Jeremy Strong did a hell of a lot of research to play Jerry Rubin in The Trial Of The Chicago 7

By Marah Eakin | October 12, 2020 | 3:00pm

Film Features Jeremy Strong

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Earlier this year, when Vanity Fair teased the release of Aaron Sorkin’s new movie, The Trial Of The Chicago 7, the magazine included a quote from Sorkin claiming that one of the movie’s stars, Succession’s Jeremy Strong, “begged me to spray him with real tear gas.” Strong, the article suggested, wanted to know what his character, Yippie activist Jerry Rubin, had been going through during the riots around the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, and the only way he could see how to really know is by learning Rubin’s actual pain.

But as Strong tells The A.V. Club in the video above, that quote and that scenario were actually taken out of context. He says he’d never use the pain of real protestors—especially now—as a bit of fun character work, and stresses that his immersing himself into Rubin’s world was really just to serve the scene. More on that and on how Strong found himself in Rubin in the video above.