when Succession comes back, I’ll be more aware of, you know, people know who I am. It’s new. It’s a new thing. And sometimes it get’s a bit…” He pauses. “Like, it was nice when we had to wear masks every day.”
Because Cousin Greg is Braun’s best-known character, people often confuse them as one and the same, and their identities seem warped and wrapped up together. While filming season two, Cox often referred to Braun’s character as Nick, rather than Greg, because he found them to be so similar. Braun is gracious on the matter. “I have the same face and I have the same voice and I generally have the same haircut. It’s pretty easy for someone to be like, ‘Oh, yeah, looks like him, sounds like him, so… Greg!’” But it’s also true he puts a lot of himself into the role, what he describes as “some of my quirkiness, or awkwardness or, like, fear, or the spasmy kind of stuff that comes out of me”. In real life, Braun will try to withhold these characteristics. But Greg is Braun “without a guard, a guard I would usually put on in life, where I’m like, ‘Ah, I don’t think I should let that part of me run totally free, because people might feel weirded out.’ With Greg I’m like, ‘That part you usually put a gate around? Why don’t you just let that part go?’”
In conversation, Braun is more considered, more reflective, and less hectically uncertain than Greg. He often thinks for so long before answering questions that I have time to focus on the ambient sounds of Manhattan. Several of Braun’s Succession co-stars describe him as a determined and hugely talented colleague. (In an email, Matthew Macfadyen, who plays Tom Wambsgans, Greg’s tormenting boss, called Braun “a brilliant, natural, instinctive actor”.) Assuming Greg to be Braun’s alter ego undermines the work he’s put into creating a wildly idiosyncratic character. But they do share traits: like Greg, Braun is a master of the deadpan. Once during this call, Braun passed a fashion shoot and shouted, “Hey, do you guys need an actor?” in a tone that could have been joking or serious. The British playwright Lucy Prebble, a Succession writer, told me, “A number of times I’ve been chatting with Nick on set and suddenly been unsure if we are doing ‘a bit’ or speaking frankly.” She added: “Nick is a comic actor of rare talent. Sometimes ‘comic actor’ can feel like a backhanded compliment, as if it is less than ‘actor’, but it really isn’t. You have to be a fantastic actor and also innately understand and control comedy.”
Succession has changed Braun’s life. He’s in no doubt the show has led to him winning big parts in other zeitgeisty projects, including Zola, a black comedy based on a wildly popular Twitter thread by A’Ziah King, a part-time stripper, and Cat Person, a film inspired by a viral New Yorker story, that he is beginning to work on now.
I ask, “In what other ways has the show changed things for you?”
He pauses thoughtfully.
“You know, things are just easier,” he says. “I can have a meeting with someone now that I wouldn’t have met pre-Succession.” The Clintons, for example. Or Robert Downey Jr, whose home he recently visited, “and all of a sudden you’re in front of someone you’ve been watching so long, and they’ve seen my work.” At a party not long ago, Sean Penn approached Braun as any other mega-fan would; in a video online, Jon Bon Jovi fawns over him. Braun seems disbelieving of these encounters, as though he’s living a life other than his own. “Artistically, so many things open up for you,” he says. “You meet someone at an awards show – back when we could go to awards shows – and that someone has seen my work now. You know, for a lot of years, nobody was really seeing the stuff I was doing. So that’s a great thing, being part of something people are watching, that people I revere are watching. Now I’m like, ‘Oh, I’m on your radar?’’’
When Braun was six, his father ended a lifelong career as a record-sleeve designer and took up acting. Braun’s parents had recently divorced and Braun, who had grown up in New York, shuttled between Connecticut, where he lived with his mother and brother, and Manhattan, to spend odd weekends with his father. Very quickly, Braun decided he wanted to become an actor, too, and whenever his dad had an upcoming audition, the pair would read scenes together. “I’d help him memorise his lines, correct him when he was wrong. And I would get into playing the other person, even if it was a romantic interest, so suddenly I’d be doing this scene with my dad from Streetcar or something.” He experienced acting as a kind of retreat. “I think I felt a bit muted or shut down emotionally as a kid in my mum’s house. Maybe that was a post-divorce thing. Whatever. But it felt very freeing to be able to, like, yell. To have a script to tell me what emotions I should share. It gave me permission to be expressive at a time when I think I wasn’t being so expressive.”
It’s a week after our first conversation, another fine day in New York. Braun had worn a beard for our first call; now it’s longer but cut more sharply, to give a sculpted look. We’re on the phone again.
“Dad sensed I was into it,” he continues. “He was doing all these open calls and I think I was just jealous, like, ‘You’re going for all these parts?’” His father was writing notes to casting directors and hunting for an agent, and Braun wanted to do that, too. “The thrill of an audition sounded good,” he recalls. “So did beating other people for a part. I just felt capable of it. And it was exciting. The thing he and I were doing in his living room, I could go do that for myself. So we auditioned for things… together.”
