“It's always Cousin Greg. It's never Greg,” says Nicholas Braun. “Or Greg the Egg.”
As the actor behind Succession’s fan-favorite underdog, Braun’s gotten used to hearing the rogue “Cousin Greg!” called out on the street. Fans will tell him, “You’re going to get all the money,” or, “You're going to be the CEO. Take them down.” The lone goldfish swimming in the HBO show’s sea of Murdochian sharks, Greg’s an easy man to root for.
That's true of Braun as well. The 6' 7" actor shares his character's gangly candor—but in situations where Greg is mostly prone to blunder, Braun prevails. His co-star Jeremy Strong, known to viewers as Kendall Roy, has seen Braun effortlessly charm even the most jaded audience: fellow celebrities. Strong took him to a party in the Hamptons, where Braun sidled up to the Clintons. “Each time I turned around there was Nick hobnobbing with Hilary, with President Clinton, with Paul McCartney,” Strong recalls. “He would just walk right up to them and strike up a conversation. I think he told Paul McCartney how much he dug his pants or something and then they ended up chatting away for ages.”
Strong also brought Braun along to a 4th of July party at Robert Downey, Jr.’s place. (Strong assures me that Downey is a fan of Succession, Cousin Greg, and Nicholas Braun—the holy trinity.) Once, Strong looked around to make sure Braun was getting along with the crowd. “He had just wandered over to sit down and join Robert, who was smoking a cigar with a friend,” Strong says. “And there was Nick, Zelig-like, belonging there already, utterly authentic and at home with other people.”
When I sit down to chat with him, I get the Downey treatment too. The actor has opted for a casual outfit—a polo shirt from a golf club where Succession had filmed, white sneakers, and cuffed khakis. He is solicitous and earnest and though he had mentioned he was hungry, he left the tuna melt in front of him untouched, for fear of being rude.
Eventually, though, he apologized and asked if it was okay to eat. I apologized in return for keeping him from his meal. “No, no, no,” he says. “I was self-restricting, because I was like, ‘Well, that's going to be sloppy,’ but I'm so hungry.” Tuna melts, it turns out, are a staple of Braun’s diet. “It's probably a once a week kind of a thing.”
It’s moments like these when flashes of Cousin Greg come through—it’s hard to figure out exactly what Braun will say next. His costar Sarah Snook, who plays the cunning Shiv Roy on the show, says it’s “like [he’s] going toward the left, and then he changes thought about halfway through the sentence and goes back to something else, and then changes halfway through that one and goes back to the original.”
Unlike his onscreen persona, Braun isn’t aimless. He also wouldn’t be foolish enough to flunk out of the family business’s management training program, as Greg memorably did in Succession’s pilot episode, after getting high and puking inside an amusement park costume.
Braun has never wandered, career-wise. Born and raised on Long Island, he started acting at five years old, when his father—a legend in the music world, having collaborated with the likes of Andy Warhol on designs for The Velvet Underground and The Rolling Stones—decided to pivot to the same career, at the same time.
“At this point, he's 54 years old,” Braun remembered. His dad (pictured here on Braun's delightful and active Instagram feed, in a photo by his son) started going to acting classes, and “he would work on his scenes with me, or read his audition sides with me, or teach me a technique he'd learned that week.”
Soon enough, the Brauns started auditioning together. “My dad got an illegal account [to look at casting calls online]. And so, we would both go through it every day and send out little postcards to casting directors hoping to get auditions,” Braun recalls, smiling. “And I don't know if those postcards ever yielded anything, but it was a fun morning activity. To spot something and say, ‘Dad, you'd be really good for this.’” It’s perhaps the most wholesome entrée into child acting that I’ve ever heard—Braun senior is the anti-Mama Rose.
Eventually, Braun’s career started picking up, leading to a role in the Disney Channel flick Sky High—but after that, his parents refused to let him skip out on school (Saint Mark’s, a boarding school in Massachusetts) for another part. He’d resume his paused aspirations later—ultimately leaving Los Angeles’s Occidental College after two years to do so—winning parts in The Perks of Being a Wallflower and the TV adaptation of 10 Things I Hate About You. More recent credits include How to Be Single and Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.
Braun says he’s had occasional doubts about his professional path, but mostly, he just really likes acting. “I think it gives me a permission to not repress my feelings, and not hide true emotion, which I think I do in my life a lot,” he says. “I’m able to go fully into emotions as opposed to being like, ‘Well, I feel this, but I probably shouldn't because it'll be too offensive or too aggressive or too sad or too anything,’ you know?”
