(This story contains a major spoiler for Succession season four.)
Succession Star Dagmara Domińczyk says her own father died while she was filming the show’s major death scene, which made filming and ultimately watching the scene all the more emotional.
Domińczyk, who plays Karolina Novotney, public relations manager and member of Waystar Royco’s legal team in the HBO series, spoke with rolling stone about his character’s role in dealing with the crisis of Logan Roy’s sudden and shocking death on a plane. During the chat, the actress revealed that while filming the scene – one of the final two days of filming the Emmy-winning series’ fourth season in New York – her father died in Poland in the age of 69.
“Two days before shooting our very last day of Succession in New York, our very last day, two days before I arrived on set, my own father, who is, I would say, a softer, kinder Logan Roy, in the sense that he was the biggest presence and the greatest strength of my entire life for me and my sisters, this truly one-of-a-kind human being, has passed away suddenly at age 69. And we found out about it through a phone call from someone we had never met. He was in Poland at the time,” she recalls.
Her death shared eerie similarities to the one she played on screen, with the actress adding that it made ‘a very strange season for me’ to have to film Logan’s funeral at the time of her father’s. when she was miles away from him in New York. Jersey.
“It’s like the universe is really – I don’t know how it works, that the death of Succession and the death of Logan Roy coincided with the death of my fucking amazing and complicated father,” she said. “I had to work the next day. And obviously the funeral – I don’t even know if I’m even supposed to tell you there’s a funeral, but obviously we’re assuming there is – we shot that a few days before my dad died too .
As for the plane sequence, it was already “emotional” and I saw another Succession actors Sarah Snook, Kieran Culkin and Jeremy Strong calling on speakerphone as his part of the sequence was filmed. “They were calling on every take we did. We were on the plane of the scene, very intimate, (with) their voices and every time they called, you know, it was so emotional and so weird,” she said. It also involved that director Mark Mylod must have reminded her – before her father’s death – that while her performance choices for crying were “magnificent,” they weren’t necessarily in character.
“I am a very emotional person. I wear my heart on my sleeve. I had a hard time not crying on that plane. It was before my dad died, we shot the episode on the plane,” she explained. “And Mark Mylod would come in and say, ‘Dag, what you’re doing is really beautiful. But Karolina didn’t want to (cry.) She’s the voice of reason here. There are things to do. He’s a giant public figure. Please don’t cry.
Domińczyk added that beyond the initial experience of having to deal with the death of her father around the filming of an already emotional script in the series, she also had to deal with her grief again after the completion and the broadcast of the episode. THE Succession The actor said that while it might “sound crazy”, in some ways it almost became therapeutic to see how his character, Karolina, handled Logan’s death on the plane when she got an early glimpse watching him “alone at night with my dog on my husband’s recliner.
“My father passed away two months ago, but in terms of sudden and traumatic loss, it could have happened two days ago. That’s how I fucking feel. And I started watching the episode, and this vein started throbbing in my head. I thought I was going to have an aneurysm,” she continued, discussing her physical reaction to the episode screening. “And of course I cried and cried and thought it was awesome. The episode was so good and so tense and so amazingly orchestrated and set up, that for a while I was able to come out of my own grief and be right in the story.
Although it provided momentary relief, Domińczyk notes that everything was still “really, really, really difficult”, with those around him sending him messages of condolence as the parallels of what was happening became clearer to them. . Among that group were her husband, actor Patrick Wilson, as well as friends who texted about how “weird” the whole thing was. Especially as someone who had “always been afraid of suddenly dying, or dying without us, and that’s exactly what happened.”
“For reasons I can’t really say, since I was a very small girl, I was afraid that my father would die suddenly. And it happened. And so it’s been really crazy,” she said. “But there was Karolina, no frills on that plane, knowing with all her health issues and Logan’s issues and hospital stays that this day would come, and she has her fancy pen and notepad ready to go. leave.”
It was an experience the actress was suddenly quite familiar with, and so a Domińczyk confidently says the show was captured.
“With these dramatic, sudden and violent deaths, the first few days, there is this kind of shock. You do not believe it. And I think Succession really captured that,” she told the magazine. “You don’t see them completely falling apart, and of course my reaction in real life was like a fucking hurt animal, because he was hearing something that you’ve been expecting to hear your whole life, but that’s not “Hasn’t happened yet, so it just won’t happen. And it has. And so, as we go into the season, this heartbreak is going to catch up with them.”