Succession Director Explains Why That Major Death Happened Off-Screen

By Charlie Ridgely

There are still seven episodes left of Succession before the award-winning HBO series comes to a close, but creator Jesse Armstrong didn't wait until the very end to show his hand. The third episode of Succession's final season aired on Sunday night and shocked viewers with the sudden death of Logan Roy. The powerhouse media mogul is no more, leaving a power vacuum at the center of Waystar-Royco.

Instead of focusing on Logan during his death, Succession made the surprising and brilliant decision to keep the attention completely on his children. Their reactions told the entire story, as the audience found out over a phone call, just as the Roys did on the show. Logan's end was unique in both execution and timing, leading fans to call the episode one of the best on television in quite some time.

Mark Mylod, who directed the episode, opened up to EW about the difficult and intriguing decision not to show very much of Logan throughout his death process. An actor like Brian Cox could've done a whole lot with those scenes, but Mylod and Armstrong wanted to make the episode feel authentic to Logan's kids.

"This is slightly speaking for Jesse [Armstrong], but I think I can represent him accurately, the idea was to really try to represent a modern life, a modern death, as accurately as possible, as well as obviously to a certain extent to create the biggest surprise as we could," Mylod explained. "We're not above that certainly. But there was that idea that in modern life, unless it's cancer or something where it's more expected, if it's a sudden death then the reality is, it's a phone call, it's an email, it's a text. It's messy. And this just seemed right to us as well as dramatically surprising."

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"There were key decisions to make of how much we would see or not of Brian's character," he continued. "Whenever I put the camera on him, lying on the floor, it felt oddly disrespectful, so I didn't, except for one very deliberate moment where the camera specifically sees that it is Logan there. It felt intense and it still does remembering it."

With Logan gone, the entire framework of Succession has been altered as it barrels towards its series finale in May. 

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