History Lessons

In the new stage adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, Jeremy Strong sees the shadows of current crises.

- Maya Singer

It ’s hot out the day I meet Jeremy Strong near his home in Brooklyn to chat about his return to the stage. “Unsettling” is how the 45-yearold Succession star describes the late October weather as we stroll along a waterfront dotted with sunbathers stretched out amid fallen autumn leaves. “Every year, it’s another ‘hottest year on record.’ How did we get here?” he muses. “That question—it’s one reason I had to do this play.”

The play Strong is referring to is An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen. In a new adaption by playwright Amy Herzog opening on Broadway March 18, Strong takes on the role of Dr. Thomas Stockmann, a man who discovers an inconvenient environmental truth and is pilloried by his community for revealing it. “It ’s easier for them not to believe,” explains Strong of the villagers’ reaction to Stockmann’s scientific data. “Believing would be too disruptive— politically, economically. You don’t have to stretch to see the analogy between what Ibsen wrote in 1881 and what ’s happened vis-à-vis climate change.”

Strong hadn’t been planning to embark on a grueling 16-week Broadway run. After the final season of Succession wrapped last year, he was ready for a break—which he got, courtesy of the SAG-AFTRA strike that allowed him to spend a mellow summer at his house in the Danish countryside with his wife, Emma, and their three young daughters. But the issues raised by An Enemy of the  People felt too urgent to pass up when his old friend theater director Sam Gold urged him to read the play. “I texted Sam as soon as I finished it,” recalls Strong. “I was like, Yeah, we’re doing this.”