‘I came to love David Beckham’: how an Oscar-winning Succession star put Goldenballs’ wild life on screen
Fisher Stevens was playing Succession’s most oleaginous lick-spittle when he got the call. Leonardo DiCaprio wanted him to direct a Netflix documentary about David Beckham. At first Stevens wasn’t interested; he was having too much fun playing Hugo Baker, slimy comms guy for the loathsome Logan dynasty.
“I was like: ‘Nah.’ That’s going to be two years of my life and I’d really have to love spending time in that world,” says 59-year-old Stevens from an editing suite in New York.
It is understandable. In Succession’s final series, Stevens gets the best lines. As the sociopathic siblings and their underlings fly to Norway to broker a last-ditch deal to save Waystar Royco with a Scandinavian business whizz, Stevens delivers the incisively self-castigating line: “We’re snakes on a plane.”
“But then the writers, especially Jesse [Armstrong, the English creator of Succession], said to me: ‘You cannot not do this. This is a great story.’ I didn’t know the story.”
So how did it come to pass, with all due respect, that a know-nothing American was the right fit to tell the life story about dolphin hunting in Japan, The Cove, won an Oscar. In 2010, he collaborated with DiCaprio on the climate crisis documentary .
