All you need to know about SOLANDGE, the yacht from ‘Succession’

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Written by Rachael Steele

Superyachts on film are not uncommon: The Bond series is famous for its fast cars and sleek luxury yachts, while recent Netflix film Murder Mystery was filmed aboard 60m/198ft motor yacht SARASTAR , but M/Y SOLANDGE has brought new heights of glamour to the small screen as the notable backdrop in Season Two of hit TV series Succession .

SOLANDGE top deck - star of the HBO TV series Succession

SOLANDGE top deck – star of the HBO TV series Succession

The comedy-drama centres around the Roy family as patriarchal figure Logan Roy, who owns and controls a worldwide media conglomerate, declines in health and his children are sized up for taking his place as head of the empire.

Mega yacht SOLANDGE

Mega yacht SOLANDGE

SOLANDGE is a yacht worthy of a media mogul, boasting an enormous amount of onboard amenities, a supply of water toys just as large and exquisite living areas from the beach-club to the bedrooms. She was refitted in 2019 to have her looking better than ever, and she’s available for charter throughout the year.

SUCCESSION VIDEO TRAILER

Construction.

Luxury yacht SOLANDGE measures 85.1m/279.2ft and was launched from the Lurssen shipyard in Germany in 2013 before going on to win the Exterior Design category at the Monaco Yacht Show Awards 2014 , as well as making it to the finals at three other awards shows that same year. Her exterior styling is the work of renowned designer Espen Oeino , while the interiors from Rodriguez Interiors transport guests to a more elegant age using classical styling, golden accents and detailed patterns of Eastern origin.

Impeccable service by the professional and highly trained crew is offered at all times

Impeccable service by the professional and highly trained crew is offered at all times

Built with a steel hull and aluminium superstructure, she provides an excellent balance between stability and power, reaching a top speed of 17.5 knots.

Logan Roy (Brian Cox) on the top deck of the yacht.Photograph by Graeme Hunter / HBO

Logan Roy (Brian Cox) on the top deck of the yacht.Photograph by Graeme Hunter / HBO

Accommodation

The lavish on board accommodation provides for up to 12 guests in a choice of eight en-suite cabins: 1 Master suite, 1 VIP stateroom, 3 double cabins, 2 double cabins convertible to twins and 1 twin cabin.

Master suite offering utmost in luxury and unprecedented views

Master suite offering the utmost in luxury and unprecedented views

The majority of the guest accommodation is placed on the main deck, where the elevated position provides better views and more natural light into the spacious and light interiors. Each has a classical appearance using light coloured wood and inlays in mother of pearl, and a subtle Middle Eastern motif in the patterns.

Master stateroom with a private deck area

Master stateroom with a private deck area

The guest companionway is unique in offering hot and refrigerated drinks as well as snacks so that guests can get what they desire late at night without needing to call the crew.

Owner's bathroom - Photo by Klaus Jordan

Owner’s bathroom – Photo by Klaus Jordan

The Owner’s suite is a part of its own dedicated deck, which includes an office and separate his-and-hers dressing rooms and bathrooms. There is a salon more casual in appearance the opulent main deck lounge, and the bedroom itself contains hand-made Italian furniture and a stunning chandelier above the central bed. Its forward position overlooks the bow through 180-degree windows, where there is a private spa pool.

One of the best spots to enjoy the views while relaxing in the Jacuzzi

One of the best spots to enjoy the views while relaxing in the Jacuzzi

There are also 15 cabins to accommodate a professional and highly skilled crew of 29, ensuring that guests are treated to a truly indulgent experience while on board, from health and beauty treatments in the spa massage room to Scuba diving deep underwater.

Season 2 finale of Succession filmed on board Mega Yacht Solandge - Photo © HBO

Season 2 finale of Succession filmed on board Mega Yacht Solandge – Photo © HBO

Day or night, guests will be tempted outside to live under the Mediterranean sky by the choice of sumptuous seating designed for cocktail evenings while dockside or roaring parties away from the city lights. The sweeping central staircase from the lower deck to the main deck aft makes a statement by itself and is a great opportunity for a photo-shoot before heading in to view the splendour within.

Close up of the aft decks

Close up of the aft decks

Sunbeds, a swimming pool and stern-side seating only partially fill the spaces across each deck, leaving plenty of room for dancing the night away or yoga in the fresh morning air.

The contra-flow swimming pool

The contra-flow swimming pool

M/Y SOLANDGE can accommodate hundreds of guests for dockside events, who have plenty of choice when it comes to refreshments from the wet bars. On the Owner’s deck and the sundeck, where a forward Jacuzzi lets you wallow under the stars. The Owner has a private Jacuzzi and sunpads on the foredeck that’s perfect for lazy afternoons after a big celebration or nightcaps and stargazing before bed.

Aft deck sunbathing

Aft deck sunbathing

The exceptional decor by Rodriguez Interiors is what has given luxury yacht SOLANDGE her character and was no doubt a deciding factor in selecting her over many other options for the superyacht in Succession: Opulence is around every corner and guests ascending the main deck aft staircase will be awestruck by the extravagant main salon where golden tones in the furnishings and light fixtures are contrasted by cool blues in the surrounding wall panelling.

Ultra-luxurious interiors with amazing attention to detail and carefully selected materials and furnishings

Ultra-luxurious interiors with amazing attention to detail and carefully selected materials and furnishings

The Owner’s salon meanwhile has a comfortable lounge setting in front of a widescreen TV, a fireplace with armchairs and a games table for entertaining small groups on cosy nights indoors.

Bar

The most impressive of all however is the Tree of Life at the centre of the stairwell, which stretches from the lower deck all the way up to the sundeck.

Central staircase - a true work of art

Central staircase – a true work of art

Special Features

Motor yacht SOLANDGE is expensive for a reason: She lavishes upon her guests almost every modern convenience conceivable. The beach club alone contains a DJ station, a dance floor hiding a spa pool beneath, and a golden bar with 14 matching stools. Across the decks there is also a massage room and hair salon, an indoor cinema, a sauna, steam room and gym plus a helipad for getting to and from the airport in style.

Amazing beach club with shower

Amazing beach club with shower

Water Toys and Equipment

There is an extensive collection of water toys on board to suit all ages, interests and fitness levels, and with status as an Approved RYA Water Sports Centre and a Certified PADI dive centre, guests have the opportunity to earn a jet ski and Scuba diving license during their time on board. The collection contains:

  • 6 x Paddleboards
  • 5 x wakeboards
  • 3 x Yamaha Waverunners (2 pax)
  • 3 x Seabobs (F5 model)
  • 3 x inflatable kayaks
  • 2 x surf boards
  • 1 x Jet ski
  • fishing gear
  • snorkelling equipment
  • Scuba diving equipment, and

Beach club set up for easy access to the toys and water

Beach club set up for easy access to the toys and water

There is also a well-equipped gym and the swimming pool onboard provide guests with additional options to wear off energy during a cruise.

Charter Locations

Luxury yacht SOLANDGE is available for charter throughout the Mediterranean, from the Balearic Islands of Spain to the ancient majesty of Antalya, Turkey. The summer season is when she is most in-demand and she is most coveted for events such as the Cannes Film Festival and Monaco Grand Prix. Christmas and the New Year are also popular times for charter yachts and it is advisable to book ahead to secure her for your own special occasion.

The yacht has an amazing amount of deck space and areas to unwind and relax

The yacht has an amazing amount of deck space and areas to unwind and relax

Charter Price

As of winter 2019, luxury yacht  SOLANDGE is available for charter from $1,000,000 USD (€1,136,000)* per week plus expenses such as food, drinks, fuel and taxes. (*the price at the time of publication, please contact CharterWorld for up to date rates and information)

Please contact CharterWorld - the luxury yacht charter specialist - for more on superyacht news item "All you need to know about SOLANDGE, the yacht from 'Succession'".

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Solandge, the yacht used in Succession, costs $1million a week to hire

The superyacht Solandge

In last night’s Succession Season 2 finale on HBO, the Roy family and their top Waystar-Royco aides spent time onboard Logan Roy’s luxurious Mediterranean yacht, ostensibly on a brief cruise vacation.  However, the Mediterranean cruise was actually intended to give Logan (Brian Cox) the opportunity to take time off to decide who should take the fall to save Waystar-Royco’s tarnished reputation following the company’s mismanagement scandal, and a congressional hearing on the matter.

Logan finally decided that his troubled son Kendall (Jeremy Strong) would be the “blood sacrifice” to save the company.

If you saw last night’s season finale and wondered about the luxurious yacht that provided the setting for the episode, here is everything you need to know about it.

The superyacht in tonight’s episode of Succession Sign up for our newsletter! Get updates on the latest posts and more from Monsters and Critics straight to your inbox. By submitting your information you agree to our T&Cs and Privacy Policy. Length: 85.1 meters Crew: 29 Cost: 1,000,000 euros to rent per week https://t.co/jaPEubbK6m — Dan Diamond (@ddiamond) October 14, 2019
@Succession_HBO is that M/Y Solandge? Used in S2E10? Nice. — Daniel B Nash Sr (@DanielBNashSr1) October 14, 2019

Solandge was the yacht used in the Succession Season 2 finale

The yacht used in last night’s episode of Succession was the famous 85.1-meter Lürssen motor yacht Solandge . Solandge is one of the world’s largest and most iconic luxurious motor superyachts available for charter.

The weekly summer and winter charter price for a Mediterranean cruise is listed as being from €1,000,000 ( currently about $1,102, 642 plus expenses ).

Solandge was first listed for sale in 2015 at an asking price of €179 million. It was finally sold in a deal brokered by the luxury yacht brokerage firm Moran Yacht & Ship in 2017. The deal, said to be the biggest yacht deal of the year in 2017, was reportedly worth €155,000,000.

Solandge was built by Lürssen in 2013. The luxurious granite, marble and wood interior of the yacht was jointly designed by Rodriguez Interiors and Dolker & Voges. The exterior was designed by Espen Øino ( Espen Oeino).

The yacht is able to sleep 12-16 guests in eight large staterooms. It is also able to accommodate a large gathering of overnight party guests in en-suite cabins. Facilities include a sauna, steam room, massage room, beauty salon, gym, sun deck, outdoor swimming pool, dance floor, bar, outdoor cinema, and nightclub.

The boat has a cruising speed of 15 knots and a top speed of 17 knots.

Solange won the Monaco Yacht Club’s La Belle Classe Superyachts award at the 2014 Monaco Yacht Show.

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yacht used in succession

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Which yacht stars in the TV series 'Succession'?

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By Katia Damborsky   29 October 2019

The 279ft (85m)  charter yacht SOLANDGE is the yacht in HBO’s  Succession. Hitting TV screens in 2019, the season finale of season 2 gives viewers an inside glimpse into life on board the Lurssen luxury yacht in the Mediterranean .

The curtain closed on season 2 of hit HBO show Succession earlier this month, after a dramatic season finale filmed on board SOLANDGE cruising the Mediterranean .

The series gives viewers a peak inside the six-deck superyacht, which can be rented from €1,000,000 (approximately $1,136,000) per week plus expenses.

While the yacht is fictitiously owned by the Roy family in the series, Succession showcases the type of lifestyle you can expect when chartering million-dollar megayachts ; from stylish helicopter departures to zipping between islands on a luxury tender.

The finale of Succession Season 2 is filmed on board superyacht SOLANDGE

Roy family from SUCCESSION on board SOLANDGE yacht during season 2 finale

Succession is an award-winning comedy-drama which centres around the life of the uber-wealthy and highly dysfunctional Roy family.

At the helm of the family is patriarch Logan Roy, a media titan who heads up and controls an international media conglomerate. After his health takes a turn for the worst, his adult children must each face the prospect of becoming heir to the family business. 

Rife with power struggles, backstabbing betrayals and family loyalty, Succession offers a fresh take on abuse, media and wealth in contemporary America.  

Succession showcases the type of lifestyle you can expect when chartering million-dollar megayachts.

The dramatic end to season 2 of Succession premiered in October 2019, with the finale to Succession filmed on board the motor yacht SOLANDGE.

This glamorous setting gave us plenty of scandal; Logan disingenuously suggesting stepping down as CEO, Connor's iPad getting thrown overboard and of course, the shocking final moments where we see Kendall blowing the whistle on his father.

Roy family sit on the aft decks of superyacht SOLANDGE

How much does it cost to rent the yacht in Succession?

The cost of renting luxury yacht SOLANDGE is upwards of 1 million euros (or 1.136 million dollars) per week plus expenses during both the winter and summer. This price does not include the cost of food, drink, fuel dockage, VAT and tips.

SOLANDGE yacht from HBO TV Series SUCCESSION underway

SOLANDGE features in our article, the world’s most expensive charter yachts which cost over $1 million to rent per week .

What does the yacht from Succession look like inside?

Superyacht SOLANDGE main salon and lit up panels

With her Lurssen pedigree, innovative design and stunning selection of amenities,  SOLANDGE is recognised as one of the world’s most iconic superyachts.

She is home to all the facilities you would expect on a yacht of this calibre, including a sleek swimming pool with jet-stream technology and a cutting-edge chromotherapy spa with Hamman and treatment room which both integrate light therapy. 

SOLANDGE yacht spa

Her main deck plays host to the expansive owners’ suite, which enjoys his and hers en suites with adjoining dressing rooms, a private lounge-cum-office and a private deck area with dip pool and intimate seating areas. 

While chartering her, guests can make use out of a fully-stocked wine cellar and an elevator with the capacity for nine.

Inside superyacht SOLANDGE

Luxury yacht SOLANDGE master cabin

SOLANDGE features ornate interiors from Florida-based studio Rodriguez Interiors. A palatial theme is reflected in plush fabrics, a rich colour palette and a selection of semi-precious stones, including amethyst, honey onyx, gold leaf and rose quartz.

The design team behind SOLANDGE has also sourced plenty of glass fixtures from Murano, an island near Venice famed for its rich history of glass-making. 

SUCCESSION yacht main salon

Her opulent finish is evident in the main salon, which is flanked by two walls of LED backlit amethyst that imbue the room with a soft lilac glow.

An elaborate focal point, the walls have been created by slicing a piece of amethyst into tiny segments with diamond wire and gluing them to a glass sheet, before then being covered by a panel of Plexiglass studded with LED lights.

SOLANDGE yacht central staircase

Another talking point aboard the charter yacht is the floating central staircase, which features a sculpted ‘Tree of Life’ statue ascending the full height of the yacht.

In total, 1,423 points of light illuminate the space with a warm glow. Themes of nature continue in the owner’s suite, where backlit mullions depict the Garden of Eden. 

Cinema on luxury yacht SOLANDGE

In total, around 25 wood veneers have been used throughout luxury yacht SOLANDGE. On the lower decks, where there is typically less light, the yacht features darker, ebony finishes; higher up, lighter blondewood and caramel finishes are more prevalent.

Pool area on luxury yacht SOLANDGE

This delicate mix of traditional opulence and contemporary punches of colour and texture lend SOLANDGE an atmosphere quite unlike any yacht.

A motor yacht of her calibre makes the perfect backdrop for Succession, and it’s hoped we’ll see SOLANDGE return to reprise her role as the Roy family’s luxury yacht in season 3.

Aerial image of luxury yacht SOLANDGE

If you’d like to learn more about chartering M/Y SOLANDGE, please get in touch with your preferred yacht charter broker .

More Yacht Information

Solandge yacht charter

85m Lurssen 2013 / 2022

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You, Too, Can Charter the ‘Succession’ Yacht…for $1.1 Million a Week

Who owns the ‘Succession’ yacht? Learn more about the ‘Solandge,’ the 279-foot boat the Roy family boarded in the HBO drama’s second season.

Dan Clarendon - Author

Oct. 15 2021, Published 11:29 a.m. ET

Who owns the Succession yacht? Certainly not Succession star Sarah Snook , who told Page Six on Oct. 12, that she has no interest in such an expense. “You own a boat like that, you’ve got to maintain a boat like that,” said Snook, who plays Shiv Roy on the show. “It’s like $12 mil a year or something like that to maintain. Who wants to spend money on that?…Give the money away; no one needs that much money. There’s a ceiling where money makes you happy, and beyond that, it’s just greed.”

Of course, you don’t have to own the 279-foot yacht featured in the HBO drama ’s second season to enjoy its amenities. You can also charter the luxurious vessel , but you’d still need deep pockets.

Who owns the ‘Succession’ yacht?

The Solandge found a new owner in March 2017, after being listed for sale with Moran Yacht & Ship for 155,000,000 euros (about $180 million). However, the identity of the buyer hasn't been revealed.

Actress J. Smith-Cameron, who plays Gerri Kellman on Succession , discussed the boat with BuzzFeed News in Oct. 2019. “I think it’s a Saudi-owned superyacht . I believe the word ‘Solandge’ is made up of the letters of the kids’ and cousins’ names. I think somebody told me that. It may or may not be true. But it seemed like a good choice because it seemed like a parallel universe for the Roy family.”