I do know what he means, although I’m a little surprised to hear that he feels he has to hold things in. Braun's guilelessness may be the quality that, above all others, unites him and his character. Well, that and a desire to connect. Braun has nothing but empathy for Cousin Greg’s near-constant bewilderment. “I see people in New York sometimes, like interns,” he says. “And I'm like, Oh, there's... That's a Greg. There's a Greg. I'm fond of those people when I see them.”
Just about everyone seems to be fond of Cousin Greg. The character has inspired a fervent, global fan base. Snook recalls meeting Greg the Egg-heads as far away as Croatia. “They turned around and absolutely flipped that it was Cousin Greg,” she says. “[Nick] was like, ‘Whoa. Hello.’”
Critics, too, have heaped praise on Braun’s character. The New Yorker christened Cousin Greg a “hall-of-fame naïf,” who’s “both the Nick Carraway and the T. J. Eckleburg of the narrative.” To Vanity Fair, he’s a “national treasure.”
There is, after all, an indelible appeal to watching the Roy family’s once-forgotten relative wedge himself into their game of ten-dimensional chess. Greg’s most memorable scenes are shared with another subjugated, Roy-adjacent figure, Shiv's husband Tom Wambsgans, played by Matthew Macfadyen as an ambitious, weaselly, and very funny yes man. In Greg, Tom sees a person he can make use of, a person even lower on the family totem pole than himself.
Adam McKay, who directed Succession’s pilot and is an executive producer on the show, says he didn’t see Tom and Greg’s anti-chemistry coming, but when they got on set, it was immediately obvious that the duo had something. They’ve crafted one of the most hilariously dysfunctional relationships on television—raising the art of ritual humiliation to new heights.
That Tom & Greg Magic:
Their onscreen exchanges are varying degrees of unpleasant, verbally (and occasionally physically) abusive, but Macfadyen and Braun relish them—even if it’s a challenge to avoid breaking character. “If I see his face twitch even slightly, I’m gone,” Macfadyen says. “I just collapse and we have to cut. It’s a challenge, but it’s delicious.”
“I just can't keep it together,” says Braun.
Cousin Greg’s singular brand of amateurism is mostly summoned from Braun’s expertly inept performance—as McKay says, “that Greg energy has to just be the Greg energy”—but it also helps that Braun is so tall. There is something wonderful about watching Greg emotionally shrink in front of pater familias Logan Roy, while still physically towering over him. When he’s in a group scene, Greg’s head is stranded several inches above the conversation, a visual manifestation of his disparate wavelength.
On other projects, Braun’s height has been a challenge to overcome. In the past, the crew has arranged an entire track of boxes, so a co-star might walk alongside him and fit in the same frame. But on Succession, his height is an asset, not something to be disguised.
His emotions, too, are an advantage, particularly his awe at his very talented co-stars. “I still feel a lot of fear or intimidation on set,” says Braun. “I let that stuff be there too if I'm feeling insecure. To be like, ‘Well, unfortunately, I'm going to be awkward as hell when the cameras aren't rolling today, but when they are, it'll feel really right.’”
Braun’s found other outlets, too. He’s written a screenplay, which he describes as a hybrid of Bachelor in Paradise and Midsommar, and explains that he’s been getting into photography in preparation for stepping behind the camera. He doesn’t go into details, but it sounds like he drew from his personal dating ordeals. I point out that he seems to like mining his own experiences for his work. “Yeah. That could be it,” Braun says, eyebrows slightly furrowed. “Thank you for figuring that out for me.”
I get another dose of the Greg/Braun sweetness when we part ways. “Do you feel good?” he asks at the end of our interview. Taken aback, I let out a chuckle. I feel good, I assure him. Does he? “Yeah,” Braun says. “It was really nice talking with you.”
It was really nice. And I can't wait to watch Bachelor in Midsommar.
Styling by Sarah Conly, Produced by David Murphy, Grooming by Melissa DeZarate. Alice the Pomeranian provided via the ASPCA.
Chloe is a News Writer for Townandcountrymag.com, where she covers royal news, from the latest additions to Meghan Markle’s staff to Queen Elizabeth’s monochrome fashions; she also writes about culture, often dissecting TV shows like The Marvelous Mrs Maisel and Killing Eve.
