Paul Gross weighs in on the parallels between King Lear and Succession
The acclaimed Canadian actor is playing King Lear at Ontario's Stratford Festival
Google searches for "King Lear" skyrocketed in the last couple of months. That's because fans of HBO's Succession thought it might give them insight into how the show would end.
"What's Roman going to do next?" they wondered, grasping for clues in the classic Shakespearean tragedy.
Paul Gross is the latest actor to take on the coveted role of King Lear at the Stratford Festival. He joined Q's Tom Power to discuss what it means to him, and the play's parallels with Succession.
"Well, it is all about succession, and so much of Shakespeare, of course," he said about the play.
"That would have been a topic of enormous concern for people in Shakespeare's time because they just dodged a bomb with [Elizabeth I] dying without any children, let alone a male heir. And there wasn't any huge scuffle. Then they lucked out and got James from Scotland. When this play was done, he would have been on the throne.
"But yeah, I mean, it's dangerous if the inheritance is screwed up. All sorts of stuff can happen — and therefore, succession."
Gross said modern-day King Lears are "around us all the time." He believes we're invested in their tragedies and successes because they influence our lives.
"I think Elon Musk is a great example of it," he said. "Just make money. That's all you need to do. You don't need to try to drive the world.… But what's he doing trying to fiddle around in politics? Get out of that.…
"The possession of ultimate power requires a responsibility that an awful lot of people who arrive at it don't have."
From watching King Lear to playing him: a full-circle moment
When asked about the moment he knew he wanted to be on stage, Gross identified the serendipitous event when, as a young boy, he went to see King Lear right where he is now, at Stratford.
"I think I was about 12," he said. "My mother took me up to Stratford. We were living in Toronto, and it was — I can't remember the year — '72 maybe? Anyway, it was William Hutt doing Lear for the third time. He did it four times in his career, which is crazy. And I don't remember a whole lot about the production, but I remember thinking I'd really like to be part of that world."
Gross describes it as "strange" to fill Hutt's shoes all these years later.
"'I didn't know Bill Hutt at all … but Martha, my wife, was very good friends with him. So I became friends with Bill," he said. "And we didn't work together until we were doing Slings & Arrows. And in it, I was playing a director who was directing Bill Hutt as Lear. That all seemed a little meta, but then even more so when Bill kind of confided to me that he was in fact dying, just as his character was dying in the show….
"And it was then that he said, 'Well, when are you going to do it?' Do Lear, he meant. I said, 'I don't know if I ever will.'"
"I do think about him just about every time I go on," Gross said. "It's just a feeling of, well, you were here, and now I'm here. And you know, the floor has not changed, so it's filled with all of the marks of every actor who's ever been on it."
WATCH | Paul Gross as King Lear for the 2023 Stratford Festival:
The full interview with Paul Gross is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Interview with Paul Gross produced by Mitch Pollock.
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