[This story contains spoilers for Inheriting Season 4, Episode 7, “Tailgate Party.” ]
With three episodes left in the series, Succession wraps up the latest episode with a bang set.
After dancing a strategic waltz all season long around their relationship status, Shiv Roy (Sarah Snook) and Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen) finally decided to confront each other and set the record straight. Shiv still hasn’t told her estranged husband that she is pregnant (likely with his child), angering Tom on air In the seventh episode of the HBO series’ final season, the two iron out all his grievances when they co-host an election-eve tailgate party.
Episode after ‘Tailgate Party’ hints couple is putting divorce on hold and rekindling love – director Lorene Scafaria tells The Hollywood Reporter Their candid conversation on “Living+” last week: “Their love is a mess. There’s something pure about it , but it screwed up. … In a way, it really brought them together and made him the right guy for her.” But this week, Shiv-Tom’s whipsaw continued and hit new lows. The episode begins with Tom complaining that their late-night sex is exhausting (with explicit text messages to prove it), and ends with the two engaging in a bitter drag battle outside their Manhattan apartment for their elite crowd. Witness inside.
So this is kind of scary. They couldn’t hear the exact sound, but they could see that we were having a screaming match. So that adds a nice layer to it,” Macfadyen said after an episode of the official Succession podcast Said , unraveling irrevocable conversations.
Election night party to confront Shiv on their balcony, implying that Tom will be fired at Lukas Matteson (Alexander Skarsgård’s GoJo acquisition of Waystar Royco, and everything else that was going on under the surface of their marriage. In a conversation where they exchanged insults and truth-telling, Tom told Shiv that she was “incapable of love , maybe not a good man with children”, Shiv told Tom, “I don’t like you; I don’t like you. “I don’t even care about you” when Tom called her out for never getting her father Logan Roy() Brian Cox
), agree.
The episode ends with each of them sleeping alone in the apartment they share, with unsatisfactory looks on their faces as Tom stares sleeplessly at the ceiling.
“It’s just a fucking injustice he feels,” McFadden explained of what caused Tom to explode. “He thought maybe they were in a good place, and he realized she had spent the whole party, kind of telling everyone he was going to chop when they should have thrown it together. So, something was broken.”
Creator Jesse Armstrong Writers for McFadden and Smith Nook brings several meaty scenes to chew on as scene partners in the fourth and final season of the Emmy-winning saga. But Macfadyen told reporter and host Kara Swisher, “It’s not like that. The lid didn’t come off that way.”
He continued, “It just came to a head. Facade Gone, he can’t take it. I remember in that scene, I was so angry at how unfair it was. He spent a lot of time on diplomacy and politics, swallowed his tongue, let her win, let her call the shots , maybe this time he won’t.”
Macfadyen felt Tom was hurt less than Shiv because she was a child who suffered under Logan Roy. “They don’t feel the love of their parents, so maybe you can’t love yourself, or you can’t love anyone, and you don’t really have self-confidence. I don’t think that’s necessarily the case with Tom,” he said.
However, he agrees with some of Shiv’s charges against Tom. That is, he only married her because of her DNA. But he also thinks they met at the right time.
“I think [it’s] partly an attraction to her last name and her father and her business and all that stuff,” he said. “I think there was a strong sex appeal and they both laughed. When they met we thought she was in a really, really bad way. She was coming out of a horrible, heartbreaking relationship and he was there to pick up the pieces , he’s just a safe pair of hands. And he really enjoys playing that role.”
Macfadyen feels that Tom is an “unstable” character at this point because he How desperate, now facing more than losing his job and his place in the Roy family: “He’s treading water. His heart rate is racing, he’s kind of…he’s sinking.”
Meanwhile, Skarsgård speaks to The Hollywood Reporter about embedding his character between Shiv and Tom, but mostly between Shiv and Kendall brothers (Jeremy Strong) and Roman (Kieran Culkin). “He was using her 100 percent,” he said of Lucas. “He smelled blood in the water, it was sibling friction. He smelled openings. He did move fast and break things, but he could read people. He saw this in Shiv, And followed it. It worked. She let him in. Where we are now, he’s still groping and testing her. Is she a charlatan too? She’s a little Nepo Baby like her siblings, or is she Competent? That’s what he’s trying to figure out.”
Succession Published every Sunday at 9pm on HBO and Max New episodes. Following THR‘s Succession last One season report .
