J. Smith-Cameron's Formula for Succession

After shooting near the St. Regis late one night, J. Smith-Cameron, who plays Waystar Royco interim CEO Gerri Kellman on HBO's Succession, wanted to take the show's cast to that hotel's King Cole Bar. "It's a New York City landmark," she says of the elegant drinking hole. But the visit was not to be — even famous pretend billionaires can't convince a hotel bar to extend last call. "I was just so annoyed," she recalls. "They closed at 11!"

Smith-Cameron knows her way around Manhattan's elite environs, the milieu in which Succession unfolds. She jokes that she could have written a guidebook called Holly Golightly's Guide to Being an Actress in Your Early Twenties in New York, highlighting which hotels' lobby restrooms had the best toiletries, which department stores had the best makeup counters and other places to prep for auditions on the cheap.

After growing up in Greenville, South Carolina, Smith-Cameron came to New York in the 1980s in search of theatrical work, scoring her first Broadway role in 1982 in Crimes of the Heart and a Tony nomination in 1991 for Our Country's Good. By the time she joined Succession in 2018, she was a stage veteran, and working with former colleagues (including Holly Hunter, Cherry Jones, Kieran Culkin and Hope Davis) eased her way into the sometimes-improvisational scenes. "It figures that they hired a lot of theater actors," she says.

She'd worked with Culkin more than once before, so familiarity helped generate the subplot of the psychosexual flirtation between Kellman and Culkin's character Roman, which could be construed as sexual harassment, playacting trauma and a professional alliance all in one. "It made sense that Roman went for an older woman and one who is hard as nails, because he's so vulnerable and she's so bulletproof," says Smith-Cameron, who received an Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series Emmy nomination for her role in 2022.

But what interests her are the moments where Gerri is not quite so "stone cold killer bitch," as Roman describes her. When Shiv Roy (Sarah Snook) confronts Gerri in season three about Roman's misdirected genital snapshots, for example. "She's thinking on her feet, literally," Smith-Cameron says. "My thought was, she was just trying to keep her cool long enough to get away and go into the bathroom, where she could safely burst into tears."

Smith-Cameron has poured a lot of herself into the formerly unflappable Gerri — giving her glasses and a signature martini, cultivating her sense of style, even giving her a couple of daughters. "One thing [showrunner] Jesse Armstrong's made clear is that I'm the world's authority on Gerri," she says. Coming into the show's fourth and final season, which begins March 26, we'll get more of Gerri's vulnerable side if she finds herself in the crossfire between, as Smith-Cameron says, "a bossy man and his childish son."

She teases, "We've never seen her be the odd man out before."

This article originally appeared in emmy magazine issue #2, 2023, under the title, "Mother Figure Superior."