[This story contains spoilers for the seventh episode of Succession season four, “Tailgate Party.”]
With three episodes left in the series, Succession ended its latest episode with a major blowup.
After dancing a strategic waltz around the status of their relationship all season long, Shiv Roy (Sarah Snook) and Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen) finally decided to confront one another and clear the air. Shiv, who hasn’t yet told her estranged husband that she is pregnant (likely with his baby), provoked Tom to air out all of his grievances while the pair were co-hosting the Election Eve tailgate party during the seventh episode of the HBO drama’s final season.
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“Tailgate Party” followed an episode that had suggested the pair were pausing their divorce and rekindling — director Lorene Scafaria told The Hollywood Reporter last week of their honest conversation in “Living+”: “Their love is messed up. There’s something pure, but it’s messed up. … And it kind of does bring them together and make him the right man for her, in a way.” But this week, the Shiv-Tom whiplash continued and ended on a new low. The episode began with Tom complaining about being so tired from their late-night sexcapades (with explicit text messages to prove it) and ended with the pair having a knock-down, drag-out fight outside of their Manhattan apartment for their crowd of elite media guests inside to witness.
“It was deliciously set because we’re on the balcony of our apartment and everybody is inside looking at us in this pre-Election party. So it’s sort of awful. They can’t hear it exactly, but they can see we’re having a screaming match. So that added a wonderful layer to it,” said Macfadyen, speaking after the episode on the official Succession podcast, unpacking the conversation that can never be taken back.
The co-hosts of the Election Eve soirée took to their balcony to confront Shiv suggesting Tom will be fired when Lukas Matsson’s (Alexander Skarsgård) GoJo acquires Waystar Royco, and everything else that has been bubbling under the surface of their marriage. The conversation saw them each hurl both insults and truths at one another, with Tom telling Shiv she is “incapable of love and maybe not a good person to have children,” and Shiv telling Tom, “I don’t like you; I don’t even care about you” when Tom calls her broken for never getting her father, Logan Roy’s (Brian Cox), approval.
The episode ended with each of them sleeping alone in their shared apartment, with an expression that left much to be desired as a sleepless Tom stared at the ceiling.
“It’s just the fucking injustice that he feels,” explains Macfadyen of what caused Tom to explode. “He thought maybe they were in a good place and he realizes she spent the whole party, when they were supposed to be throwing it together, sort of telling everybody he was heading for the chop. So, something breaks.”
Creator Jesse Armstrong and the writers have brought Macfadyen and Snook several meaty scenes to chew on as scene partners in this fourth and final season of the Emmy-winning saga. But Macfadyen tells journalist and host Kara Swisher, “Nothing like this. The lid has not come off in this way.”
He continues, “It just comes to a head. The facade goes and he can’t accept it. I remember in the scene feeling the terrible rage at the injustice of it. He spends a lot of the time being diplomatic and politick and swallowing his tongue and letting her win and letting her have the last word, and maybe he doesn’t this time.”
Macfadyen feels that Tom is less damaged than Shiv, simply because she’s a child who has suffered under Logan Roy. “They don’t feel loved by either of their parents, so maybe you can’t love yourself or you can’t love anybody else and you don’t have a real confidence. And I don’t think that’s true of Tom, necessarily,” he says.
He agrees, however, with some of Shiv’s charges against Tom. Namely, that he only married her because of her DNA. But he also thinks they met at the right time.
“I think [it was] partly attraction to her surname and her father and the business and all that stuff,” he says. “I think there was a strong sexual attraction, and they had a laugh. And we decided she was in a very, very bad way when they met. She’d come out of an awful, heartbreaking relationship and he was there to pick up the pieces and he was just a safe pair of hands. And he quite liked playing that role.”
Macfadyen feels that, at this point, Tom is a “precarious” character because of how desperate he is, now faced with not only losing his job but also his status among the Roy family: “He’s treading water. His heart rate is racing and he’s sort of under … he’s sinking a little bit.”
Skarsgård, meanwhile, spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about wedging his character between Shiv and Tom, but mainly between Shiv and brothers Kendall (Jeremy Strong) and Roman (Kieran Culkin). “He’s one hundred percent using her,” he said of Lukas. “He smells blood in the water, this friction between the siblings. He smells the opening. He does move fast and break things, but he can read people. He sees that in Shiv, and he goes after that. It’s worked. She’s let him in. Where we’re at now, he’s still feeling the waters and testing her out. Is she also a charlatan? Is she just like her siblings, a little Nepo Baby, or does she have what it takes? That’s what he’s trying to figure out.”
Succession releases new episodes Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO and Max. Follow along with THR‘s Succession final season coverage.
