The actor opens up about the final moments on set of the HBO show and what it was like taking one last lap as Tom Wambsgans: “It’s been great therapy.”
It’s well known by now that Matthew Macfadyen is nothing like Tom Wambsgans. In Succession’s early years, comparisons focused on the juxtaposition between the refined British actor — a graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and notorious for his role as one Mr. Darcy — and the bumbling Midwesterner he portrays. But now, as the high-octane family drama launches its fourth season, Wambsgans has climbed the ranks to become billionaire Logan Roy’s double-crossing right-hand man — all much to Macfadyen’s delight. “In a word, I thought it was great,” he says of the season-three cliffhanger that saw Tom cutting his wife out of her family’s company. “It’s such a bold, calculated move for someone so seemingly spineless.”
Tom’s transformation from the good-natured, occasionally bordering on doormat, Son of St. Paul into the calculating and even cold strategist came as a surprise to audiences back in December 2021, but his more ruthless business exterior feels natural through most of the season four premiere. Even the more unseemly behavior of the Disgusting Brothers, the moniker coined by fellow Waystar henchman Greg Hirsh, isn’t far out of his wheelhouse — just think back to that warehouse bachelor party. Macfadyen (who, it should be noted, is an exceedingly polite person) himself sees this most recent version of the character as the product of a season’s worth of betrayals. “It was pretty brave and cool that he was willing to be the fall guy for the family, and [last season] when he sensed that Shiv [Sarah Snook] was disappointed that he got off the hook, and in fact maybe wanted him to go to jail, it was a death by a thousand cuts,” he explains.
Despite his often outwardly cheery demeanor and constant quips (episode 401’s riff on Greg’s date’s handbag nearly rivals the great deck shoes castigation of 103), Tom hasn’t been a stranger to melancholy. This, after all, is a man who professed to his wife, while on their honeymoon, “I wonder if the sad I’d be without you would be less than the sad I get from being with you.” Season four will, seemingly, show viewers the more vulnerable side of the breakdown of the show’s single successful marriage; Macfadyen is most moved by his character’s attempts to process the abbreviated split. “What Tom really wants is to talk about what happened,” he says. “There’s been no postmortem at all. He didn’t have the chance to explain his reasons to Shiv, or to have the chance to tell her that there wasn’t anything he did that she wouldn’t have done. She shuts it down and it’s quite sad.”
