Interview: Zoë Winters’s Kerry Steps Out of the Shadows in HBO’s Succession

“She’s been a bit of a scary ghost lurking in the corners,” says actor Zoë Winters of Kerry Castellabate, her firebrand alter ego on the hit HBO series Succession. Winters joined the cast two seasons ago in the small role of assistant to Logan (Brian Cox), and her arc has steadily grown. With this new run of episodes, Kerry has gone from Logan’s shadow to terrifying co-conspirator, with her biggest arc coming in this week’s episode (no spoilers here).

Winters is a longtime New York theater veteran known for scene-stealing turns in plays like Amy Herzog’s 4000 Miles, Lucas Hnath’s Red Speedo, and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon. It’s an off-Broadway production that perhaps led the Succession team to finding Kerry’s bailiwick: There’s a resemblance to the right-wing prognosticator Winters played in Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning. The play didn’t exactly lead to the creation of Kerry — Winters joined the Succession cast before Heroes ran at Playwrights Horizons in 2019 — but enough of the team saw it that it’s safe to conclude that they went hand-in-hand (Arbery himself joined the series as a writer and producer after the Heroes run, too).

As a lifelong theater person, Winters is thrilled that one of her stage roles had such an impact, even if she, too, seems a little frightened by Kerry’s motives.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Do you see a line between your character arc as Kerry and your role as Theresa in Heroes of the Fourth Turning?
I actually came in at the very tail end of season 2, which was before Heroes of the Fourth Turning. Kerry joins the company at the height of the sexual misconduct trial, and it’s when these proceedings are going on that she chooses to become a more instrumental part of their team. I always thought that was twisted and strange.

Then I did Heroes of the Fourth Turning. Danya Taymor, who directed it, had been shadowing on Succession the same season I had been acting in it, so some of the writers and producers and Frank Rich came and saw me in this kind of stentorian, fire-spewing, alt-right, terrifying role. They got to see me do a really ferocious performance — it was such an athletic endeavor performing in that play — so they definitely got more of a sense of who I was as a performer. And then in season 3, Kerry is more of a presence and there are some political leanings that start being introduced. She’s pushing Logan to go towards this fascist, far-right conservative presidential candidate.

I don’t exactly know how it happened, but I’ve been a person of the theater for so long. I’ve really been doing New York theater for the last decade, and there’s always a push to go to LA to try and get on a TV show. The fact that I, perhaps, got to flex more muscles in a television format connected to a performance I did on stage is very special for me. I’ve played a lot of interesting characters in New York, but I often leave the theater and people say, “I hated you.” So that seems to be a theme for me.

Did you have a sense of your character arc when you started? Did Jesse Armstrong and the team take you through the journey of Kerry as Logan’s assistant and confidant and her desire to be a television anchor?
When I came back in season 3, Jesse and I spoke about her arc, so I had some notion of the way that it was going to expand and transition. But I also think that one of the really successful things about Succession is that there’s really very little exposition and hand-holding for the audience. I think it creates this constant thrum of mistrust that they’re only giving you what they need to give you.

Oftentimes, people will ask me what Logan and Kerry’s relationship dynamic is, and I never say, because it’s more interesting to carry on this feeling of anxiety. That’s also what’s so anxious making about being on the show. You don’t know who’s your ally and who’s betraying you. The audience feels those same things because they’re not being spoon-fed any sort of plot or information that you wouldn’t just see by witnessing these people interacting with each other.

Does Succession feel like doing a play with actors like Peter Friedman and J. Smith Cameron and writers like Lucy Prebble and Will Arbery around?
Absolutely. I had done some television before this. Even though I had worked on some great shows, I hadn’t had a recurring part like this. What I love so much about the theater is that you have an ensemble and these incredible relationships that form because when you go out onstage, it’s important that it feels like these characters have a shared history. I hadn’t had that in TV prior to Succession, and I actually didn’t know if TV was a form that was going to work for me because I’ve been such a creature of the theater.

Getting to do this show has been so theatrical. They shoot these long, sweeping pages of text. The camera people are such experts in their craft that they’re able to move around the space and catch these moments and reactions, so you’ll do these really long scenes and 15-pages of dialogue.

And then, doing it with this many people from the theater is just so exciting. J. Smith Cameron saw me in Heroes of the Fourth Turning, and we had started to have a friendship, and that friendship has bloomed and become something really special. Obviously, Will Arbery is a dear friend of mine, and there were a couple times this season where he was in for the day watching things. To come from a theater background and land in a space where there’s all these theatrical titans getting to work on this rich language is really fun.