Demands for a Succession spin-off show have hit fever pitch in the last 24 hours, as the Twitterverse has declared it imperative that Willa Ferreyra be given the hero storyline she deserves. In episode two of the fourth and final season of the HBO show, we see the youngest Roy siblings turn up late to their eldest brother Connor’s rehearsal party, only to see Willa doing a runner at the end of it. ‘I think they can take it from here,’ she nervously tells Roman before rushing out, wine glass in hand, from the restaurant. In the hours that follow, Connor tracks her location on his phone, locating her in an aquarium-supply retailer, a dry-cleaners, and on the Williamsburg Bridge, prompting viewers to plead desperately for a breakaway series chronicling her night's adventure.
‘What’s fun are the little easter eggs that [the writers] plant so fans can create their own narrative of what happened that night,’ Lupe explains. ‘I would love to have both seen and gotten to execute a night [of what happened]. I imagine it would have been fruitful – Willa is a very dramatic human being, so I image it was quite the existential journey she went on.’
Out of all the characters in the hit show, no one has had an uphill climb like Willa. In episode one, Roman introduces Lupe’s character as the ‘hot-party-girl-who-wouldn’t-look-twice-at-you/hooker’. Fast forward several years, numerous family bust ups and ferocious ‘f*ck off’ bellows from Logan, and Willa has gone from playwright/escort to fiancé/First Lady candidate – a trajectory Lupe admits even she couldn’t have predicted. ‘I had no expectations or vision for where this was going to go,’ the actor says of her character, ‘I've just been happily surprised that I've been kept around’.
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Denver-raised Lupe initially joined the show in 2017 as a guest star, with the understanding she’d appear in three episodes of the first season, before splitting with her on-screen partner, Connor. However, amid plot rewrites and Willa’s increasing importance at Roy events, it was a no brainer that Lupe would sign on as a regular in 2020.
‘Willa isn’t really into the interpersonal drama,’ she says when asked why she thinks the Roys haven’t given her the boot like everyone else. While Willa isn’t afraid to expose her artistic sensibility, like when she expressed that she wished she’d been consulted on the vagina tunnel in season three, Lupe thinks her character is largely ‘cool as a cucumber’, but is by no means a wallflower, which gains her respect among the Roys. ‘She sits at a distance most of the time and only steps in when she knows that she needs to for Connor, or when someone crosses a boundary,’ she continues, referencing Willa’s now-famous line in season one when she tells a cocky Tom Wambsgans: ‘At least I’m only getting f*cked by one member of this family.’
A quick analysis of the taut relationships in the show, Lupe argues that Willa and Connor's, while wildly unconventional, is one of the most authentic. ‘I feel like their relationship has evolved into something really tender, and there’s a level of honesty. Willa is very protective of him, and he of her. You never hear them eviscerating each other in the way their family members do to their spouses. Everything is on the table and there’s no backstabbing. There's a dialogue and so much communication,’ she notes, alluding to the moment Connor enthusiastically asks Willa how she’d feel about marrying under the Statue of Liberty 'with a brass band and an assorted hoopla' in episode one of the fourth season.
In a recent interview with Esquire, Kieran Culkin (Roman) described Connor as the worst and most evil Roy as he has trapped Willa in 'a golden cage’. But Lupe would beg to differ. While she might not vote for Connor in an upcoming election (‘he's a terribly misguided version of Bernie [Sanders]’), she says Willa understands and appreciates her partner’s ambitions, quirks, and kookiness. ‘In order to be with this person, there's a certain level of surrendering and accepting of who that guy is,’ she notes. While it might not be the most empowering reason for a person to stay with a partner, the need to compromise and 'bend' to another's needs is relatable. I ask her what advice she’d give to a friend in a romantic relationship like Willa's. ‘I actually have a friend who's in this kind of situation,’ she says. ‘I try to remind her to keep her own life, friends, and family to avoid the sense of co-dependency,’ she adds, referring to the power dynamic between Willa and Connor when she was essentially ‘hired to be there for him'. 'I feel like when you start a relationship in this a kind of transactional way, you kind of have to remind yourself to have your own life.'
I’m speaking to Lupe – who also stars in Prime Video’s hit series The Marvelous Mrs Maisel – over Zoom from her hotel room in Atlanta, where she’s currently sat in jogging bottoms and a sweatshirt. Her cabin-size suitcase lies open behind her on the floor next to a plush unmade bed. For fans of season four, this more relaxed image of Lupe will likely be at odds with the blonde-haired First Lady 'glow up' her character presents in the latest season – a topic the actor is keen to explain. ‘It was conscious choice to go a little more blonde, because we were like, “Okay, let's lean a little bit more into the politician's wife kind of sensibility and think, what would that little tweak look like? But also I think I’m just like a healthier person,’ she notes. ‘I had severe anaemia before we started the last season, and I had to be hospitalised. I had six blood transfusions and was in hospital for a week, so I think my skin and hair changed. I have more hair than ever. I think it’s a weird combo of my own personal kind of evolution, and [Willa] becoming this like First Lady candidate.’