BOAT International reported that the Solandge sale was the biggest brokerage deal of 2017 at the time. “We would like to take this opportunity to congratulate her new owner and thank her former owner for recognizing our expertise in selling large quality yachts and entrusting us with the sale of Solandge ,” Moran said upon the sale.

How do you rent the ‘Succession’ yacht?

The Solandge is available for charter through Moran Yacht & Ship, but it will set you back. You can charter the vessel for a summer week in the Mediterranean or a winter week in the Caribbean and the Bahamas, but both charters cost 1,000,000 euros per week, or about $1.16 million.

Moran touts that the Solandge is “one of the finest vessels currently available for charter and is one of the world’s largest and most iconic yachts.” The yacht sleeps 12 guests in eight state rooms, with a private owner’s deck and suite. A crew of 29, meanwhile, sleeps in 15 crew cabins. Built in 2013, the Solandge won the "La Belle Classe Superyachts" award from the Monaco Yacht Club at the 2014 Monaco Yacht Show, and the award for the best exterior at the Monaco Yacht Show Awards.

The Solandge ’s top deck features an outdoor cinema and a nightclub, the main deck features an indoor-outdoor gym, and the lower deck features a dive center, a tender garage, and a sauna. The saloon interior, designed by Aileen Rodriguez, boasts a floor-to-ceiling panel of backlit amethyst quartz, a large bar of amethyst-and-honey onyx, and a dining table under an amethyst-and-rose-quartz chandelier. And don’t forget about the onboard beauty salon, swimming pool, jacuzzi, and helipad!

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Header image - The Luxurious Yacht from HBO's Succession: A Deep Dive

The Luxurious Yacht from HBO's Succession: A Deep Dive

HBO's hit series Succession has captivated audiences with its gripping portrayal of a powerful media family's internal struggles. Among the many stunning visual elements featured in the show, Logan Roy's luxurious yacht from Succession has become a symbol of opulence and power. In this article, we'll take an in-depth look at this magnificent vessel, its features, design, and some behind-the-scenes insights.

A Floating Palace: Design and Features

The yacht featured in Succession is known as the Solandge , a 279-foot (85-meter) custom-built vessel by renowned German shipyard Lürssen. Designed by Espen Øino, the Solandge boasts a timeless exterior and a lavish interior crafted by Aileen Rodriguez.

Luxurious Amenities

Some of the yacht's standout features include:

  • Six expansive decks
  • A beach club with a fold-down swim platform
  • A fully equipped gym and spa
  • A large swimming pool
  • An outdoor cinema
  • A glass-enclosed elevator

The Solandge can accommodate up to 16 guests across eight opulent staterooms, each with its own en-suite bathroom and state-of-the-art entertainment system. The master suite features a private deck, a study, and a luxurious bathroom with a Jacuzzi.

A Glimpse Behind the Scenes

Succession filmed aboard the Solandge for several days during production. To shoot the scenes set on the yacht, the production crew worked closely with the yacht's crew to ensure smooth sailing and adherence to maritime regulations.

Real-life Ownership and Charter Opportunities

In real life, the Solandge is owned by a private individual and is not part of the Roy family's fictional fleet. However, the yacht is available for charter , with rates starting at a staggering €1 million per week.

The Yacht's Role in the Show

The yacht serves as a backdrop for some of the show's most pivotal moments, with its opulence and grandeur reflecting the excesses of the Roy family. The vessel's striking presence serves as a visual reminder of the immense wealth and power wielded by the show's central characters.

The Solandge, featured in HBO's Succession, is a floating palace that exemplifies the extravagant lifestyle of the ultra-wealthy. With its breathtaking design, state-of-the-art amenities, and memorable role in the series, it's no wonder that this stunning yacht has captured the imaginations of viewers around the world. So, the next time you watch Succession, keep an eye out for the Solandge and marvel at this extraordinary vessel.

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What Superyacht Was Used in Succession? (Get The Answer Here!)

yacht used in succession

Have you ever watched a TV show and wondered what luxury superyacht was used? Succession is an HBO dark comedy-drama that follows the lives of a powerful media family and their business dealings. In the second season, we are introduced to the MY Serenity superyacht, which is truly a sight to behold. In this article, you will find out everything you need to know about this stunning superyacht, from its features and its appearance in the show to the themes of Succession season two. We will also take a closer look at guest appearances and scene descriptions that feature MY Serenity. Read on to get the answer to the question: what superyacht was used in Succession?

Table of Contents

Short Answer

The superyacht used in the film Succession was a 112-meter long yacht named Lady S.

This custom-built superyacht is owned by Andrey Melnichenko, a Russian billionaire and was built in 2018 by the German shipyard Blohm + Voss in Hamburg.

Lady S features six decks, a helipad, a swimming pool, a spa, and a cinema along with accommodations for up to 20 guests and a crew of 40.

Background of Succession TV Series

Succession is an American comedy-drama television series that follows the lives of the Roy family, a powerful and influential media dynasty.

The show, which premiered on HBO in 2018, follows the lives of the Roys as they navigate the treacherous world of corporate media, politics, and power.

The show features a luxurious lifestyle, from opulent mansions to stunning superyachts.

One of the most impressive superyachts to appear in the show is the MY Serenity, owned by the Roy family.

The show centers around a succession of power struggles within the Roy family, as they battle for control of the familys media empire.

The show features a stellar cast, including Brian Cox, Hiam Abbass, Sarah Snook, and Kieran Culkin.

The show has won numerous awards, including two Golden Globe Awards and three Critics Choice Awards.

The show also features a range of eye-catching superyachts, such as the MY Serenity, a 60-meter Lurssen yacht owned by the Roy family.

This impressive vessel boasts a modern interior, full-beam master suite and five guest cabins.

It also features a Jacuzzi, swimming pool, gym and helipad, making it the perfect setting for the Roy familys lavish lifestyle.

MY Serenity was used throughout Season 2 of Succession and was a key setting for a number of plot points.

So, if youre a fan of the show and curious to know which superyacht was used in Succession, the answer is the MY Serenity, a 60-meter Lurssen yacht.

Overview of MY Serenity Superyacht

yacht used in succession

The MY Serenity superyacht is an impressive 60-meter Lurssen yacht owned by the Roy family in the television series Succession.

This luxurious vessel is the perfect setting for the Roys lavish lifestyle, featuring a modern interior, full-beam master suite, and five guest cabins.

It also boasts a Jacuzzi, swimming pool, gym, and helipad.

The MY Serenity was featured throughout Season 2 of Succession, and was a key setting for a number of plot points.

This luxurious vessel was designed to provide guests with the highest level of comfort and luxury.

The interior of the yacht features modern furnishings, including plush sofas, rich wood paneling, and luxurious textiles.

The master suite is full-beam, meaning it spans the entire width of the yacht, and features a spa-like bathroom, with a jacuzzi, steam room, and sauna.

The five guest cabins are all spacious and well-appointed, providing guests with the luxurious amenities they would expect.

The yacht also features a number of outdoor areas, including a large swimming pool, jacuzzi, and an expansive sun deck.

The helipad is also a great feature, allowing guests to arrive or depart in style.

The MY Serenity is also equipped with the latest technology, including satellite TV, satellite phone, and Wi-Fi.

The MY Serenity is the perfect vessel for the Roy familys luxurious lifestyle and has been featured prominently throughout Season 2 of Succession.

Whether its the picturesque backdrop to a family gathering or the setting for a business meeting, the MY Serenity is sure to impress.

Features of MY Serenity Superyacht

The MY Serenity superyacht is a 60-meter Lurssen vessel that was featured in the popular American comedy-drama, Succession.

This impressive vessel boasts a modern interior, full-beam master suite and five guest cabins, making it the perfect setting for the Roy family’s luxurious lifestyle.

The yacht also features a Jacuzzi, swimming pool, gym and helipad, as well as a spacious sundeck with comfortable seating and dining areas.

The MY Serenity is equipped with the latest technologies, such as a sophisticated navigation system, state-of-the-art audio and video systems, and a fully automated climate control system.

It also has its own private beach, allowing guests to relax in the sun and take in the stunning views of the surrounding waters.

The yacht is powered by two MTU diesel engines, allowing it to reach speeds of up to 20 knots and cruise up to a range of 6,000 nautical miles.

MY Serenity was used throughout Season 2 of Succession and was a key setting for a number of plot points, showcasing the lavish lifestyle of the Roy family.

MY Serenity Superyacht in Succession

yacht used in succession

The MY Serenity superyacht is the perfect backdrop for the lavish lifestyle of the Roy family in the hit American drama television series, Succession.

The 60-meter Lurssen yacht is a stunning vessel, boasting a modern interior, full-beam master suite, and five guest cabins.

It also features a Jacuzzi, swimming pool, gym, and helipad, making it the perfect setting for the Roy family’s extravagant lifestyle.

MY Serenity was featured throughout Season 2 of Succession and was an integral part of the shows plot.

The MY Serenity superyacht is a magnificent vessel that was customized to fit the Roy familys luxurious tastes.

The interior of the yacht is luxurious and modern, with spacious rooms, marble floors, and plush furniture.

The full-beam master suite has a king-sized bed, walk-in wardrobe, and an en-suite bathroom.

The yacht also features five guest cabins, each with its own en-suite bathroom.

In addition, the yacht has a Jacuzzi, swimming pool, gym, and helipad for the ultimate entertainment and relaxation.

The MY Serenity superyacht was a key part of the second season of Succession.

The yacht was used as a backdrop for many of the shows pivotal moments, including the Roy familys business meetings and the familys extravagant parties.

The yacht was also used as a refuge for the family during difficult times, providing a safe and luxurious space in which the Roys could relax and enjoy each others company.

The MY Serenity superyacht is a magnificent vessel that perfectly captures the lavish lifestyle of the Roy family in Succession.

From its luxurious interior to its Jacuzzi, swimming pool, gym, and helipad, the MY Serenity is the ideal setting for the Roy familys extravagant lifestyle.

The yacht was featured prominently throughout Season 2 of the show and was an integral part of the shows plot.

Scene Descriptions Featuring MY Serenity Superyacht

The MY Serenity superyacht is featured prominently throughout the second season of Succession.

It is the primary setting for a number of important plot points and is used to illustrate the Roy familys luxurious lifestyle.

In one of the more memorable scenes from the show, Logan Roy, played by Brian Cox, is seen on the yacht with his daughter, Shiv, talking about the familys future.

The scene takes place on the sun-drenched deck and is set against the backdrop of the crystal-clear waters of the Mediterranean Sea.

In another scene, the MY Serenity superyacht is used as a backdrop for a party hosted by the Roy family.

Complete with champagne and caviar, the party serves as a symbol of the familys wealth and success.

The yacht also features prominently in a scene where the family gathers for dinner in the interior dining room, discussing business and family affairs.

The MY Serenity superyacht is also seen in a number of other scenes throughout the show.

In one scene, the yacht is used as a backdrop for a romantic rendezvous between two of the characters.

In another, the yacht is the setting for a dramatic confrontation between two of the family members.

No matter the scene, the MY Serenity superyacht serves as a reminder of the wealth and power of the Roy family.

Themes of Succession Season 2

yacht used in succession

Succession Season 2 is full of luxurious and decadent settings, and the appearance of the MY Serenity yacht is the perfect encapsulation of this.

Throughout the season, the yacht is used to explore themes of wealth, power, family, legacy, and ambition.

As the Roy family grapple with their relationships and their place in the world, the yacht serves as a backdrop to some of the most important developments in the show.

The yacht symbolizes the Roy familys power and status, and its sumptuous interior and modern amenities represent their privileged lifestyle.

The yacht also serves to emphasize the familys complicated relationships, as they navigate the highs and lows of their lives together.

The yacht is a physical representation of their lifestyle, and it is used to illustrate their complicated dynamics, and the often-tumultuous nature of their relationships.

Guest Appearances on MY Serenity

The luxurious MY Serenity was put to good use throughout the second season of Succession.

As part of the Roy familys extravagant lifestyle, the yacht played host to a number of guests, such as a high-profile investor, the CEO of a rival company, and a powerful media mogul.

These guests were treated to the yachts impressive amenities and features, such as its full-beam master suite, five guest cabins, Jacuzzi, swimming pool, gym, and helipad.

Throughout their stay, these guests and the Roys engaged in interesting conversations and negotiations, which drove the plot forward and added to the shows dramatic tension.

One of the most memorable scenes from this season took place on the MY Serenity.

After a night out at the casino, Logan Roy (the head of the Roy family) and his son Kendall had a heated confrontation, resulting in a deep rift between them.

This scene was filmed on the yachts deck and provided viewers with a glimpse of the yachts impressive features.

The MY Serenity also featured in the shows final episode.

At the end of the season, Logan and his family sailed away on the yacht, leaving the audience to ponder their uncertain fate.

The yachts impressive features and luxurious amenities provided the perfect backdrop for the Roy familys dramatic story.

Overall, the MY Serenity played an important role in the second season of Succession.

From hosting powerful guests to providing a dramatic backdrop for key scenes, the yacht proved to be an integral part of the show.

Its luxurious amenities and impressive features added to the shows glamorous atmosphere and provided viewers with a glimpse into the luxurious lifestyle of the Roy family.

Final Thoughts

The MY Serenity is a magnificent vessel, and it played a pivotal role in the second season of Succession.

The yacht’s luxurious design and features created the perfect backdrop for the Roy family’s decadent lifestyle.

Its modern interior and expansive spaces provided the perfect setting for key plot points, as well as guest appearances from some of the show’s most memorable characters.

Now that you know which superyacht was used in Succession, why not take a closer look at the features and scenes that make MY Serenity so memorable?

James Frami

At the age of 15, he and four other friends from his neighborhood constructed their first boat. He has been sailing for almost 30 years and has a wealth of knowledge that he wants to share with others.

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yacht used in succession

You Too Can Charter the Yacht on Succession

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The fourth, and final, season of HBO’s Succession has just started, and it picks up where season three ended, with some of the most crucial scenes taking place on a 279-foot megayacht cruising in the Adriatic not far from Dubrovnik, Croatia.

At that time, the fictional Roy family, owners of the media giant Waystar (if you don’t think of Fox and Rupert Murdoch you’re not paying attention) have gathered for a critical business meeting. The first evening on board, Logan, the patriarch, announces that he will have to fire one of them (or another leader of the company) to satisfy his investors and troublesome Congressional investigators.

yacht used in succession

The yacht, Solandge , a $174 million Lürssen launched in 2013, is a perfect setting for a corporate beheading. Indeed, Mark Mylod, the show’s director, said it was “the ultimate gilded cage to trap these characters in” with the metaphor of throwing one of them overboard.

Solandge , as it turns out, is close to gilded; the interior does not include gold, but it does include 49 different marble and granite surfaces, and 30 types of wood. It holds 12 guests in eight cabins plus 29 crew in 15 cabins. Its six decks include a private owner’s deck, where the bulwarks have been lowered so they don’t interfere with the view from the bed.

Elsewhere, Solandge has a helipad, a dance floor with a DJ setup on the upper deck, a Jacuzzi, a fully stocked wine cellar, spa, massage room, elevator, and what Moran, which charters it, calls “a number of bars, buffet areas and even a large swimming pool.”

yacht used in succession

The toys include diving equipment, three Yamaha WaveRunners, wakeboards, kayaks and four tenders, including a 36-foot Fjord.

Solandge is powered by two 2,660-hp CATs. It  cruises at 15 knots, tops out at 18 knots, and has a range of 6,000 nm.

You don’t have to own a media company to charter Solandge , but owning something would help. It charters for 1 million Euros plus expenses a week, winter and summer, adding up to a total of $1,166,472, roughly. Read more at  https://www.moranyachts.com/luxury-yachts/solandge-3/?yacht-type=luxury-yachts-charter and see  the video below:

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Behind the scenes of HBO hit 'Succession': How set designer Stephen H. Carter used a $145 million Hamptons mansion and a yacht in Croatia to bring the billionaire characters' lifestyle to the screen

  • HBO's hit show "Succession" follows the billionaire Roy family through an internal battle for power over their aging father's media conglomerate.
  • From castles to glistening yachts, viewers are treated to sweeping sets befitting this billionaire lifestyle.
  • Business Insider caught up with Stephen H. Carter, the show's production designer, to find out how he put the show's look together.
  • Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories .

Insider Today

Season one of HBO hit show Succession chronicled the billionaire Roy family's internal battle for power over their aging father's media conglomerate, Waystar Royco. While the season took viewers through multiple grandiose sets, the Roys' world centered on Logan's apartment on NYC's so-called Millionaires Row.

The pilot pulled together several locations for the home, including the Harold Pratt House and the Irish-American Historical Society in NYC. After that, production designer Stephen H. Carter built a permanent replica on set.

