Alan Ruck Is Ready to Leave the Roy Family

The article includes spoilers for the most recent episode of “Succession.”

One of the most impressive tricks HBO’s “Succession” has played on viewers over the course of four seasons is generating sympathy for reprehensible people. Sunday’s episode, in which democracy is discarded, apparently because Roman Roy (Kieran Culkin) had to eat too much chicken as a child, puts most of that sympathy to rest.

It also ended the ludicrous presidential campaign of Connor Roy (Alan Ruck), the eldest and most bumbling Roy son, who launched his bid to confront what he saw as America’s biggest problems: “usury and onanism.” But even in conceding, Connor insults voters and issues a veiled threat to unleash the “Conheads,” his followers, after saying that he wouldn’t stoop to petty behavior. It was perhaps the darkest moment for a character who has largely been relegated to buffoon status, but Ruck sees Connor’s ignorance as his main political tool.

“He’ll believe whatever sounds good to him that day,” Ruck said in a recent video call full of vivid anecdotes and laughter. “He’ll read something online or he’ll hear something on television, then that’ll become, like, the central plank of his platform for that day. And then tomorrow could be something completely different because he’s just not a focused person.”

As Connor, Ruck, 66, has spun decades of character-actor chops into some of the series’s most scene-stealing moments: the “hyperdecanting” of a bottle of wine in a Vitamix blender; the rage over butter texture while overseeing his father’s gala ceremony; the suggestion to his call-girl-turned-fiancée, Willa (Justine Lupe), that they have “razor wire and bum fights” at their wedding to gin up fanfare for his presidential campaign.

“Hands down the best writing I’ve ever encountered, week after week,” he said. “But I do think that it’d be fun to move on to something else after playing basically the family [expletive], you know, for what amounted to six years.”

Ruck sees the series as “a gift” in a career that has often been feast or famine, with occasional day jobs to pay the bills. In 1986, he played Cameron Frye in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”— a quintessential Gen X character in a quintessential Gen X teen comedy. But the role didn’t immediately translate into stardom, and Ruck found Cameron’s shadow to be quite long.