One of the things that often happens to us when talking about ‘Succession’ is that its characters are so absorbed in their moves, tricks and ambitions while we forget they have family… although many times, as in the case of Kendall (Jeremy Strong), it is not noticeable.
But he wasn’t the only married brother at the beginning of the series, Roman (Kieran Culkin) also had a wife and daughter at the time. Two characters we met in the pilot and then didn’t hear from both a few episodes into the series. A sudden “disappearance” (in fact it is not even mentioned) for these characters due to, we could say, script interests.
Play with sexual fluidity
This was revealed by Culkin himself in a recent interview, where he commented that, while the first season was taking place, they began to raise this change in life of Roman in order to “give freedom” in terms of the character’s relationships:
“Not your daughter. Neither his wife, either. It was in the pilot and after it was approved for series, she was his girlfriend and she has a daughter. I wear my own wedding band in the episode. I was excited about having a daughter and she was 7 or 8. It was kind of disappointing, but I think the idea was that it would give them more freedom to play with the character.
They mentioned to me, even before shooting the pilot, about questioning what Roman’s sexuality was… and we don’t know what it is. But he did something to my brain and it was like “Okay, but am I married and have kids?” They were toying with the idea that she was aware that she had certain sexual hangups around monogamy and could be more fluid, but we don’t know what that is yet.”
We must clarify that if we go to the IMDb tab, Molly Griggs is credited as Claire Roy, so there was the character conceived as Roman’s wife. Another thing is that she finally interested the team led by Jesse Armstrong to stay that way.
On television, especially when this pilot model is used, these situations are common taking advantage of the time lapse between the filming of the first episode and the production of the rest of the first season of the series in question.
Thus, if we look closely, many times we find substantial changes between the pilot and the second episode including, but not limited to, complete set changes, a character that changes actors or, as in this case, becomes rethink someone’s importancen until they ended up disappearing and was never heard from again.
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