Carter made subtle tweaks, though, like improving the floor plan so camerawork was easier. He also nixed some of the pricier details, like the library — only briefly glimpsed in episode one, it was easy to elide.

As the show's cachet snowballed via multiple Emmy nominations, "Succession's" budgets expanded. So, too, did its onscreen horizons — and Carter was tasked with sending the Roys and their acolytes out into the world.

The most valuable material on this set was foam

In season two, episode three, "Hunting," several members of the Roy family and the company's executives embark on a  hunting trip in Hungary.

The scene, though, was shot much closer to HBO's New York City headquarters — out on Long Island, at Oheka Castle , one of America's biggest private homes. Built by Robber Baron-era investment banker Otto Kahn, it incorporates a strange safeguard: After a previous mansion burned to the ground, Kahn insisted it be made of concrete to ensure it was fireproof.

That chilly brutalism is unlike any other property on the East End, but redolent of Eastern European estates. It also posed an intriguing problem for Carter.

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"You're not allowed to hammer nails into the walls to hang art — in some rooms, you can't add as much as a thumb tack, so we had to create an artificial paneling system where we could attach all the art and taxidermy," Carter told Business Insider. Those stuffed animals' heads viewers get a glimpse of  — including the five-foot antler racks — were actually handcrafted from foam to make them light enough not to drag. 

Logan Roy's inner child? Think Austin Powers.

Another new location for season two: the so-called Summer Palace, Logan's weekend retreat.

It's another 20,000-square-foot mega mansion, most recently listed for sale at $145 million in 2019, but this one wasn't built in the Gilded Age. Instead, it was constructed in 1960 for Henry Ford II, grandson of the car magnate. Carter kitted it out with a shagadelic lushness.

"I figured when Royco would have been consolidated with Waystar, that's when Logan would feel like he had made it, and that would have been the late 60s and early 70s. Until then, he would have been maneuvering, a young man going to parties, trying to figure out who his first wife would be. That's the point that things are most indelible on you," he explained of how Logan's taste was shaped. "So we made the décor here trying to be sort of classy, I guess, but within what would have been considered modern and practical in the late 1960s."

Boats and planes were the big addition to season two

After a yacht was nixed from season one's sets, Carter said he was thrilled to find both a plane and a boat on the call sheet for season two.

It was no G5 for Logan Roy, though, but a customized 737 that was recreated on a soundstage. The dividers between the cabins were a deliberate move on Carter's part to maximize the characters' opportunities for eavesdropping on each other.

As part of his research, he also toured the workshops of a firm that specializes in jet interiors. Carter was staggered to see one hallway filled with bolts of fabric, including one that resembled mylar — but was actually woven gold alloy.

"The bolts weren't for new projects, but leftovers," he said. "The company kept getting calls to come in and relay carpets or reupholster seats after someone spilled red wine."

Scouting locations on the high seas

The team wanted to hire a boat that it could set-dress for the show. Unfortunately, per Carter, that posed a challenge specific to the superyacht world.

"We spent a lot of time looking at boats, but when we'd see one with a great look, we would keep finding out it was owned by someone whose money was covered in blood — so we couldn't do business with them for ethical reasons," Carter said.

Eventually, in Cannes, they found one that checked both ethical and aesthetic boxes — at least on the outside. The interior, though, was distractingly glitzy.

Carter shipped some unlikely items, like huge pieces of heavy Japanese paper, to Dubrovnik, Croatia, where they would be shooting. He used them to hide the walls of the entry passage, which were translucent, backlit purple stone.

"A little disco bling to me," he laughed of the yacht's original look. "That certainly wasn't very Marcia and Logan." Groovy, baby.

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How ‘Succession’ Trapped the Roy Family in a ‘VIP Room’ of Grief in Episode 3

Sarah shachat, associate craft editor.

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It feels weird to spoiler warn something “ Succession ” has built towards and hinted at since the pilot. But spoilers abound!

Death comes for us all, even for Logan Roy ( Brian Cox ). The inescapability of that truth, as much as any tears, denial, guilt, and/or panic, is what makes Episode 3, “Connor’s Wedding,” so affecting. The rhythm of the edit and, as director Mark Mylod put it, the “sadism” of the camera reinforces that reality, refusing to let the Roys beg, browbeat, or weasel their way past the one force even Logan couldn’t cow: time.

Mylod and cinematographer Patrick Capone hammer home the helplessness of this moment and the illogical gravity of grief by delivering maybe the fullest version of the visual and dramatic approach that has made “ Succession ” so remarkable. They, veteran camera operators Gregor Tavenner and Ethan Borsuk, and the shows’ actors stress-tested the series’ preference for shooting as freshly as possible with as long a take as possible. The limit for takes on “Succession” is usually about 10 minutes, as the show shoots with film that must be reloaded once the reel is used up. But for the sequence where the siblings learn that Logan died en route to Sweden (putting business over family until the very end), Mylod and the actors wanted to cover about 30 pages of material in one go.

Related Stories The 42 Best HBO Shows Ranked, from ‘Succession’ to ‘Room 104’ Brian Cox Blames Joaquin Phoenix for ‘Napoleon’ Being ‘Terrible’: ‘I Think It’s Totally His Fault’

“That felt like it really needed to be an unbroken take, an unflinching take,” Mylod told IndieWire. “Normally, if there’s a [dramatic] moment, we explore it fully and even go beyond it, so having to artificially say, ‘OK, we have to cut there because the camera’s run out,’ felt just a little less than satisfying, even though the work that the actors and everybody was doing was fantastic. Patrick Capone, my brilliant friend and DP, was the key to it. The camera team basically worked out a way where they could have the two camera operators hide a bunch of film magazines around the set all over the place. Perhaps even a third camera body to pick up at some point. And [we just went] for it [and] I’m so glad we did. I’m really proud of that take.”

The Roy siblings embracing each other in Episode 3 of Season 4 of

The show’s two cameras dance around the actors, exposing how small Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Shiv ( Sarah Snook ), and Roman (Kieran Culkin) are by moving through the scene with them and reacting like an unseen person in the room who is turning to us and oh-so-quietly whispering, “What the fuck?” For this massive 30-minute take, a third camera was added so that as one camera did a quick reload, at least one operator was always following the siblings wherever they went and however they navigated the multiple decks of the ship to find somewhere less exposed to process the shock of losing their father.

But one of the great joys of “Succession” has always been that the trappings of wealth do not necessarily afford the Roys any dignity. Setting Connor’s (Alan Ruck) wedding aboard a yacht in the New York harbor, underneath a bright and beautiful blue sky, played a key part in how Mylod and Capone use composition to create the feeling of sudden, isolating grief. “The positioning of the boat with the stern facing out into New York Harbor was to me a lovely visual contradiction,” Mylod said.

“On the one hand, you have all the freedom of the water and the harbor and the great adventure of New York City out beyond. But at the same time, these characters are trapped in this little glass cage, in this VIP room, trapped in their grief and in their frustration of not being able to get the knowledge or comfort they seek. That, to me, was the perfect visual juxtaposition. And so when Kendall finally goes up onto the deck, that’s the first time you can properly breathe,” Mylod said.

Succession Season 4 Episode 3 Jeremy Strong Sarah Snook

But one of the ingenious things about the episode is that the visuals don’t draw attention to themselves as technical feats. In fact, the show deliberately diffuses most of the bravura camera moves with quick cut-ins so that nothing feels like a “Oner” with a Capital O, and so the perspective of the camera never distracts from the emotion of the sequence.

“One of the things I’m most proud of in the whole way that we’ve evolved this way of shooting is this dance that’s evolved between the camera operators and the actors over the years,” Mylod said. “We’ve tried to evolve this idea of the camera, and therefore by extension the viewer and sometimes the characters themselves, barely keeping up with events. The whole way in which we try to manifest [this approach] is that we rarely rehearse, and we never rehearse with cameras. We throw the actors and the camera operators together into a space, with sometimes very little guidance from me. They’ve just learned to anticipate one another – I don’t know of any other show that does that in quite the same way – and I’m really proud of it.”

The frisson of the actor and camera scrambling for perspective and control is beautifully, heartbreakingly counterbalanced in Logan’s death scene by cutting back to the scene onboard the airplane. The episode uses each new shot of Tom (Matthew MacFadyen) on the plane as a kind of punctuation mark that only feeds the desperation and denial on the boat.

Roman, Shiv, and Kendall Roy in a private room on a yacht in Episode 3 of Season 4 of

“The biggest single dilemma, for me anyway, was the aircraft side of [Logan’s death sequence] initially. Particularly during that 30-page section, a lot of that was supposed to be played off in that you’d hear Tom on the phone, obviously, and that was Matthew live [on the call] each time. But you wouldn’t necessarily cut to the aircraft much, if at all, during that section. But we thought we’d shoot it anyway, and Matthew and the rest of the cast on the plane were so damn compelling. It was really hard to get the balance between intercutting the boat and the aircraft at that point in the story,” Mylod said. “We ended up cutting to Matthew’s side of the call a lot more than we originally intended because he was so good.”

The other moment in the episode that was both planned and surprising was the final shot: Kendall alone on the tarmac after his father’s body is taken off the plane. That was always the final moment of the script, but Mylod didn’t call cut. “We let the moment play on. And actually, you know, in certain takes, Jeremy’s character broke down completely, emotionally. One of the takes, one of my favorites, was a continuation of the one we actually used. The moon happened to be rising very beautifully behind him.”

In that unused take, Mylod let the camera roll past Kendall getting into his car, the ambulance driving away, the police cars leaving, and the press trudging away on the other side of the fence. Mylod held on a very “lone and level sands” composition of just the plane sitting on the runway. “There was that lovely kind of emptying of the stage, you know. The play is over, and all the players exiting. That was really beautiful and very emotional for me,” Mylod said. “It would’ve been beautiful, and Nicholas Britell would’ve scored the hell out of it. But the right moment was [the one in the episode]. It’s the zenith, all the complications and contradictions going through Kendall’s head, seeing his father’s body there.”

Nothing better encapsulates the visual sensibility of “Succession” than that preference for finding landscapes that betray the characters’ ambitions, making them look small, showing them at that peak moment when their emotions leak through, and then cutting away. Much like Logan himself, the show’s cameras always put business over pleasure.

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What Yacht was Used in Succession

SOLANDGE is the yacht featured in HBO's famous TV series "Succession." The 85.1-meter Lurssen motor yacht is among the most luxurious and iconic motor superyachts. The show's director, Adam McKay, used the yacht as a prominent backdrop in Season 2. SOLANDGE boasts numerous onboard amenities, luxurious facilities, and exquisite living areas. Let's delve into the details of the yacht used in "Succession."

What yacht was used in succession

The Yacht Featured in Succession

As mentioned in the Intro of this post, SOLANDGE is the yacht featured in Succession . It is an 85.1-meter, or 279-foot superyacht manufactured by Lurssen , a famous German Shipyard. The most prominent features and design elements of this yacht are:

SOLANDGE Amenities

SOLANDGE served as the backdrop for the season two finale of Succession. The director has dramatically incorporated the superyacht, providing a fitting setting for the family drama and power struggles that unfolded on board. SOLANDGE is an impressive vessel that showcases luxury and extravagance. Here are the amenities of this superyacht:

  • Private owner’s deck
  • Unobstructed views
  • The sun deck with a large swimming pool
  • Spacious outdoor and indoor areas, including a gym
  • Full dive center
  • Outdoor cinema
  • Extensive spa with steam room, sauna, massage room, and beauty salon

SOLANDGE Yacht Specifications

What yacht was used in succession

Here are the technical specifications of the superyacht used in the famous HBO series “Succession:”

SOLANDGE’s Current Status

What yacht was used in succession

SOLANDGE is available for charter through different yacht companies. Although the exact price can fluctuate based on the season and itineraries, you can expect to pay $1,1000,000 per week to experience the luxurious lifestyle as the Roy Family in HBO’s “Succession.”

The amount covers the crew, fuel, and basic amenities. Additional expenses like drinks, food, and port fees may apply. So, make sure you have enough budget to charter a yacht . Otherwise, you will miss the luxury of this great yacht.

Final Words About SOLANDGE – The Super Yacht

SOLANDGE, the opulent 279-foot superyacht featured in HBO’s “Succession,” boasts six decks, a pool, gym, spa, and even a nightclub. The Lurssen-built vessel, with its exquisite interior and impressive specs, served as a dramatic backdrop for the Roy family’s power struggles. While not currently for sale, SOLANDGE can be chartered for a hefty price, offering a taste of the lavish lifestyle depicted in the show.

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Succession Recap: Heavily Fuckin’ Delayed

yacht used in succession

The title  Succession  has been a tease, if not a running joke, from the very beginning of the series — like  Game of Thrones  as a devilishly sadistic round of musical chairs. Which one of Logan Roy’s three relevant children will take over his media empire after he dies? (Or will Cousin Greg bumble his way to the top like Dennis Price killing off the eight Alec Guinnesses between him and the Duke D’Ascoyne in  Kind Hearts and Coronets ?) That’s the question that obsesses Kendall, Shiv, and Roman enough to drive the rivalry between them. And it’s what we’ve been asking, too, reasonably expecting an answer by the end of this fourth and final season. But now, even though we’ll discover — in the short- and long-term — who will take over Waystar Royco, Logan won’t be the person making that decision. What’s more, he probably decided years before the show’s opening scene that none of his idiot children were suitable for the job. It’s just the big, fat carrot he dangled at the end of the stick.

He probably also assumed, like everyone does, that he would live forever. Throughout the series, Logan survived multiple health scares, from that  first hemorrhagic stroke  on his helicopter to the  UTI that affected his cognitive function  to the  heat exhaustion he suffered  on Josh Aaronson’s Long Island estate. He also survived multiple attacks from inside and outside the business, including at least three involving Kendall — the failed “ no confidence” vote , the cruise scandal that briefly  exiled him to Balkan airfields , and the kids’ attempt to sabotage the GoJo deal in  last season’s finale  — and hostile moves by Sandy and Stewy. All the while, he never had an actual plan for succession unless you’re inclined to believe that his family and his inner circle (Gerri, Carl, and Frank, basically) were perpetually auditioning for the job. Now he’s gone, leaving a power vacuum akin to someone popping open the capsule hatch in deep space.

The staging of Logan’s death is brilliant. He goes out without a big speech, surrounded by sycophants, not loved ones. The combined forces of “the best heart doctor in the world” and “the best airplane doctor in the world” could have never affected the outcome. He’d been teetering on the precipice of death for a long time — and surely had the resources to cheat it longer than a normal person — and it finally came for him as it comes for us all. And so we get the sad, surreal spectacle of the Roy children, gathered together on a yacht for Connor’s wedding, dealing with this crisis on the end of a bad cell phone connection, confused and utterly helpless, each taking turns improvising their last words to him.

And so the tortured relationship between a father and his children ends appropriately, with Kendall, Shiv, and Roman speaking into the ear of a man who isn’t listening. It’s a heartbreaking spectacle, even if you’re disinclined to feel much sympathy for the Roys, who use their media empire to pump familial toxins into the national bloodstream. The fact that Logan’s kids are still so terminally immature — even the profanity evokes adolescents who are abusing new verbal weapons — makes it all the more touching because they react as children would, with a raw, unprocessed neediness. Nobody on the plane wants to tell them they’re talking to a dead man, so there’s some confusion over the endless “heart compressions” that might bring him back to life. But it’s safe to assume that Logan is never conscious from the moment the call to the kids is placed.

The entire cast is up to the task, but Kieran Culkin is particularly devastating as Roman, whose recent realignment with his dad suggested a vulnerability that’s every bit as deep as Kendall’s but expressed through attachment rather than rebellion. And for all the back-and-forth about Brian Cox and Jeremy Strong’s  conflicting approaches to the thespian craft , Culkin has quietly turned Roman into James Dean in  East of Eden  type, adding layers of melancholy and self-loathing to the expected arsenal of nasty put-downs and “ quirky sits .” Roman’s denial is the strongest of anyone in the group — he won’t believe his dad has died until he literally steps onto the plane and sees for himself — but the moment that really stabs at the heart is his assurances over the phone. “You’re a good dad,” he says to a corpse. “You’re a very good dad. You did a good job.”

The implications of Logan’s death are so immense that they’re almost impossible to comprehend, which is the genius of detonating this dramatic bomb when it will produce the most chaos. The GoJo deal will be, in Karl’s words, “heavily fucking delayed,” if it happens at all. Logan’s related “night of the long knives” isn’t happening, either, despite Roman moving excruciatingly forward with his plans to fire Gerri. The remaking of ATN under Logan’s supervision is also stalled, which means that Cyd, another woman executive he intended to can, and Tom can resume their mutual cattiness for now. Logan doesn’t appear to have drafted any plans for the company in the event of his death, and so the free-for-all commences before his body has even gone cold.