The first part Braun won, he and his father won together: a short film titled Rocky and Pop’s Search for the Holy Mackerel. Braun was seven. He played Rocky; his father played Pop. They were paid in food on set and a hard copy of the final production. Braun’s first headshot was taken in Central Park and features a sweet six-year-old boy, smiling in a baseball cap. He was going by Nicky at the time. Whenever he sent one to a casting director, he’d attach a small, handwritten note he thought might help his chances of getting noticed: Hey, I just shot my first short film! Hi, I just did a play at the Westport Art Centre in Connecticut! Soon enough Braun took up acting classes like his father, and he began to audition relentlessly – he found it irresistible. Often his mum would pull him out of school early so he could make a 5pm casting in Manhattan. He picked up small parts here and there, and whenever he finished a project he’d frantically update his CV. At 11, he won his first leading role in a TV feature, Walter and Henry, which was filmed during a school holiday and earned him $30,000 and an agent. He’d been to the audition with his father. “I knew I’d got it as soon as I left the room,” Braun recalls. In the street afterwards, he turned around and shouted, “I fucking nailed it, Daddy!”
I ask, “Where did the determination come from?”
“I mean, I guess I didn’t like the suburbs that much,” he says. “I just didn’t want to be in Connecticut. I wanted to be in the city. And I didn’t come from much money, so I had this drive to make money, to make something of myself.” As a kid, Braun would buy soft drinks from a petrol station and “hope to get some margins” by selling them outside his house. Later he started a lawn-care business, and “carried a leaf blower around”. His surroundings both distressed him and urged him on. “We were living in one of the wealthiest towns in Connecticut,” he says, “but we didn’t have a big house or anything, and I was sleeping over at friends’ houses that were huge.”
“You wanted that life,” I say.
“Yeah,” he says. “You know, I told my mum I didn’t like to drive down streets with big houses. It made me too upset.”
“Because you didn’t have that?”
“I guess so. Life seemed pretty good for those people.”
Braun didn’t grow up poor, but neither was he rich. When he discusses his early ambitions, they strike me as similar to those of Cousin Greg – an urgent, jumbled aspiration for a kind of wealth that feels both close and far away.
“Never thought about that,” Braun says. “But, yeah. The allure of it. The allure you project on to these people. ‘Man, he’s got a tennis court? At his house? They’ve got a gate that opens automatically?’”
He pauses.
“You know, you can sleep at a friend’s house. But at the end of the day your mum’s coming over to drive you home.”
Before he landed the role of Cousin Greg, Braun had gone to San Francisco to live with his brother, who is two years younger. As kids, they had slept on bunkbeds. Now they were sharing a double: “Sleeping together, making the bed together, eating together.” Braun was 30 when he got Succession. (He is now 33.) Over the previous decade he’d appeared in various Hollywood productions – How To Be Single with Dakota Johnson; The Watch with Vince Vaughn, Jonah Hill, Ben Stiller and Richard Ayoade – but nothing had resulted in major success, and a number of his projects never made it out of the starting gate. He thought briefly about quitting. “There were several things where I was like, ‘Well, this could be the thing, or this could be the thing.’” But no. He worried he wasn’t networking effectively. “I was kind of nervous around some of those actors. I didn’t really know how to be myself outside the scenes.” He would think: “Man, you don’t play the game well enough. You didn’t get Vince Vaughn’s number!”
I ask why he thought this was the case.
“I just have a tough time, sometimes, feeling, you know, at ease, or comfortable,” he says. “It’s not something I can control. It’s just what happens. Trust me, I try. I think, ‘Why does this fucking happen?!’ But it does.”
On the set of Succession, Braun will often turn to Mark Mylod, one of the show’s directors, to discuss his performance in a scene. “I’ll be like, ‘I don’t know if that was any good. I was doing this and that and…’ I’m just super critical. And he’ll turn around and say” – he puts on an almost-British accent – “‘Don’t be daft, I loved it, really lovely.’ Sometimes I have to be told.” Braun is grateful to have landed a part in a show whose cast is often reported to be familial. (He describes his colleagues as “a loving, supportive group”.) Much of Succession’s third season was filmed across Europe last summer, after a long pandemic-forced break, during which the show won several Emmys and was nominated for several more. Sometimes, that pressure could be too much for Braun to bear. “Starting this season, I was like, ‘All right, I hope I give the people what they want this year…’” he says. “I had to kill that pretty quickly. It doesn’t help you in the process.” Longstanding rumours involve Greg playing a larger role in coming episodes, which will please fans, many of whom consider the character as an audience surrogate – his meekness is human, like ours – or even some kind of moral compass, no matter how passively corrupted he becomes. On this Braun is vague. “I don’t think he’s evil intentioned,” he says, of Season-three Greg. “Among a group of assholes, he’s not an outright asshole.” Many of Succession’s characters, he continues, are emotionally “invulnerable”. Greg is not this. Neither is Braun. “Over time, I’ve felt better being honest than hiding,” he said during our first call, of his feelings. “But there’s a line. Sometimes I’m like, ‘You don’t have to tell people exactly what you’re thinking… You can close that down a little bit.”
Succession, a Sky exclusive, is available on Sky and NOW on Mondays at 9pm, and on demand
Styling by Chloe Hartstein; grooming by Rheanne White at traceymattingly.com; photographer’s assistants Nathan Martin and Roy Beeson; shot at Pier 59 Studio, New York