Amid conversations relating to Willa’s 'glow up', that ‘capacious’ bag, and character Naomi Pierce’s (Annabelle Dexter-Jones) now-coveted Princess Diana-inspired pixie crop hair, season four has reignited society’s obsession with ‘quiet luxury’ – new-age minimalism with a focus on investment pieces. The perception of wealth is one widely questioned on set too it would seem, with Culkin recently revealing that he learnt that coats are ‘cumbersome’ for billionaires because they ‘don’t ever have to walk anywhere or do anything’. For Lupe, she became acutely aware of the elite’s love of acronyms for almost anything. She recalls being on the set of the show and hearing her co-stars use the term ‘PJ’. For a long time she assumed they were referring to pyjamas, before realising the acronym was short for ‘private jet’. ‘It took me way too long to catch on to what everybody was talking about,’ she jokes, ‘partially because I’d never got a private jet, but also because I didn’t think this kind of family [the Roys] would be doing that’.
Reflecting on her six years filming the Jesse Armstrong-written show, which has gone on to win 13 Emmys, five Golden Globes and continued to feed our appetite of ‘Eat The Rich’ TV narratives, the Juilliard alum admits she’s grown up on the show in many ways. ‘I started out kind of as a girl,’ she says of joining the show, aged 27, during a pivotal point in a person’s life, let alone a woman’s. ‘I definitely feel like I'm walking out as a woman and life has changed. I went from barely subletting and being in one apartment for two months and then being like, “Okay, I have to be in a less expensive apartment for another month”, and from casual fun dating, to owning a home and thinking about what I want out of my life, what kind of balance between work and life I want to have, and how much I want to commit to this career.'
The show’s cast was instrumental in her growth, too, and seen her act opposite the likes of Olivier Award-winning Brian Cox (Logan Roy) and Ferris Bueller's Day Off’s Alan Ruck (Connor). ‘I felt impostor syndrome, consistently, but it was a helpful thing. Watching incredible actors pushed me in a way that I hadn't worked before,’ she says, noting that Ruck gives ‘so much, you have to rise to be there’. It’s no surprise then that Lupe, as well as Nicholas Braun (cousin 'Greg The Egg’), bawled her eyes out on the last day of filming. ‘I heard that both of us were pretty big wrecks individually on our last good-byes,’ she says. When I liken the ending of season four to a break-up, Lupe is initially reluctant to accept the comparison (‘it doesn't feel like there was like a decision to split’), before questioning whether showrunner Armstrong was the 'breaker-upper' and she the 'break-upee'. ‘I guess I’m the one who got broken up with, and now I'm just internalising that…’ she jokes. ‘It feels like a chapter of my life is closing and it’s hard to wrap my mind around…
‘It's a really sad goodbye. It was heartbreaking. I’m still living with it. Watching the season, you’re just reminded of how much care you have for all of the people involved. When I told Alan Ruck about the pain I was in over letting it go, he said “that’s the price of admission”, so I try to keep that in mind. It’s a bittersweet thing to love something so much that it hurts to let it go. It's kind of a double-edged sword. But that’s what life is - just loving things over and over again. [Succession is] definitely going to be one of the loves and losses of my life.
As our time draws to a close, I can’t help but wonder what karaoke song Lupe would’ve sung if she’d had the chance to share the mic with Ruck during episode two’s fist-biting karaoke scene. ‘I love karaoke, I love witnessing karaoke, but I'm horrible at karaoke,’ she says. In an act of ‘rebellion’, the actor says she often chooses to sing unpretty karaoke songs, before proceeding to belt out the lyrics ‘Vindicated / I am selfish / I am wrong,’ from Dashboard Confessional’s 2004 hit rock song ‘Vindicated’. ‘There’s no beauty in my performance or expectation of sounding good, it’s just a cathartic and silly choice,’ she jokes. ‘That’s the best way to go for me, otherwise, it's just incredibly humiliating and painful.’ Compared to Connor’s rendition of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’, we’ll take Lupe’s singing any day of the week.
‘Succession’ season four premieres on Sky Atlantic and NOW every Monday from 2am.
Katie O'Malley is the Site Director on ELLE UK. On a daily basis you’ll find Katie managing all digital workflow, editing site, video and newsletter content, liaising with commercial and sales teams on new partnerships and deals (eg Nike, Tiffany & Co., Cartier etc), implementing new digital strategies and compiling in-depth data traffic, SEO and ecomm reports. In addition to appearing on the radio and on TV, as well as interviewing everyone from Oprah Winfrey to Rishi Sunak PM, Katie enjoys writing about lifestyle, culture, wellness, fitness, fashion, and more.