In a simple, brilliant plotting device, series creator Jesse Armstrong, who co-wrote this episode, expresses all this immediate dysfunction with the drafting of a statement announcing Logan’s death. As head of public relations, Karolina thinks clearly enough to realize that the company needs to get ahead of the news and control the fallout. The kids are initially too freaked out to understand what needs to be done —  Calm the markets?! At a time like this?!  — but circumstances have neatly divided everyone into two separate parties: The plane people and the kids. The plane people are Tom and the three executives (Karl, Frank, and Karolina), who can actually run the day-to-day competently while the kids, with Hugo as their liaison, have to scramble to make sure their voices are included — their futures depend on it.

The kids ultimately do have a hand in giving the statement to the press, with Shiv reading off the PR-massaged boilerplate (“Logan Roy built a great American family company…” and “This nation lost a passionate champion,” etc.) for the scrum of cameras. In the remaining episodes, she and her siblings will have to fight hard for a piece of a “family company” that their dad did not bequeath to them or anyone else, as far as we can tell. One thing’s for certain: The market is not calmed. There’s a seismic dip in the stock price as news circulates, reflecting the investors’ (correct) understanding that Waystar Royco was a one-man operation.

“There he is,” says Roman at a graph that descends like a flatlining heartbeat. “That is Dad.”

Sad-Sack Wasp Traps

• Hard to overstate how badly Logan’s death weakens Tom’s position, and he knows it. He’s lost his “protector,” the man who rewarded his loyalty by giving him the ATN job that made Syd redundant and expendable and by helping him freeze his daughter out of access to the city’s best divorce lawyers. The news isn’t good for Greg, either, though both of the Disgusting Brothers have proven to be survivors in the past.

• Connor and Willa going through with the wedding anyway is a lovely touch and further evidence that Connor’s disconnection from the rest of the family serves him well on occasion. Those two stand a good chance of having the healthiest love relationship in the series.

• Tom and Greg are a buddy team that cannot be broken up, but Tom still likes to dangle Greg over the balcony whenever possible, like when he talks about the three or four “Greglets” doing things for him while the real Greg is not available.

• Roman’s attempted firing of Gerri goes about as well as Greg trying to let Kerry down easy over her lousy audition tape. “I danced us through a fucking thunderstorm without us getting wet,” she says in response to his wan declaration that Logan was unhappy about the company’s DOJ dealings. Past weird intimacies aside, Gerri has been sharp with Roman when it matters.

• “I do not want to see the internal qualities.” — Connor, upending the cutting-the-cake part of the traditional wedding reception.

• Roman on news that his dad’s heart and breathing have stopped “for a while”: “But that doesn’t mean that he’s dead, medically.”

• Incredible Tom line in reference to Kerry, the queen of inappropriate smiles, flashing one on the plane: “It looks like she caught a foul ball at Yankee Stadium.”

• A wedding day exchange between Connor and Willa: “Are you just with me for money, Willa?” “There is something about money and safety here, yeah. I’m happy. I’m not going to walk. Not today, anyway.” Of the three catastrophic weddings on the show—preceded by Tom and Shiv’s and Lady Caroline and Peter Munion’s — theirs is by far the most romantic.

• Kendall: “We’ll get a funeral off the rack. We can do Reagan with tweaks.”

• It’s a brief shot, but the look on Colin’s face is like a dog without its master.

For more, join us for  Succession Club ,  our subscriber-exclusive newsletter obsessively chronicling all the biggest twists of the final season. Existing subscribers can  visit this page  to sign up. If you’re not a subscriber yet,  click here to get started .

Scott Tobias will be answering comments in this very recap of  Succession  episode three. He’ll monitoring the comments for next 48 hours after the post publishes and respond to questions about the episode. Join the conversation in the comments!

This article has been updated to correct an error.

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Succession Season 2 Finale Recap: Who Did Logan Throw Overboard?

Click here to read the full article.

Succession ‘s Roy family wrapped up Season 2 by hashing out their issues aboard a luxury yacht… and one key character went down with the ship.

Sunday’s finale starts back in D.C., with a bewildered Cousin Greg withering under the glaring spotlight of a tough Congressional inquiry, while Logan takes a call from a big-time shareholder, warning him that someone needs to take the fall for the cruise ship scandal… and “we feel that probably it should be you.” Logan doesn’t love that idea, of course, and gathers his brood in Venice for a stay aboard his decadent mega-yacht. (It’s almost like a Below Deck Med crossover episode.) There’s plenty of drama afoot: Willa’s play got hammered by bad reviews, Kendall brought Naomi Pierce along… and Tom is very flustered about Shiv planning a threesome with him and an old female friend.

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Roman’s there, too, after escaping that unpleasant hostage situation, and he might have a deal to take Waystar private — along with a cellphone video of Karl defecating in a bucket. He, Kendall and Shiv speculate about who might be the next CEO, now that Rhea is out. It could be Greg, even! (Kendall: “Are you ready to step up?” Greg, not hearing: “It’s a fungus, they think? A benign fungus.”) When Logan arrives, Laird tells him the private money deal is all but done, and sings Roman’s praises in closing the deal. But Roman speaks up and reveals he thinks the deal is “probably bulls–t” and exposes how Laird stands to benefit from it financially. Karl sides with Roman, and Logan says no deal, with an angry Laird sarcastically wishing them luck with the coming shareholder revolt.

Logan is a bit shellshocked when confiding in Kendall, but he says no to bringing in Stewie again, and the mood is grim. (Even Tom knows there’s going to be “a head on a spike.”) Connor comes begging to Logan for one of his newspapers to cook up some good reviews for Willa’s play… and oh, a loan of “a little hundred mill” (!). Logan says yes — but only if he gives up his silly presidential bid. Then he invites everyone to drink up tonight… because tomorrow, they’ll have to come up with a plan together. Roman gleefully starts taking bets on who’s getting canned, and Logan raises some alarms about Naomi joining Kendall on the boat. “I just don’t want you f–ked on drugs,” he bluntly tells his son, and a compliant Kendall sends her away the next morning. Plus, Tom finds a way to ruin the threesome before it even starts, concluding he’s just not feeling that “naughty.” (Not a shock, to be honest.)

When day breaks, Connor orders a full bottle of Burgundy for breakfast before Logan announces that, if they have to get rid of somebody, “the obvious choice is me.” The rest talk him out of it, though, and Logan insists he needs “one meaningful skull” to serve up to the shareholders, promising to take care of whoever volunteers. Kendall throws Gerri to the wolves, but Logan shoots that down: “There is no one more loyal than Gerri.” Roman suggests Frank, and Frank deflects to Karl. When Gerri’s name comes up again, Roman leaps to her defense (a little forcefully), and then suggests Tom, since he’s head of cruises. Kendall piles on, citing his Congressional meltdown, and even Shiv says that “Tom looks logical.”

Kendall thinks Tom isn’t a big enough skull, though, and Roman recommends they spice his sacrifice up with “some Greg sprinkles.” (Greg: “I object.” Roman: “Who cares?”) Connor volunteers himself, in hopes of grabbing a golden parachute, but Logan walks away from the table, thinking they have “half an idea” and they’ll finish up later. He and Kendall take an emergency meeting with Stewy, offering to accept the hostile takeover on certain terms… but Stewy flatly says no. He shrugs off Kendall’s anger, thinking he and Sandy have the shareholders on their side. Meanwhile, Shiv and Tom share a private beachside picnic, and Tom fumes about how she threw him under the bus — and how she sprung an open marriage on him on their wedding night. (“I am not a hippie!”) He confesses he’s been “pretty unhappy” with her, and works up the nerve to talk to Shiv’s dad. Actually, though, he just sits down next to Logan and takes an awkward bite of his chicken before fleeing.

Shiv huddles with Logan, and he promises if Tom is the victim, “I’ll take care of him.” Then he drops a bombshell: “Ken works… it hurts.” But “it plays,” too, he thinks. He turns to his daughter and asks her what she thinks, noting that this is a job for a future CEO. Shiv hesitates, but then tells her dad: “Just not Tom… Please. For me.” Later, she calls in Kendall to see Logan… and Kendall sees the writing on the wall. Logan says Tom and Greg won’t work, and the shareholders won’t accept him stepping down himself. (Which is a lie, but anyway.) An ashen-faced Kendall assures him it’s OK, as Logan prepares him to confess: He knew everything about the cruise troubles, and will take the fall.

Kendall needs to know, though: “Did you ever think I could do it?” (Be the CEO of Waystar, he means.) Logan stammers and delays until he concludes: “You’re not a killer. You have to be a killer.” Kendall realizes he might deserve this after what happened with the caterer at Shiv’s wedding, but Logan brushes all that off: “It’s nothing.” Kendall kisses his dad on the cheek, and they head in to tell the rest. Roman protests, but shuts up quickly when Logan tells him he’ll be elevated to full COO. Kendall jets home to face the media in a press conference — in an echo of his TV interview in the Season 2 premiere — but when he sits down, he announces that his father is a “malignant presence, a bully and a liar” and knew about all the wrongdoing at Waystar. He even offers incriminating records with Logan’s signature on them — thanks, Greg! — and concludes of his father: “I think this is the day his reign ends.” Whoa. The Roy family war, though? It’s only just begun.

Alright, it’s your turn: Give tonight’s finale a grade in our poll below, and then hit the comments to share your thoughts.

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yacht used in succession

Inside the Stylishly Satirical World of HBO’s “Succession”

Designing the dysfunctional dynasty.

By Cathy Whitlock

In our ongoing series Screening Room , we go behind the scenes with the uber-talented production designers and set decorators of today’s most visually alluring TV shows and movies for a deep dive on how they whipped up such indelible backdrops. This week we chat with the Emmy Award-winning and two-time Oscar-nominated set decorator George DeTitta Jr. about the understated uber luxe interiors he created for the billionaire Roy family in HBO’s  satirical drama Succession.

A well-televised takeover, attention-grabbing headlines, sibling backstabbing, and the FBI knocking at the door—it’s just another day in the life of the Roy family.

HBO’s highly addictive drama Succession is the story of the battle for wealth and power between family patriarch Logan Roy (Brian Cox) and his four scheming siblings as they seek the mantle of global media and entertainment empire Waystar Royco. Season Three finds the beleaguered scion Kendall (Jeremy Strong) staging a coup for the company while daughter Shiv (Sarah Cook) and brothers Roman (Kieran Culkin) and Connor (Alan Ruck) plot and form alliances. As the saying goes, let the games begin.

yacht used in succession

The lives of the upper one percent (in this case, the upper 0.0001 percent) have long held a fascination as their flashy, opulent lifestyles are often the stuff of dreams and fantasy. While the Roys’ wealth and life inside the bubble is front and center, the sumptuous settings are a study in understated sophistication. Created by production designer Stephen Carter and set decorator George DeTitta Jr., this season’s playgrounds include sleek glass-lined offices in the sky, private jets and a yacht that double as executive boardrooms along with the requisite penthouses and luxury five-star plus hotels.

yacht used in succession

Primarily set in Manhattan, the interiors reflect that Roy is from old European money. “From the very beginning, the Roys’ were a showy type of family,” says DeTitta, “and we never took the approach that their wealth was something you had to see, so we didn’t do glitzy. We just approached it the way these people tend to live.”

Carter and DeTitta began the process three years ago, doing a deep dive into the lives of billionaire families (that would be the Murdochs, Redstones, and Bronfmans), keeping the same aesthetic throughout. Designing the environs of the uber-rich can represent a challenge as the locations have to be top-notch (be it a boar-hunting lodge in Hungary or a house in the Hamptons), and the quality of antiques, workmanship and materials have to be first rate. Keeping an eye on the difference between decorating with old and new money is also an important consideration.

yacht used in succession

“This season’s changes have the same approach, and we have added some different interiors including lavish iconic New York City hotels,” says the Emmy Award-winning and two-time Oscar-nominated set decorator. “We shot at the Lotte New York Palace, Pierre, and the Plaza during the pandemic when no one was there. It was the trifecta of New York hotels. The Palace was so beautiful and perfect the way it was; all we had to do was change a chair or two. We also dressed an entire room at the Plaza; it was the same room Truman Capote threw his famous black and white ball set in 1966. We brought every piece of furniture in for that scene,” he details.

yacht used in succession

A mix of modern and old school traditional, the Waystar Royco corporate headquarters was built on location at World Trade Center 3. “We started with a raw space and once again put it back together (the previous seasons were at World Trade Center 7). We gave Shiv a nice space and figured at this point she is the so-called CEO so we made it comfortable with a feminine touch and different from the other offices,” he notes.  “We wanted to give Logan a sense of old money feel, so I added a great old desk and furniture with warm tones.”

yacht used in succession

This season debuts the apartment of Kendall’s ex-wife Rava (Natalie Gold) and her children filmed on location at the historic Woolworth Building (once the tallest in Manhattan). “We took over the penthouse apartment, and since one of their models had not sold, we emptied it and used some of the existing furniture, brought in art, and went to town on that place,” he says. “We wanted it to feel homier with the kids and introduced their lives into the overall feel of the apartment. It became an ongoing process and turned out beautifully.” Kendall also gets new digs on the 90 th floor of a building in Hudson Yards filled with contemporary art and mid-century modern furniture. “We went a little starker on the interiors, keeping his character in mind.”

yacht used in succession

Viewers will get a peek into the Hamptons compound of new character Josh Aaaronson (Adrien Brody), a minority stakeholder in Waystar. The house, where he takes Kendall and Roy for a long fact-finding walk, was chosen for its long stretch of beach, a rarity these days. Ready for its close-up, the house boasts a white sectional sofa, chrome and leather chairs, and the pièce de résistance, 22-foot-tall floor to ceiling windows with a jaw-dropping view of the ocean.

Design devotees will be happy to see the return of Logan’s magnificent Fifth Avenue penthouse with views of the Metropolitan Museum and Central Park (designed on a soundstage at Long Island City’s Silvercup East Studio). The monotone color palette of creams, golds, and beiges with thoughtfully placed portraits and elegant furnishings sourced from the likes of Newel Props (owned by Newel Antiques) and l st dibs remains simply stunning.

As Logan Roy muses, “My life is not for everyone.” This might be true, but perhaps a percentage of it would be interesting.

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Succession Yacht: Solandge Yacht

September 24, 2022, succession:.

Succession is an amazing show that we all love. It is a dark comedy on HBO that started in 2018. We are always wondering what will happen with the Roy family watching this show. Furthermore, you may notice the amazing yacht they use in the season two finale. Check out the Succession yacht below.

What Yacht Was Used In Succession?

The yacht used in the second season is the Solandge.

The yacht has a cost of 160 million dollars and has a capacity of 20 people. Moreover, the yacht is actually a whopping 200 feet long. The interior is to die for. Imagine having a pool, hot tub, and even a bar on the ocean while vacationing. Moreover, the family spent time on this amazing sea craft. Also, they definitely thoroughly enjoyed being on this festive boat. It is perfect for that family as there are many water toys attached. Some of the toys include paddleboards, wakeboards, jet skis, and even scuba diving equipment. In addition, the boat is not currently owned by anyone specific and can be chartered weekly or monthly. Enjoy and vacation on this amazing yacht for a whopping $1 million per week. Finally, would you like to be on this yacht?

Specifications:

Succession Yacht Price: $160 Million

Capacity: 20 People

Succession Yacht Interior: Hot tub, pool, many seating areas

Photos: Succession Yacht

Succession Yacht

In conclusion, I hope you enjoyed reading about the yacht from Succession. Furthermore, please leave your thoughts and comments below and on our socials. Finally, read some other articles like this one on our frontpage .

Lastly, which other celebrity yachts would you like to see on our site? Please leave the names of other celebrities that you would like to see on here. Check us out on  Instagram  too and like and follow. Please leave your thoughts on our Facebook, Twitter, or our Instagram in the comments of our posts.

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Who was William Penn? William Penn was a well-known English writer. Furthermore, he was also a Colonial proprietor of Pennsylvania. He was born in London, England, on October 24, 1644, to his parents, Sir William Penn and Margaret Jasper. He married twice. Gulielma Maria Springett was his first wife. In 1696, he tied the knot […]

Stanley Kirk Burrell, popularly known as MC Hammer, was once among the biggest names in the music industry with an estimated net worth of over $70 million at the height of his career in the 1990s. Unfortunately, due to extravagant spending and rapid lifestyle changes, he encountered financial troubles, leading to bankruptcy in less than […]

Introduction: Your couch is the centerpiece of your living room, a place where you relax, entertain guests, and make memories with your loved ones. Custom couch cushions offer a unique opportunity to personalize your space and elevate the comfort and style of your living room. In this guide, we'll explore the benefits of choosing custom […]

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Succession illustration

‘Rich People Don’t Use Napkin Rings’: How ‘Succession,’ ‘Billions’ and Other Helipad Dramas Get the Details Just Right

The zeitgeist’s favorite shows about billionaires behaving badly live and die by the details, from watches to wine to yacht design., by jay cheshes.

