J. Smith-Cameron is loving being swarmed by her Succession "shippers"

The New Yorker

"For many years, Smith-Cameron, who is originally from Louisville, Kentucky, and still has a hint of a Southern drawl, operated under the radar," Rachel Syme says in a New Yorker profile of the 64-year-old actress. "She liked it that way. Her dream, she told me, was merely to keep the lights on with stimulating stage work. She did act occasionally in films, namely in (her director husband Kenneth) Lonergan’s three-hour 2011 epic Margaret, in which she is magnetic as the preening actress mother of Anna Paquin’s protagonist. But it was not until Succession, a bona fide sensation, that Smith-Cameron found herself famous beyond her Broadway bubble. Suddenly, hundreds of strangers were responding to her tweets—Smith-Cameron is very active on Twitter—with effusive commentary about her onscreen flirtations with the much younger Roman Roy, the horny scallywag played by Kieran Culkin. At the age of sixty-four, Smith-Cameron finds herself swarmed with 'shippers' who make gushing fan art about her character’s sex life. She is loving every minute of it." For her part, Smith-Cameron says of her audition: "I had seen In the Loop, so I knew Jesse Armstrong’s name. Then, when I had the audition, they sent me a link for the pilot so I could get the tone of it, but I couldn’t get it to play! So I was, like, F*ck it. Doug Aibel, who has cast my husband's films, was the casting director at that point. He cast Margaret. Well, I mean, Kenny had cast me in Margaret, but, you know. I guess it was perhaps Doug’s idea to see some women for that part, because it was written for a man. It was Jerry, J-E-R-R-Y, in the scripts that I read. The first scene that we shot was between Kieran and me, but it was supposed to be a guy, so the crude language in it was just the way they always talk to each other. I tried to do this thing where I straddled being unflappable but being grossed out. You know how Gerri is always wincing and rolling her eyes and pretending she didn't hear? But she’s not clutching her pearls. It’s so crazy, because I’m such a dizzy dame. Like, I wouldn’t be a good Gerri in real life."