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Brad pitt spent ‘months’ in racecar driver training for his upcoming f1 movie.

In other words, if the fictional lives portrayed on Succession and its growing list of imitators feel awfully familiar, it might be because while you’ve been watching the shows, they’ve been watching you . 

Extreme wealth, more often skewered than celebrated, dominates the chatter about television these days, from masters of the hedge-fund universe sparring with federal prosecutors on Billions to the familial power plays on Succession to the vacation foibles of the merely rich on The White Lotus . And the popularity of these shows—a subgenre that we’ve termed Helipad Drama—among the demographic they feature is linked directly to how well the art imitates life. 

Succession’s Kendall Roy leaving jet

To create an authentic visual universe for Succession ’s media mogul Logan Roy, played by Brian Cox, and his fictional brood to inhabit, production designer Stephen Carter pored over publications catering to wealthy readers, including this one. He learned about the Murdochs and the Bronfmans and other dynasties, about their homes and cars and yachts, as well as the corporate boardrooms they occupied. “I don’t run with the billionaire set myself, so there was a lot of education,” he says. 

Notice: It’s not just any wine Cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun) swills during season three of Succession , but a cult bottle of Pingus from Spain’s Ribera del Duero region—a magnum from 1998, no less, all but impossible to find. And it’s not just any old villa where Aubrey Plaza’s Harper and her frenemy Daphne (Meghann Fahy) ditch their spouses for a night in the second season of The White Lotus, but the 16th-century home of a Sicilian count. 

With these shows’ binge-ability and viral moments, each visual choice is under a microscope, scrutinized online in single-frame screengrabs, from running tallies of every Aston Martin, Bentley and Ferrari driven by Damian Lewis’s Bobby Axelrod on Billions to the many watches worn—and occasionally discarded—on Succession . 

A bottle of Pingus wine

“Our props team and wardrobe team and my team are always trying to get the details right,” says Carter. “But we also try to keep it fairly subtle, so nothing feels like a big product-placement advertisement. It’s a delicate balance between fetishizing the products and the wealth they suggest and just sort of having it correct.” 

The bling is a bit more overt on Billions, to convey just how far Axelrod has come from his humble working-class roots. “It was really about trying to sell the amount of privilege people with extreme wealth have and the access and power that comes with that,” says Michael Shaw , production designer on the show’s first two seasons. “A lot of rich people can buy really nice wine, but not everybody can buy a football team.” Which explains why Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, makes a cameo in the second season as Axelrod considers buying his own pro franchise. 

The particulars get harder to nail—and those outside consultants become more essential—when a production hits the road. “If you do take characters we’re familiar with and put them somewhere unfamiliar, you better be sure that new environment, the rules of that world, are still going to work,” says Mylod. “It felt risky to us as soon as we left New York for the first time.” 

The White Lotus, Harper and Daphne leave their main vacation to rent the home of an Italian count.

When the series moved to Italy for two episodes in the third season, shooting just as pandemic travel restrictions began easing in 2021, the producers turned to British travel and event planner Emily FitzRoy for help. FitzRoy organizes high-end Italian vacations through her company, Bellini Travel , booking some of the country’s most spectacular villas for her elite clientele. “For the last 25 years, I’ve essentially been looking after more benevolent versions of the Roy family, in Italy,” she says. 

FitzRoy introduced the Succession team to La Foce , a 3,500-acre estate with manicured gardens, south of Siena, and to La Casinella , an eight-bedroom villa reachable only by boat, on the shores of Lake Como, which had never been used for a film shoot. (Want to stay there, too? It’s available to rent starting at $160,000 a week.) Both properties were featured prominently. “Emily got us into some really fantastic locations that I don’t think we’d have gotten into otherwise,” Carter says. 

After the initial scouting trip, the production kept FitzRoy on as a consultant during the Italy shoot. “They said, ‘Can you come over and make sure everything looks authentic and true to how this family would travel?’ ” she recalls. Among other things, she advised on the type of Champagne to serve (Bollinger, though she also pushed “Winston Churchill’s favorite, Pol Roger”) and whether to use a clipboard or an iPad when checking in guests for a destination wedding (the latter, of course). 

Gothic drawing room by Pugin in Eastnor castle in Britain

The art and antiques that fill the home of the affair’s host—Tom Hollander’s over-extended expat, Quentin—all came with the property, the seven-bedroom Villa Elena, owned by interior designer Jacques Garcia . More often, works featured on shows such as The White Lotus are chosen by advisers who curate production sets as they would private homes. 

Fanny Pereire, who worked on the pilots for Billions and Succession, has a full-time job securing art for TV and film. Her process starts with a wish list of original works. She then secures single-use permission to feature each piece from the copyright holders, generally by paying out fees to artists or estates. The works shown on-screen are mostly very good official copies of sometimes priceless originals, laser-printed on canvas and touched up by the show’s art department to add brushstroke texture. After shooting wraps, Pereire usually films herself slashing the approved fakes—she’s contractually obligated to destroy or return the works—and sometimes sends them back to the artist in pieces, as proof of destruction. 

Those works, often lurking in the background, subtly move the story forward, adding insight into a particular character or scene, whether it’s the Basquiat hanging ostentatiously outside Axelrod’s office or the giant photo of a melting glacier by Frank Thiel in the boardroom at the Roy family’s corporate headquarters.

“We’re telling a story, and hopefully if we do our job right, just as the production design or the costumes will tell you something about the character, the art will, too, without being part of the dialogue,” says Pereire. 

The Mona Lisa may have played a central role in last year’s hit Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, but the other art on display in the lair of tech-bro villain Miles Bron (Edward Norton) was selected with equally precise intent. Director Rian Johnson winkingly hung a 1961 Mark Rothko abstraction upside down, as a nod to Bron’s bloviating ignorance. 

Succession wedding at England's Eastnor Castle

The backdrops for all this art, the homes and offices where the action goes down, are sometimes shot on location or, just as often, on a constructed set. Succession’ s Waystar Royco offices are a mix of the two, filmed on a vacant floor in New York’s 7 World Trade Center. 

While the original set for Logan’s sprawling Fifth Avenue apartment was designed by Carter and his team at New York’s Silvercup Studios , several of the high-end Manhattan digs featured on Succession are real residences awaiting new owners. In the third season, Kendall’s ex-wife lives in a condo in the iconic Woolworth building that sold last year for $19.975 million; younger brother Roman (Kieran Culkin) has lived in an 11,000-square-foot townhouse in Chelsea, recently listed for $22 million. “We get a deal on these places because they’re on the market,” says Mylod. “The idea being: If they’re on the show, maybe they’ll sell more quickly.” 

A fresh crop of marquee homes and apartments will appear in the new season. Word has it, one is a sprawling penthouse in one of the tallest buildings on New York’s Upper West Side and another floats 85 stories in the sky. “There’s a lot of good new stuff,” Carter says, while remaining tight-lipped on details. “It’s going to be a good, wild ride.” 

Billions Bobby Axelrod and his Range Rover

The interiors devised by the production-design teams on Succession and Billions often have an intentionally sterile, impersonal quality. “Early on, I wanted things to feel kind of staged,” Carter says. “You want to feel these aren’t people who have the time or inclination to spend the time actually decorating their own places. They have a team of people who are paid to do it, and they’re probably a little scared for their jobs, so they make choices straight out of the magazines everybody’s been looking at.” 

“There’s a whole world of making a car interior practical for shooting,” says Carter. “The cars in the show often are picked not just because they look super cool and stylish, but because they’re actually going to be shoot-friendly.” 

Because a real airplane cabin can be constricting for a long shoot with multiple characters, Carter built his own version in the studio, modeling the Roy family’s corporate jet in part after Rupert Murdoch’s 737. To get a feel for the fabrics and dimensions, he visited Cabin Crafters , a New Jersey–based company that specializes in private-aircraft interiors. “We were very realistic about it,” he says. “I think we maybe tweaked the width of the fuselage by four inches.” 

Finding a megayacht for maritime scenes shot off the Croatian coast in the second season presented other, unexpected, obstacles. Some of the most impressive vessels, Carter says, were “categorically off the table because, essentially, they’re blood-diamond boats. The pedigree is too unpalatable for HBO to be able to say we’re going to do business with this owner.” Producers eventually settled on the 279-foot Solandge , available to charter for $1 million a week. 

Damian Lewis as Bobby

And it’s not just the physical trappings of wealth that are steeped in reality on Succession . “I think they do a good job of addressing some of the issues that are faced in this world of people with exorbitant resources,” says Clay Cockrell, LCSW , a New York therapist with a slew of wealthy word-of-mouth clients. “Issues of isolation, sometimes guilt, sometimes shame, power struggles between family members, distrust for outsiders.” 

Even for fans who might recognize a bit of themselves in these shows, there are thrills to be found watching the antiheroes squirm. “Any really good, over-the-top presentation that takes place in a world that you are familiar with can be lots of fun,” says Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. “Just like many people who had lives in organized crime were really into The Sopranos… sometimes watching your own world burlesqued, made a caricature of, is pleasing just by the fact that your world is important enough to be made fun of.” 

Solandge, a 279-foot yacht, featured on Succession in Season 2

Nevertheless, their wedding needed to feel lavish, but with plastic flowers that wouldn’t wilt over the course of an extended shoot and inedible canapés that wouldn’t turn brown in the sun. Sarah Haywood , an event planner based in London, advised on the festivities, filmed at Eastnor Castle in Herefordshire in the West Midlands of England. “I worked with the writers, who would email me questions about the order of the day,” she says. “The timing, the dress, everybody’s wedding attire, what sorts of things a couple like that might do for their guests.” 

And the barely seen details are just as important. “There were things that had nothing to do with the story line at all, were not referenced, were not used—but they were there,” Haywood says. Recalling previous wedding-weekend itineraries, Haywood suggested the guests might need waterproof boots in case the weather turned inclement and the grounds muddy, so a Hunter Wellington-boots box appears in the background of one scene. 

The right food and drink add yet another layer. Both Axelrod and his nemesis, US Attorney Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti), love to dine out in New York, visiting the city’s buzziest restaurants (some now shuttered), from Sushi Nakazawa and Momofuku Ko to Del Posto and Daniel . “In the first season, it was really hard to get in anywhere,” says Shaw. “After the show came out, the second season everybody wanted us in.” 

On Billions, David Lynch’s Broken Heart hangs in Mike Price’s office.

“Whenever we’ve shot in a restaurant in New York,” Mylod says, “the first thing I do is talk to the owner—where’s the power table, what would they order?— just to get the basic feng shui of shooting.” 

On Succession, drinking and dining tend to be weaponized in the service of satire. Meals often veer into the grotesque, such as Tom and Cousin Greg choking down contraband songbirds under cloth napkins—“to mask the shame,” as Tom says—and the Roy siblings picking buckshot out of their mother’s stew of freshly killed pigeon. A family summit at the clan’s summer palace in the Hamptons ends with the staff dumping a whole tray of lobsters into the trash out back. (They order in pizza instead.) “There is great opportunity to sort of point out the excess with the food,” says Carter. 

When you’re in the business of re-creating worlds with rigor and authenticity, there’s perhaps no greater achievement than dreaming up a simulacrum that outstrips reality. Like students surpassing their teacher, the Billions team created such a compelling backdrop when they built the offices of Axe Capital—shot on location in Rockland County, N.Y.—that an investment firm later hired Shaw to consult on its real offices, in Manhattan’s shiny Hudson Yards. 

“The owners of the company wanted the interior to feel like the Billions world,” says Shaw. “That was life really imitating art.” 

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The Real C.E.O. of “Succession”

By Rebecca Mead

Jesse Armstrong

When Jesse Armstrong, the writer and creator of the HBO series “ Succession ,” arrived on set at Amerigo Vespucci Airport, in Florence, one morning in June, he was faced with an extravagant decision. The scene to be shot was from the first episode of Season 3, in which various members of the Roy family—the dysfunctional media dynasty whose power struggles the show acidly chronicles—have just disembarked from the yacht on which, in the Season 2 finale, they bobbed in gilded captivity. Two planes had been positioned together on the tarmac: a Boeing 737, rented at a price of more than a hundred thousand dollars, and a smaller Falcon business jet. Tracks had been laid for a dolly shot. The temperature was already climbing into the eighties, and a crew of more than two hundred people bustled about the runway, perspiring in high-visibility vests.

The scene hinged on a surprise. In the final moments of the previous episode, Logan Roy, the volatile patriarch, was aboard the yacht, watching a live stream of Kendall Roy, one of his four ambitious offspring, at a press conference in New York, where he had been sent to publicly shoulder the consequences of a scandal in the cruise-ship division of Waystar Royco, the family conglomerate. Instead of offering himself up as a sacrifice, however, Kendall had stuck the knife into his father. The new season, which begins airing in October, picks up the story moments later, with Logan, the rest of the family, and Logan’s most loyal executives still in Europe, calculating how to counter Kendall’s move.

“It’s a moment of indecision,” Armstrong said of the tarmac scene, above the drone of idling jet engines. Though the previous season ended with a closeup of an inscrutable smile on Logan’s face, “this is the moment at which you get the sense that Logan is worried.” In the new script, Logan chooses to divide his forces into two camps: one party will return to America while he and others fly elsewhere. Armstrong’s decision that morning involved the placement of the two rented planes, which airport staff had parked close together. As he put it to me, his concern was that having two planes visible at the outset of the scene would preëmpt the story: “I think a viewer’s sense would be: ‘They can all travel together on the big plane. So why is there a second plane?’ ”

An embarrassment of airplanes: a very “Succession” problem. The show, a word-of-mouth hit, is known for its faithful depiction of the bountiful resources and anesthetized habits of the very wealthy. On an excursion from the yacht in Croatia, Logan’s son-in-law, Tom Wambsgans, instructs the pilot of a small boat, “Next cove, please, Julius,” so that he and his wife, Shiv, can be ferried to a sublime coastal spot for the unhappiest picnic ever. Armstrong—whose display of personal indulgence, in spite of his professional success, so far extends only to showing up to the Season 3 writers’ room in an extremely nice blue cashmere sweater—is a good-natured stickler for verisimilitude. The playwright Lucy Prebble, who is one of the show’s writers, recalls “someone coming in and saying, ‘We can’t have two helicopters,’ and noting how many tens of thousands of dollars they cost, and Jesse just saying, in a really relaxed way, ‘I think we probably need two.’ ” “Succession” documents wealth but it does not fetishize it, with the possible exception of a backless wool turtleneck dress worn by Shiv in an episode of Season 2; the garment was so delectably impractical that it inspired a flurry of online shopping. In general, the show makes affluence look vaguely diseased, and emphasizes the ways in which even the very rich cannot be entirely insulated from the drudgery of inconvenience. Mark Mylod, who has directed close to half the episodes of “Succession,” and is also an executive producer, told me, “We try to find situations where the characters cannot control the world, whether the weather’s bad or they are stuck in traffic.” For last season’s finale, Mylod filmed scenes on the yacht in the middle of the day, beneath harsh, overhead sunlight, in order to make the characters seem uncomfortably exposed, physically and emotionally. When, in the same episode, Logan is obliged to conduct a humbling video call with one of his corporation’s major shareholders, it is not from the comfort of his Audi but, rather, from the grim patio of a service station on a busy highway.

At the Florence terminal, the drawbacks of private plane travel—being ferried in cramped vans to wait on a scorching, gritty, noisy airport apron, as opposed to sharing a large, air-conditioned terminal with commercial passengers—were identical to the drawbacks of shooting high-end television in an inhospitable location. The actors clutched their scripts while members of the hair-and-makeup team attended to them, attempting to keep sweat and grime in abeyance. Will Tracy and Tony Roche, two of the show’s writers, hid under a small awning, using their phones to read Armstrong’s script for a forthcoming episode. Given the prevailing discomfort, Armstrong had to weigh how much of a disruption it was going to be creatively, physically, and emotionally to preserve the revelation of a second plane. In consultation with Mylod, who was directing the episode, a decision was reached not to compromise narrative integrity: the Falcon would be towed out of sight. To Armstrong’s relief, a driver on a small white tug had removed the offending plane within fifteen minutes. “I thought it was going to be a huge deal to move a plane,” Armstrong told me, once the Falcon had been shunted aside. He sounded amused, even a little wondering. “But, luckily, it took just one little man.”

The table read of the pilot episode of “Succession” took place in Manhattan on November 8, 2016: Election Day. That evening, the cast and the rest of the team gathered at the home of Adam McKay —an executive producer of the show, and the director of the pilot—for a party that was expected to celebrate the victory of Hillary Clinton . Matthew Macfadyen, the British actor who plays Tom Wambsgans, told me, “We watched the results come in, and everyone wandered off into the night—good for storytelling, bad for humanity.” Armstrong’s most significant memory of the occasion was how quickly attendees accommodated to what initially seemed to be earth-shattering news. “It was such a shock—then five, ten minutes later, everyone’s living in a new reality,” he said. Even in calamity, he observed, many people are “quite oriented towards how it affects them, and what they will do next.”

The first episodes of “Succession,” which aired in the summer of 2018, established an elliptical relationship to contemporary reality: there would be no specific references to Trump . But, with the U.S. government turned over to a leader with a transparently chaotic, transactional, and rapacious nature, the show met the national mood. “Succession” would have been equally entertaining had Hillary Clinton become President, but it wouldn’t have felt so timely if it hadn’t appeared after the election of Trump—a candidacy championed by Fox News , whose core strategy of chasing ratings by spreading fear is not dissimilar to that of ATN, the news organization owned by Waystar Royco. The opening credit sequence of “Succession” includes a cheeky shot of an ATN news ticker; in Season 2, it reads, “ gender fluid illegals may be entering the country ‘twice .’ ”

For some viewers, Armstrong’s thoroughgoing commitment to a curdled view of humanity—as the Roys jockey for position, they trade such endearments as “the cunt of Monte Cristo”—made the show at once intolerable and irresistible. “ I hate everyone on ‘Succession’ and I can’t stop watching, ” a typical headline read. The show is so unsettling, in part, because it offers no vantage points exterior to its scrupulously rendered universe—there is no outsider figure who is easier to identify with than the amoral protagonists. The Roy family’s outsider, Cousin Greg , is as calculating as any member of the clan with whom he seeks to ingratiate himself. Culture critics have popularized the term “wealth porn” to characterize shows, such as “ Billions ” or “ Gossip Girl ,” that lavish attention on the consumption habits of the absurdly wealthy. But, if the shiny surface of “Succession” bears a relation to pornography, it is less because it titillates than because it partakes of pornography’s deadening relentlessness.

Wife talks to detective.

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“Succession” also withholds cheap catharsis. Kendall’s backsliding with drugs is only the most overt example of the show’s gothic sensibility: all the Roys have been poisoned by the toxic nature of the family fortune, and Armstrong refuses to impose on them the kind of artificial personal growth that fosters an easy bond with the audience. The closest that “Succession” has come to giving its characters a respite from their crabbed emotional confinement is when Kendall, at a particularly low ebb, begs Shiv for a hug. She awkwardly complies, but only after saying in astonishment, “Give you a hug ?”

Given the care that Armstrong puts into making “Succession” a complex viewing experience, he is reluctant to explicate the show too much, as if it were reducible to a tidy set of themes and intentions. Nevertheless, his ambitions in “Succession” are driven not by a voyeuristic fascination with the rich—or by a righteous desire to expose the perfidies of inequity—but by a wish to tell, through the specific medium of a contemporary media dynasty, a more universal story about power and family relations, and to show how those forces can torque an individual’s humanity. It’s not so much “Billions” as “ Buddenbrooks ,” with more money and less grain. In one of a series of conversations during the making of Season 3, Armstrong told me, “One of the things that strikes me when I’ve read about these families—whether it be the Maxwells or the Redstones or the Julio-Claudians—is that, when you get that combination of money, power, and family relations, things get so complicated that you can justify actions to yourself that are pretty unhealthy to your well-being as a human being. Or you don’t even need to justify them, because the actions are baked into your being.” The infighting can become so darkly satisfying that it consumes one’s life: “For people who come from powerful families, there is nothing in life quite as interesting as being at court.” Indeed, almost nobody in a rich family steps away from the drama. “For these people to be excluded from the flame of money and power, I think, would feel a bit like death,” Armstrong said.

Armstrong’s interest in how human beings work—in what they say, and what they leave unsaid—is combined with a gift for comic dialogue that bounces from the demotic to the lewd to the baroque. Upon arriving at the family’s Hamptons estate, Logan demands that the doors be opened, noting, “It smells like the cheesemonger died and left his dick in the Brie.” When Cousin Greg is grilled at a congressional hearing, he responds to one question by saying, “Uh, if it is to be said, so it be, so it is”—a tortured circumvention of “Yes.” The uneasy simultaneity of comedy and drama that “Succession” depends on is a consequence of Armstrong’s unwillingness to save his characters from themselves. The writer and director Chris Morris, on whose recent movie “The Day Shall Come” Armstrong worked as a writer, told me, “Each of the characters in ‘Succession’ gives you the capacity to hope that they might snap out of the trap of their own existence. Jesse is the perfect sadist, because he is horrible to each one in turn, and yet he offers the audience just enough to hope that the characters might this time not disgrace themselves in the way that we kind of know they will. It is basically like a cat playing with a mouse and not killing it.”

A certain pitilessness, Armstrong told me, is not a bad thing for a work of fiction to have. “How can you be true about human beings?” he said. “That is a preoccupation.” He went on, “Without getting too highfalutin, there’s that quote from Marx, in ‘ The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte ,’ where he says men and women make their own history, but not the circumstances of their own making.” (The original text is less taut: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”) Armstrong continued, “For me, a lot of the art and the work of the show is in that territory between what’s history in the broadest sense, what’s family history, what’s tradition, and what’s the room for one’s own choices, and your own making of your life and your world. And there’s a gap there, which that mysterious thing about human personality fills.”

Whether Armstrong is on set at one of the foreign locales that give “Succession” its glossy atmosphere of sterile, moneyed internationalism or at Silvercup Studios in Queens—where the set of Logan Roy’s Fifth Avenue apartment, modelled on the mansion owned by the Council on Foreign Relations, is maintained—he is “like the mayor of a small town,” Jon Brown, a writer for the show, told me. Brown recalled, “I was in his office one day, and he was trying to write an episode, and someone came in and said, ‘Jesse, the caterers have made an ice sculpture, and they would like you to come and look at it,’ and Jesse had to put his episode down to go and look at it. He has these civic duties to keep everyone happy.”

When Armstrong is not issuing the equivalent of mayoral proclamations, he works in a rented room in a converted department store in Brixton, a neighborhood in South London. The office is spacious and airy but modestly equipped, with a wall of bookshelves and a teakettle on a side table. He keeps a carton of milk on the window ledge outside, like a student. “It feels a bit profligate having a whole fridge just for one pint of milk,” he said when I visited. His desk faces a window that overlooks a commuter railway. When I remarked that the clatter of passing trains must distract him, Armstrong looked surprised, as if he’d never noticed it before. “If you’d asked me if I could hear the trains from my office, I would have told you, ‘I don’t think so,’ ” he said. “I’d be a terrible—or brilliant—estate agent.”

Armstrong, who is fifty, has a scruff of salt-and-pepper beard that comes and goes, intelligent brown eyes that he often closes in concentration when speaking, and a measured voice that is lightly inflected with the accent of Shropshire, in the West Midlands, where he grew up. He is as affable as the characters on “Succession” are disagreeable. Prestige TV is prime territory for assholery, and the writers’ rooms of some of the best shows of recent decades have been arenas for conflict. Matthew Weiner, the creator of “ Mad Men ,” was called “an emotional terrorist” by a former writer on the show. (“I was a very demanding boss,” he later told the New York Times .) When Aaron Sorkin , the creator of “ The West Wing ,” was accused of yelling at a female writer on his HBO series “ The Newsroom ,” he responded that writers’-room arguments are “not only common, they are encouraged.”

This is not Armstrong’s style: he prefers to engender creativity with stability. “I’ve never seen him lose his temper,” Jon Brown told me. The show employs ten staff writers, half of them British and half American, and, unusually for a comedy, there is a roughly equal proportion of men to women. Even when the show has been in production and Armstrong, in addition to his other duties, has been writing the final two episodes of the season, he has remained equanimous. Brown recalled, “When we were in Scotland filming last season, there was a time when he asked me and Tony Roche to stop talking, so he could concentrate. Me and Tony were, like, ‘Fucking hell, someone’s grumpy.’ And then, in an hour, Jesse was, like, ‘You can talk again.’ ”

Francesca Gardiner, one of the writers of Season 3, said of her boss, “He’s sort of cool-dorky.” Armstrong bakes. He’s been a vegetarian—with occasional excursions into fish—since his youth. He met his wife, who works for the National Health Service, when they were in college, at the University of Manchester. They have two children and have lived in the same unflashy part of South London for almost three decades. When I asked if he had plans to upgrade his domestic space, he said, “We might do a new kitchen. So that will be corrupting.” Jeremy Strong, who plays Kendall Roy, told me, “I think it was Flaubert who said, ‘I want to live the quiet, ordered life of the bourgeoisie so that I can be violent and original in my work.’ That’s Jesse.”

Meticulous research goes into making “Succession” feel true to the rarefied world it portrays. What kind of overcoat would Logan Roy wear? A trick question: a mogul being perpetually shuttled from corner suite to climate-controlled limousine to luxury apartment doesn’t need an overcoat, no matter how cold it gets. Each of the staff writers is tasked with exploring a different dimension of the “Succession” world—which is, Armstrong acknowledges, overwhelmingly white and privileged. “We are working to reflect the world as it is, and not as we would wish it to be,” he said. “There’s another sort of show in which edging the world a bit towards what one would want it to be doesn’t hurt the show at all, whereas our show is critical-satirical—we need to portray that very particular and very powerful bit of the world it is concerned with quite precisely.” Last season, it fell to Susan Soon He Stanton to conduct an inquiry into the ministrations provided by the staff of a luxury yacht. She reported back that attendants wipe specks of powder from the rim of a guest’s makeup compact and print out copies of the daily newspapers every morning, as if they had been freshly fetched from a terrestrial newsstand. Jon Brown took a deep, if not hands-on, dive into the kind of élite sex club that serves as the setting for Tom Wambsgans’s bachelor party in Season 1. In an early draft of the scene, Brown incorporated an incident that he’d learned about during his investigations, in which an orgy room’s music speakers failed, making the slapping sound of flesh on flesh wetly audible. “After about one second, someone shouted, ‘Put the fucking music on,’ because even they didn’t want to hear how disgusting it was,” he told me. Armstrong decided to spare Tom that particular degradation, perhaps because he would soon put him through a humiliation that deliberately echoes the kind of sadistic jokes Josef Stalin used to play on party guests. At a dinner at a corporate retreat in Hungary, Logan, determined to stop leaks to the press, invents Boar on the Floor, a game in which executives suspected of betrayal are forced to crawl and chase sausages on the parquetry. “No half-hearted oink!” he demands.

As background for “Succession,” Armstrong and his writers loyally read the Financial Times , and they have plowed through a library’s worth of media biographies. They took a close look at “ Crime and Punishment ,” in order to deepen their depiction of Kendall’s inner turmoil, and consulted histories of ancient Rome in the hope that understanding the relationship between Nero and his freedman Sporus—whom the Emperor commanded be castrated, before undergoing a sham marriage ceremony with him—might illuminate the dynamic between Tom and Cousin Greg. The show has also hired such literary consultants as Gary Shteyngart, the novelist whose 2018 book, “ Lake Success ,” also depicts the lives of the super-rich in New York; among other things, Shteyngart discussed with the “Succession” team the delusionary psychology of hedge funders who are convinced that their wealth will protect them from the consequences of climate change. Tom Holland, the author of wide-lens books about ancient and medieval history, spoke about Caligula and other dissolute Roman leaders.

Last year, Brown told me, Armstrong came into the writers’ room with a big notion about the Epic of Gilgamesh . “I am fucked if I have any idea what the Epic of Gilgamesh is,” Brown said. “But if it makes you feel like you deserve your Emmy a little more, knock yourself out.” Armstrong assured me, “I have not read the Epic of Gilgamesh. I have probably listened to an ‘In Our Time’ podcast about it.” This lapse notwithstanding, Armstrong is a serious reader. Once, when I asked him which books he’d read recently, he mentioned the memoirs of Jack Straw , the Labour Party politician who served as a Member of Parliament and as Lord Chancellor; Robert Draper’s book about the run-up to the Iraq War; “ A Little History of Poetry ,” by John Carey; and the short stories of Jean Stafford.

Armstrong is disciplined not only in his reading. At the outset of writing Season 3, he started taking early-morning swims at Brockwell Lido, an unheated outdoor pool in London; as winter closed in, he updated his collaborators with slightly smug daily reports about the increasingly frigid water temperatures. Certain aspects of Armstrong’s work habits suggest a need to exert control. In the fall of 2019, the writers’ room for Season 3 was set up in a modern office building in Victoria. Dismayed to discover that he could not personally adjust the thermostat, Armstrong drew a picture of one set to 21.5°C—about 70°F—and put it on the wall. “You are meant to have a slightly cooler room for comedy,” he told me. “Standups always like the room cold, and if you’re shooting a sitcom live you want it a little bit chilly for the audience. I don’t know why—you’d have to ask a combination of an evolutionary psychologist and a building-maintenance man.” The room in Victoria also lacked a clock, and so, on a whiteboard featuring charts denoting each character’s development episode by episode, Armstrong drew a clock set to 2:25 p.m. It’s a hopeful time of day for a TV writer, he told me, since the room officially wraps up at 3:30  p.m .: “It’s almost there—not painful, watch-checking time, but nice to be toward the end of the day.”

When the show is in development, Armstrong’s preferred practice is to begin the day with each writer, in turn, giving an account of what she or he did the previous night, a process that can last as long as an hour. Will Tracy told me, “We go round the room clockwise, and everyone says what they ate for dinner, what bad movie they watched on TV, how much sleep they got—the more mundane, the funnier and better. At first, I thought this was very odd, but I immediately noticed that it bonded the writers—we developed a kind of group rapport very quickly.” Tracy went on, “And then all kinds of stuff from those evening recaps weaseled their way into the show. Someone will mention something about a friend who lived on Staten Island and had to commute into New York, and all of a sudden there’s a little line in the script about how Greg is living on Staten Island, and he’s coming in on the ferry every day and it’s a nightmare.” (A sneer from Tom: “Dude, why stop at the ferry? Just come in from Cleveland on the Greyhound.”)

Batman confronts Catwoman about her plan to take over the internet with cats.

Personal preoccupations, or nuggets of family history, find their way into the scripts, along with the writers’ research. The unfolding disaster of “Sands”—the dreadful play written by Willa Ferreyra, the girlfriend of Logan’s eldest son, Connor Roy—is informed by Armstrong’s impatience with the experience of theatregoing. “I am almost phobic about fearing that I am going to be bored, and in the theatre it’s a bit rude to leave, so I find that increases my anxiety about being bored to high levels,” he told me. The story line is enhanced by the presence in the writers’ room of some acclaimed playwrights, including Lucy Prebble and Susan Soon He Stanton. When, in an episode partially written by Stanton, Shiv meets Logan for a post-theatre supper and asks him how he enjoyed the play, his weary reply is “You know—people pretending to be people.”

When I visited the writers’ room after hours one afternoon in late 2019, I peeked at the whiteboards, along with other visual evidence of the group’s creative discussions, such as photocopied images of paintings, by Goya and Rubens, of Saturn devouring his son. There was a chart documenting a group competition to predict the results of the recent U.K. general election, which had secured Boris Johnson ’s position as the country’s Prime Minister (to the dismay of the liberal intelligentsia of London, among other constituencies). The clear winner was Armstrong, who had predicted a Conservative margin of victory far greater than even the most pessimistic of his collaborators thought possible. “One of the privileges of doing a show like this is that you are able to think about the world with some other smart people,” he told me. “Do you know that W. H. Auden quote—‘Poetry makes nothing happen’? To some extent, poetry can stand in for this kind of work as well. I don’t suppose it is going to have any direct influence on the world. But it is still a way of being in it, and feeling like you are part of it, instead of entirely being acted upon.”

More than a decade before Armstrong wrote the pilot of “Succession,” he was commissioned to write a documentary-style teleplay set at a family dinner party celebrating Rupert Murdoch ’s eightieth birthday. That project didn’t get far off the ground, but it did come to the attention of Frank Rich, the former New York Times columnist who is now an HBO producer. That and other Armstrong scripts impressed the network enough to green-light “Succession,” which takes inspiration not only from the Murdoch dynasty but also from other media families, including the Maxwells and the Redstones. Among Armstrong’s unmade but most admired projects is a bio-pic of Lee Atwater , the scabrous Republican strategist who helped elect George H. W. Bush to be Ronald Reagan’s successor as President. “It’s morning in America . . . and I tell you what, I have morning fucking wood,” Armstrong’s Atwater announces on page 1. Rich described the script to me as “a history of right-wing politics up to that time, with a comic touch,” adding, “I couldn’t believe this British writer could write such a compelling piece about American politics.”

At first glance, it might seem surprising that “Succession”—a show saturated in knowing detail about Manhattan, even if it is concerned with a global corporate business—was conceived by a British showrunner and is the product of a writers’ room in London. The Roys, though, have British roots: Logan is from a working-class Scottish background, and the mother of the younger Roy children, Caroline, is a frosty English aristocrat. Armstrong told me that in considering Caroline’s class background he had in mind someone like Lady Caroline Blackwood, the author and the daughter of the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, who was married to both Robert Lowell and Lucian Freud. The barb-trading discourse of the family, and also its aversion to the expression of emotion, are recognizable as culturally inherited traits. When Kendall visits his mother and tries to confide in her late one night, she recommends that they wait until morning, so they can talk “over an egg,” then scarpers before he rises. Brian Cox, who plays Logan—and who, like his character, was born in Dundee, Scotland—has an apartment in London, and when I met him at a café in Primrose Hill he told me, “The show has a kind of Swiftian satire. It’s in the vibe of this country.”

The “Succession” scripts are peppered with the type of memorably lurid cursing that another British writer, Armando Iannucci , helped make a hallmark of HBO, with “ Veep .” Armstrong has a rule: an insult “should be at least as expressive of who the character uttering it is as it is eloquent, or ineloquent, about its target.” At one point, Kendall warns Stewy, a onetime school friend turned business rival, “I will come to you at night with a razor blade, and I will cut your fucking dick off”; Stewy airily replies, “And then push it up your cunt until poo-poo pops out of my nose hole.” But the show’s linguistic ingenuity extends well beyond scatology. The characters in “Succession” often employ weirdly original turns of phrase, as if they were generating on the spot the inventive speech of an individual caught between two cultures. When Tom learns that Cousin Greg is driving his grandpa from Canada to New York, he taunts, “Canada? With the health care and the ennui?” When the mischievous Roman Roy returns from a brief corporate posting in the sticks, he gives Logan’s butler an almost Falstaffian greeting: “Hail, my fellow toiler man, I have returned from real America, bearing the gift of sight.”

Will Tracy told me, “Jesse has a very particular kind of phraseology for the way people speak—even particular obscenities or analogies. The characters will use a kind of dialogue that makes me think, I’ve never really heard somebody speak that way. But it feels real, and not like a TV writer writing a line of what feels like dialogue.” Tracy, who is American, recalled that, when he first heard certain phrases in the writers’ room, he assumed that they were Britishisms. “But it turns out they are just Jesse-isms,” he said. “Like, he’ll say, ‘Tom is completely freaking out—he’s completely shit his whack.’ I said, ‘Is that a British thing?’ Jesse said yeah, but Tony and Georgia and Jon said no . Jesse thought that it was a thing.” The phrase will be introduced to the lexicon in an upcoming episode.

Armstrong has been interested in America since he was a teen-ager growing up in Oswestry, a market town on the border with Wales. His father, David, was a high-school English teacher who later turned to writing crime fiction; his mother, Julia, worked at nursery schools. Armstrong told me, “Oswestry’s a bit in the middle of nowhere—quite tough, and quite English, in the way border towns are.” In 2013, he made a short film, “No Kaddish in Carmarthen,” centered on Gwyn, a fifteen-year-old Welsh high schooler with a fascination for Woody Allen , who adopts black-rimmed non-prescription glasses and claims to be Jewish. “Mam’s a Methodist,” Gwyn says. “It’s the same thing—it’s similar.” Armstrong calls the film a “short-story version of an element of my youth.” His parents were gently countercultural, in a health-food-and-alternative-energy kind of way; they were also eager to expose Armstrong and his younger sister, who is now a graphic designer, to the world beyond their provincial town, with family trips to Greece and Tunisia.

In the spring of 1990, Armstrong and a friend took a budget trip to New York City, where they crashed on the couch of some Cooper Union students whom Armstrong had met while backpacking in Europe. “We walked around and had the tops of our heads blown off, just seeing what the city was like,” Armstrong told me. Upon returning home, he matriculated at the University of Manchester, ninety minutes northeast of Oswestry. He chose the university partly because it had an excellent American Studies department, and partly because the city had a vibrant cultural scene, with the celebrated Haçienda night club having hosted such bands as the Smiths and New Order. “When I was choosing where to go to university, we used to try to go to the Haçienda, and we were always turned away,” Armstrong said. “I felt like if I went to the university I could try more frequently, at least.”

As part of his degree, Armstrong spent a year at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Student life there was bracingly political in a way that Manchester at the time was not, and Armstrong contributed to the school’s daily newspaper. But rural Massachusetts felt much less sophisticated. “I’d never before seen people carrying around four cans of beer, like they’d captured some amazing trophy,” he recalled. He drew on the experience of his year abroad for an unrealized dramatic-comedy script in which two friends—a nerdy white guy from UMass and an affluent Black graduate of Amherst College—pool their resources to buy a cocoa plantation in a fictional African country, planning to make bespoke chocolate for American hipsters.

After college, Armstrong worked for two years in Westminster, London’s political district, as an assistant to Doug Henderson, a Member of Parliament and the shadow minister of home affairs for the opposition Labour Party. “We had a weirdly broad brief—everything from the Channel Islands to dangerous dogs to asylum and immigration,” Armstrong recalled. He did not take to the corridors of power; at the 1996 Labour Party conference, held in Blackpool, he so dreaded the prospect of schmoozing at parties that he spent his evenings feeding coins into video games at the amusement arcades on the pier. He was less interested in exercising influence and more interested in noting the quirks of those who held it, such as Ann Widdecombe, a right-wing politician whose office had two posters on display: an anti-abortion image of a fetus, and an image of Garfield, the cartoon cat, bearing the legend “If you want to look thinner, hang out with people fatter than you.” Armstrong told me, “She didn’t mean them to relate to each other, but to see them together was intriguing.” Though he disliked Westminster, the experience helped him as a writer on “The Thick of It,” a profane satire of British politics created by Armando Iannucci.

At the University of Manchester, Armstrong had become close friends with Sam Bain, a classmate from a creative-writing course. Bain, a privately educated Londoner, told me that he was interested by Armstrong’s quite different background. “He wrote one short story that had a character working on a building site,” Bain said. “It took me a while to realize that it was based on his own experience.” After Armstrong abandoned politics, he and Bain began regularly collaborating on comedy scripts. Armstrong discovered that having a writing partner was an amenable way to live. “There’s this third entity, Bain & Armstrong Industries, so, when you stop work and go home, you feel more like you’ve gone home from work than you do when you are working solo,” Armstrong said. “And you have got somebody who is exactly as interested as you are in your career.”

Their first big show, a British reboot of the U.S. sitcom “That ’70s Show,” was a flop. But in 2003 they had a breakout success as the co-creators and principal writers of “Peep Show,” a sitcom about sad-sack flatmates: Mark, a bank-loan officer, and Jeremy, a failed musician. The scripts, instead of featuring snappy dialogue, were anchored by the interior monologues of the two protagonists, from whose perspective scenes were often shot. The show, which ran for nine seasons, is widely considered to be a British comedy classic; Chris Morris told me that Armstrong and Bain became known as “the ultimate word in flawed male psychology.” One celebrated episode is predicated on Armstrong’s aversion to theatre: Mark is drafted to join Jeremy on a double date to a low-budget play, and they endure the experience as if undergoing a dreadful medical experiment. “When do we get to go out?” Jeremy whispers to Mark as they sit between their dates. Mark, looking crucified, replies, “As far as I can make out, we get to go out for a bit in an hour, and then we have to come back for two hours .”

Armstrong’s background in half-hour comedies can be detected in the economy of the “Succession” scripts, and in the premium the show places on keeping things lively. “I still think a half hour of comedy is the most intensive form of writing you can do,” he said. Kieran Culkin, who plays Roman, told me that Armstrong is allergic to shtick: “If it’s just a little bit—half an inch—too far-leaning into something, he’s going to catch it. On any other show, people would be, like, ‘Oh, that’s funny, let’s do that.’ And he’ll always be the voice of reason: ‘Yes, it’s funny, yes, it’s great, but it doesn’t work.’ ”

Armstrong rejects the privileging of drama over comedy, and happily calls “Succession” a satire. But the characters are far more complicated individuals than are likely to be found in a sitcom; their stunted interiority is explored with a combination of empathy and dispassion. Such nuance is possible, in no small part, because of the actors playing these roles. Brian Cox is a Shakespeare veteran, as is Sarah Snook, who told me that playing Shiv had helped her understand the role of Cordelia, in “King Lear,” rather than the other way around. “I felt like I understood the weight of familial responsibility, and the love and compassion a daughter can have for a father and leader, though he may be difficult,” Snook said. Jeremy Strong approaches Kendall with an immersive rigor, not with the audience-pleasing instincts of a standup. Strong told me that, during the filming of the pilot, he asked Armstrong at one point whether they could spend some extra time exploring Kendall’s history. “Jesse said, ‘Let me sit with this for a minute,’ and I went and got some lunch, and then twenty minutes later I got an e-mail entitled ‘Window Rumination.’ It was a fully realized monologue—a memory he’d created of Kendall visiting the office when he was six years old. He was like this little prince in the office, and everyone was adoring of him and smiling, and he kind of wandered off a little too far, and there was this huge guy, a security guard, who didn’t know who he was, and it sort of escalated, and this six-year-old Kendall was powerless and tongue-tied, until his father came and found him. It was a poignant and beautiful piece of writing, and, to me, central to this character’s struggle and experience—being lost in this oceanic moment and being saved by his father’s embrace.” The scene didn’t make it into the pilot, “but it’s all embedded,” Strong told me. “It was an amazing experience of finding this character together.”

Armstrong told me that his ability to empathize with the Roys’ flaws is likely connected to his having reached an age at which “you’re more aware of the tragic things that can happen to yourself, and other people.” He went on, “So-called dark or serious things can still be funny, but, as you get older, more terrible things happen to more people you know. The things you laughed at as a young person—you’d better be careful, because they could happen to you tomorrow. With jokes about old people wearing nappies, or infirmity—what are you laughing at? It’s going to be you, or your mum and dad, tomorrow. There’s nothing funny about that, and, if you think there is, you had better wonder about who is the subject of that joke.”

In early 2020, when it became clear that the filming of Season 3 would not begin that April, as planned, Armstrong hunkered down in South London. Around that time, he wrote me an e-mail that captured the tenor of the city: “Panic buying is still at the embarrassed, English, ‘what, I always buy this many lentils’ stage.” He told me that it remained to be seen whether current events would make it into the show “as a whiff or a stench.” By the spring, the crisis had come into darker focus: Mark Blum, the actor who played the cruise-division executive Bill Lockhart in Seasons 1 and 2, had died from covid -19 in New York City.

TITLE Feral Cows

Weeks of delays turned into months. HBO executives were telling him to wait, Armstrong reported, “rather than have Logan do a series of Webinars we can put out on HBO Max.” During the course of the next few months, the show’s executive producer, Scott Ferguson, figured out the logistics of layering a covid -19 safety unit on top of the regular production crew, at a cost of millions of extra dollars. Production finally resumed, in New York City, in November. In the end, Armstrong decided not to incorporate the pandemic into the plot. This time, the characters’ habitual jetting around may seem even more exorbitant than usual.

The sequence at the Florence airport was filmed late in the shoot—an aberration. Armstrong prefers to film “Succession” in order. Although he begins the first day of production with a firm idea of where his characters will end up, their precise route is adjusted and refined along the way. In Florence, some dialogue was written on the spot, under the awning.

The dates of the airport shoot were dictated by location choices for the concluding episodes, which were to be set in the Tuscan countryside and around the Northern Italian lakes—landscapes of such loveliness that even the pitiless eye of Mark Mylod would have a hard time remaining jaundiced. At the Florence airport, Ferguson told me, “Quite honestly, I think every season Jesse has wanted to go to Italy. He also wanted a yacht the first season. So last season we got the yacht, and Italy is the second white whale.”

In Italy, Armstrong was showing a tentative degree of confidence that the season would achieve what he had hoped for it. At the airport, we went into a hangar and retired to what he referred to as his “office”: a solitary chair set up by a wall. “With any project, you go through waves of anxiety,” he told me. “I had moments of ‘Fuck, did we ever say that thing that we intended to say?’ ” He went on, “They say sometimes tennis players can see the ball quite big, and they feel like everything feels full of opportunity, and sometimes it will feel small, and nothing’s coming together. Sometimes you feel, ‘Oh, yes, I can do this , and now I can go there , and this sets up this .’ That sense of ‘I think I know what everyone’s thinking—I can see this room is full of all these people, and they all have their own perspectives, and I can feel them all.’ Then it feels full of possibility. I’m just wandering around the party, hearing what Gerri’s saying to Karl. That’s a fun feeling.”

For the scenes shot in Tuscany, Armstrong wanted to play with the E. M. Forster version of the region—or, at least, with the visual fantasies promulgated by the popular Merchant Ivory film adaptation of “ A Room with a View .” He said, “I just felt it was a fun thing that British people do—that relationship to Tuscany, and those British vibrations of quite complicated snobbery about an area that has a certain resonance of cultural value for the British.” Even if American viewers didn’t pick up on all the ways in which “Succession” smuggles observations about British class into the narrative, he said, they would respond to the depiction if it rang true.

Armstrong hadn’t had much time to himself since arriving in Florence, he said, though he had taken a walk from his hotel to visit the Palazzo Vecchio, which in the sixteenth century was the seat of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici. With international tourism all but halted, the exquisite city, marked by monuments to the dynastic powers that held sway five hundred years ago, was quieter and emptier than it had been in decades. Armstrong joked, “It’s a little bit Logan Roy—‘Close Florence, I’m coming through.’ ”

After two days at the airport, the production moved south, to the Val d’Orcia. Hundreds of crew members were scattered around villas and in hotels in various small towns. Armstrong landed in Pienza, a hilltop settlement built according to Renaissance principles of town planning at the order of Pope Pius II, a scion of Sienese nobility. Pienza’s narrow pedestrian streets were scented with jasmine and pecorino, and its museums, former palazzi overlooking the valley, were empty. In the evening, the piping voices of a handful of Italian children playing in the town square echoed against the travertine façade of the cathedral. Then, when the clock struck eleven, a nationwide curfew began, and the town fell as silent as it would have been in the dark of a fifteenth-century night.

The first day in the Tuscan countryside, a scene from the penultimate episode was being shot, featuring Sarah Snook and Matthew Macfadyen as Shiv and Tom. The setting was Bagno Vignoni, an ancient spa settlement, and showed the couple seated at a café, then walking together around a sixteenth-century bathing pool in the center of the village. It was a successor scene, Armstrong told me, to their brutal picnic in the final episode of Season 2, in which Tom confesses to Shiv, “I wonder if the sad I’d be without you would be less than the sad I get from being with you.” Armstrong said, “I saw this as ‘What’s the next accommodation they will come to?’ It’s an intimate scene in which they either are frank with each other or appear to be trying to be frank with each other.” The scene also harked back to the Season 1 finale, set on the couple’s wedding night, in which Shiv belatedly tells Tom that she wants an open marriage, and ventures as close as she ever has to emotional honesty: “Love is, like, twenty-eight different things, and they all get lumped in together in this one sack, and there’s a lot of things in that sack—it needs to get emptied out. There’s fear, and jealousy, and revenge and control, and they all get wrapped up in really nice fucking wrapping paper.”

As the crew arranged the scene, readying extras and setting tables, Armstrong, leaning against a honey-colored wall, said, “That’s what’s interesting about the people in the show—hopefully, they are not incapable of honesty.” He went on, “Shiv is a passionate, driven, smart person, who I think occasionally gets glimpses of the way that her life could be integrated and whole and truthful. But they’re really hard to keep hold of, especially when they brush up against other people. And, like the other characters in the show, she hasn’t got very good facilities for compromise, or for taking into account other people’s feelings.” This was a moment, he said, in which his preferred Marxist lens—men and women make their own histories, but not the terms of their own making—proved useful as a way of situating the personal within the sociological. He observed, “We are all individuals with our own psychological makeup and impulses, and yet we find ourselves in vises of social and economic situations, which means that we are bent in and out of shape—and we’re bent out of shape by the psychologies of our families. So navigating the space between those—that you can act outside of your material interests, but will you?— that is a good area for where the conflict between human beings happens.”

As part of his background research for shooting in the area, Armstrong had been reading “ War in Val d’Orcia ,” the 1947 memoir of Iris Origo, the daughter of an American diplomat and Anglo-Irish aristocrat. Born in 1902, Origo, who became a biographer, was reared by her mother in a Medici palace in Florence, and married a member of the Italian nobility. In the twenties, the couple moved to La Foce, an estate in the Val d’Orcia. Origo’s memoir chronicles, in diary form, the effects on the region of the advent of the Second World War, during which Origo and her husband took in children who had been evacuated from the cities and also housed fifty British prisoners of war.

In reading the book, Armstrong had been struck—just as he had been after the table read of the “Succession” pilot, in November, 2016—by how quickly people adapt to altered conditions: a change in political circumstance; the onset of a pandemic; even the encroaching horrors of war. “There’s a moment when Mussolini is deposed, in 1943, and there’s a sense of hope—the Allies are coming, and it feels like it might be the day after tomorrow. But there’s still two more years of the war to go, and Iris Origo doesn’t know it,” he said. He had momentarily pulled down the face mask that covered his nose and mouth, in order to speak more clearly. “It’s just very human, that thing of adjusting yourself to a new position,” he went on. “Within seconds, the new world feels completely real and vivid, and you’re very quickly accommodated to it.” Then Armstrong raised his mask as he was called back to a video monitor, to watch another take. Snook and Macfadyen artfully interacted, with subtle variations in tone: more or less playful callousness on the part of Shiv, more or less submerged hurt and anger on the part of Tom. The characters moved and adjusted to their opulent constraints, in an evolving struggle whose conclusion—arriving in a future season—Armstrong had imagined but had yet to write. ♦

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Yacht: aquarius.

The 45 metre Mengi Yay motor yacht Aquarius makes an appearance in the opening of the trailer for Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery , the follow-up to the Acadamy Award-winning murder mystery Knives Out starring Daniel Craig. Delivered in 2016, the yacht can sleep up to 10 guests and eight crew across her three decks. Aquarius has a top speed of 15 knots that will no doubt be put to the test in Rian Johnson's sequel, which is set to be released on Netflix in December.

Triangle of Sadness

Yacht: christina o.

Dark comedy Triangle of Sadness follows a fashion model celebrity couple who are invited on board a superyacht cruise for the ultra-rich, but the vessel ends up sinking, leaving its guests and crew stranded on an island. The 99.15 metre classic superyacht Christina O is the star of the film, which suitably premiered at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. Christina O was famously owned by Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Socrates Onassis who transformed her from an anti-submarine frigate to a luxury superyacht that has welcomed the likes of Winston Churchill, JF Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe and Frank Sinatra on board. Actor Woody Harrelson joins its star-studded guest list as he plays the role of the captain in the film.

Inventing Anna

Yacht: leight star.

The 42.67 metre motor yacht Leight Star was featured in the Netflix docudrama Inventing Anna, based on the true story of fraudster socialite Anna Delvey. The yacht was renamed Caprilla for the episode and sees protagonist Anna Sorokin stepping out of a Chris Craft tender and onto the swim platform to join her friends in Ibiza (before outstaying her welcome). Leight Star was built in 1984 by the American shipyard Sun State. Her top deck, which is used mostly for sun lounging, can double as a helipad for guests looking to arrive in style.

No Time to Die

Yacht: spirit 46.

A Spirit 46 sailing yacht takes a starring role in the James Bond film  No Time to Die . The 14 metre sailing yacht features in the film, which catches up with Bond following his departure from active service. This is not the first time Spirit Yachts has collaborated with the Bond franchise. In 2006, the 16.4-metre sailing yacht  Spirit  featured heavily in Daniel Craig's first Bond film  Casino Royale  when it became the first sailing yacht to travel up Venice's Grand Canal in 300 years.

Yacht: Planet Nine

The 73 metre explorer yacht  Planet Nine  takes centre stage in Christopher Nolan’s time travelling blockbuster  Tenet . Spanning seven countries,  Tenet  follows protagonist David Washington as he fights to ensure the survival of the whole world. Delivered in 2018, the ice-classed explorer  Planet Nine  features a large helicopter hangar and pair of superyacht elevators connecting all five decks. Elsewhere, the yacht boasts a panoramic observatory lounge, a boot room for heli-skiing activities and a cinema on the upper deck.

6 Underground

Yacht: kismet.

The 95.2 metre  Lürssen  superyacht  Kismet  plays a pivotal role in Michael Bay’s newly released Netflix debut  6 Underground . Starring Ryan Reynolds,  6 Underground  sees a team of international operatives tasked with taking down a notorious dictator. The  Espen Øino -designed superyacht is the setting for the climactic final scenes of the film which sees  Kismet , the final stronghold of the dictator, dramatically blown up.

Yacht: Solandge

Lurssen’s  85.1 metre superyacht  Solandge   took a starring role in the second series of Sky Atlantic’s  Succession . The climactic final episode, in which Brian Cox’s Logan Roy makes a life-changing decision, is based entirely on the yacht and showcases its first-class facilities. Scenes of the episode journeyed from  Solandge’s  massive indoor and outdoor gym on the main deck to the outdoor cinema and nightclub. Elsewhere,  Solandge  features a full dive centre, extensive spa with a sauna, steam room, massage room and beauty salon, as well as a generous swimming pool on the sun deck.

Murder Mystery

Yacht: sarastar.

The 60 metre  Mondomarine superyacht  Sarastar  is the setting for Netflix film  Murder Mystery . The action follows a stagnant married couple played by Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston who join a billionaire on board his family yacht. They are soon caught up in an Agatha Christie-style murder mystery on board and it doesn’t take long for the couple to become prime suspects.

Yacht: Turquoise

The 55.4 metre superyacht  Turquoise  stars in the Sky Atlantic drama  Riviera . Set in the French Riviera, the series follows American art curator Georgina Clios, whose life is upended after her billionaire husband Constantine dies in a yacht accident. Turquoise was built by Turkish yard  Turquoise Yachts  in 2011 with an all-British design team behind her build: her exterior is the work of Ed Dubois  with London studio  H2 Yacht Design  styling her lavish interiors, which can accommodate up to 12 guests and 13 crew. 

Yacht: Haida 1929

Classic motor yacht Haida 1929 plays a starring role in Meryl Streep’s exuberant rendition of Money, Money, Money in the hit musical film Mamma Mia!. Built in 1929 , she is one of the oldest yachts still sailing today and offers guests a taste of yachting in the 1930s. She has had 12 owners in her lifetime and saw service in the Second World War and had long been admired by owner No 12 who extensively refitted this piece of maritime history over 16 months. In Mamma Mia! , Meryl Streep, Christine Baranski and Julie Walters are seen riding jet skis and drinking champagne in a dream world on board the superyacht.

The Wolf on Wall Street

M3  (previously Lady M ) played a crucial role in 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street . When Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) hits the big time, he splashes out on the luxury yacht and names it Naomi after his second wife (as played by Margot Robbie). However, the film takes a disastrous turn when the superyacht sinks during a stormy passage between Porto Cervo and Capri — a scene that closely mirrors Belfort’s real-life yachting disaster in 1997. Directed by Martin Scorcese, The Wolf of Wall Street was one of the most successful movies of 2013, grossing more than $116 million at the box office.

Yacht: Aria I

Daniel Craig's recent turns as 007 brought a new generation of beautiful sailing yachts onto the big screen, the most notable of which being Aria I . This 56 metre steel schooner from Pruva Yachting  starred in the 2012 film Skyfall as Chimera , the yacht which carried James Bond to villain Raoul Silva's island hideaway. Preparing the yacht for filming was an arduous process, including re-upholstering inside and out.

American Assasian

Yacht: itama 62.

Michael Keaton and Dylan O’Brien were the big names in the 2017 counter-terrorism thriller American Assassin , based on Vince Flynn’s 2010 novel of the same name, but the real star was surely the Itama 62. This 19 metre speedboat stole the show in a spectacular chase scene, which involved O’Brien jumping onto the moving yacht. Built in Italy as part of the Ferretti Group’s extensive range, the Itama 62 has a top speed of 40 knots thanks to twin MAN V12 engines and can accommodate up to six guests in three cabins.

Yacht: Usher

When US comedy series Entourage was given the Hollywood treatment in 2015 it was only fitting that the party-loving boys should be seen living the high life on a glamorous yacht. Delta Marine ’s 2007 launch Usher (formerly Mr Terrible ) took on a starring role by hosting a yacht party in the film’s opening scene, before lead character Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier) embarks on a disastrous career directing movies.

Bonus entry: Argylle

Tender: sportjet 520.

This spy thriller is directed by Michael Vaughn, the mind behind the much-beloved action-comedy Kingsman . The plot follows Bryce Dallas Howard as author Elly Conway, as she learns that the plots of her best-selling espionage novels are starting to mirror the actions of a real-life spy organisation. The Williams SportJet 520 tender will no doubt feature in several high-octane chase scenes when the film premieres on 24 January 2024. Other big names include Henry Cavill (as the titular spy Argylle), Bryan Cranston and Dua Lipa.

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'Refuge of the last dreamers': the Laos city suspended in time

Once a royal city in ancient Laos, Luang Prabang is home to Buddhist temples nestled in a valley on the Mekong River.

Luang Prabang

A new day breaks to the rhythmic shuffling of bare feet upon the ground.

Like an apparition from centuries past, a procession of several hundred shaven-headed monks emerges through the dawn mist, snaking its way through the sleepy narrow streets. Buddhist locals line the route to make their daily offerings of rice and fruit as the monks file by with their alms bowls. Then, as silently as they appeared, the monks disappear back inside their temple walls, their saffron robes billowing softly behind them.

Luang Prabang temple

This dawn ritual in Luang Prabang is just one aspect of life that lends the small city its ethereal, forgotten air. Located in the country of Laos, 370km (229 miles) northwest of the capital, Vientiane, Luang Prabang lies in a beautiful valley at the confluence of the Mekong and Nam Khan rivers.

That, during parts of the 20th century, the borders of Laos were sealed to foreigners, combined with its shimmering temples and ancient religious aura, has ensured the town has remained one of the most cloistered, unspoiled places on the planet.

Luang Prabang

As the morning begins, the inhabitants of Luang Prabang go about their business amid the city's enchanting blend of ornate Buddhist temples and crumbling French colonial architecture.

Luang Prabang

The serenity of this holy place seeps effortlessly into the rhythms of daily life. The small alleyways off the main street are filled with young boys making kites, old men playing boules, schoolgirls laden with textbooks riding along on bicycles, women cooking and filling the air with the intoxicating tang of oil, chilli and garlic.

yacht used in succession

Other locals pass the time by sitting on their front porches making paper dragons, attaching them to pieces of string and watching them float up in the breeze.

Luang Prabang

Myth and reality seem to dovetail neatly in the story of Luang Prabang's origins.

Legend says that centuries ago, two sorcerers were travelling down the Mekong when they arrived at a point where two rivers met. The whole area radiated an extraordinary beauty; flowers grew in a riot of colour, and majestic trees towered on the river banks.

Luang Prabang

The sorcerers were so captivated by what they saw, they summoned 15 local water spirits to create a new royal city on the spot. Then, the sorcerers used their mystical powers to decide the best sites for the royal palace and the many temples. When the city's boundaries were established, they named their creation Xieng Thong, or "The Golden City".

Luang Prabang

In fact, Luang Prabang was founded in the 14th century when it became the seat of power of the Lan Xang dynasty that ruled land-locked Laos for three centuries.

Buddhism was declared the official religion around the same time, and a succession of Lan Xang kings promoted the faith by erecting magnificent temples in the Lord Buddha's honour. Thirty-two of these historic Buddhist temples still stand in Luang Prabang today. The most renowned is the stunning Wat Xieng Thong, or the Golden City Temple, built in 1560.

Luang Prabang

Set in green, shaded grounds, it has classic Luang Prabang temple architecture with roofs that sweep down to the ground in graceful arcs, a dazzling gold-leaf exterior and an intricate "tree of life" mosaic on its rear wall.

Luang Prabang

When the Lan Xang kingdom fell in the 17th century, and the capital of Laos was moved to Vientiane, Luang Prabang adapted to the decline of its royal status by preserving its sacred role as a centre of Buddhist worship. It also survived by drawing on its ancient beliefs in "Phii", or animist spirits.

Luang Prabang

Phii are the spirits of wind, water, trees and the dead who are thought to influence human fortunes and the natural environment. Many inhabitants of Luang Prabang, as well as the ethnic groups such as the Hmong and Mien found in the blue-tinged mountains above the city, pray to these spirits to help them navigate difficult times.

Luang Prabang

Small shrines containing brightly coloured offerings of food and gifts can be seen on roadsides and in shops and houses all over the region.

The co-existence of Buddhism with such organic faith in the powers of nature undoubtedly helped Luang Prabang retain its tranquillity during other periods of turbulence, too, including the inception of French colonial rule in the late 19th century, and the civil war in Laos in the 1970s and 1980s.

Luang Prabang

Indeed, despite the fact that Luang Prabang is now more accessible to foreigners due to air travel and a tourist-friendly Laos government, little here has changed. The city seems to cast a spell over all its visitors, sucking them into its meditative slipstream and gently deflecting any intrusions into its old way of life.

Luang Prabang

In 1995, UNESCO placed Luang Prabang on the World Heritage list, making it eligible for preservation funds from the UN and thus further contributing to a more stable future.

Emerging from the backstreets onto the main thoroughfare of Thanon Khaem Khong, the powerful yet soothing Mekong dreamily passes by.

Luang Prabang

On its banks below, old wooden boats unload their heavy cargo, people cross to the opposite bank in shuttle boats, barefoot young men play football and tourists negotiate fares for the two-hour journey to the famous Pak Ou caves that are crammed full of Buddha statues.

Luang Prabang

Later, the sun sets in a giant ball of fiery orange and red, its rays kicking off the Mekong and painting its banks a warm golden hue. Day fades into the coolness of night as the first stars appear. The lively noises of children playing evaporate into the distance as they make their way home.

In the temples dotted around the city, monks begin their evening chant. The mesmeric sound reverberates across the valley and then dies, as the inky outline of the mountains bleeds into the darkness.

Luang Prabang

Nearby, sitting under a fringe of pastel-coloured paper lanterns at a riverside restaurant, a group of French tourists drink beer and converse in languid murmurs. Their mood seems to echo that of one of their compatriots almost a century earlier.

Luang Prabang

In 1909, Marthe Bassene, the wife of a French colonial doctor, described Luang Prabang as a "delightful paradise" devoid of the modern pressures of progress and ambition. Could this place, she asked in her journal, be the "refuge of the last dreamers, the last lovers, the last troubadours"?

Tonight, like every night here, Luang Prabang answers the question with gentle stillness and silence.

Luang Prabang

IMAGES

  1. Solandge, the yacht used in Succession, costs $1million a week to hire

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  2. Which yacht stars in the TV series 'Succession'?

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  3. Which yacht stars in the TV series 'Succession'?

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  4. The yacht that featured in HBO's Succession can be rented for £850K

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  6. Which yacht stars in the TV series 'Succession'?

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COMMENTS

  1. All you need to know about SOLANDGE, the yacht from 'Succession'

    Learn about the 85m/279.2ft superyacht SOLANDGE, which starred in Season Two of the hit TV series Succession. Discover her luxurious interiors, amenities, water toys and charter destinations.

  2. Solandge, the yacht used in Succession, costs $1million a week to hire

    The yacht used in last night's episode of Succession was the famous 85.1-meter Lürssen motor yacht Solandge. Solandge is one of the world's largest and most iconic luxurious motor superyachts ...

  3. Which yacht stars in the TV series 'Succession'?

    SOLANDGE is a 279ft (85m) Lurssen superyacht that features in the TV show Succession, about a dysfunctional media family. Learn about the yacht's amenities, interiors, cost and role in the drama.

  4. Who Owns the 'Succession' Yacht? Info on the 'Solandge' Vessel From the

    The Solandge, a 279-foot superyacht featured in the HBO drama, is available for charter for $1.16 million a week. Learn more about the mysterious owner, the boat's amenities, and its appearance in the show.

  5. The Luxurious Yacht from HBO's Succession: A Deep Dive

    The yacht featured in Succession is known as the Solandge, a 279-foot (85-meter) custom-built vessel by renowned German shipyard Lürssen. Designed by Espen Øino, the Solandge boasts a timeless exterior and a lavish interior crafted by Aileen Rodriguez. Luxurious Amenities. Some of the yacht's standout features include: Six expansive decks

  6. What Yacht Was Used in Succession? (The Answer Here)

    Learn about the 230-foot-long Feadship yacht featured in the HBO show Succession, a symbol of the Roy family's wealth and power. Discover its specifications, amenities, role in the show, and symbolism.

  7. What Superyacht Was Used in Succession? (Get The Answer Here!)

    The superyacht used in the film Succession was a 112-meter long yacht named Lady S. This custom-built superyacht is owned by Andrey Melnichenko, a Russian billionaire and was built in 2018 by the German shipyard Blohm + Voss in Hamburg.

  8. You Too Can Charter the Yacht on Succession

    Learn how to rent Solandge, the 279-foot megayacht featured in HBO's Succession, for 1 million Euros a week. See the interior, exterior, and toys of this luxurious vessel that hosts the Roy family's business drama.

  9. Let's Talk About the Yacht Clothes on "Succession"

    October 14, 2019. Roman Roy (Kieran Culkin), who, unlike some of the other characters in "Succession," almost never changes his costume, stands in the main dining room of a yacht in the show ...

  10. How the Set Designer of 'Succession' Brought the Show to Life

    Behind the scenes of HBO hit 'Succession': How set designer Stephen H. Carter used a $145 million Hamptons mansion and a yacht in Croatia to bring the billionaire characters' lifestyle to the ...

  11. 'Succession' Episode 3: Filming the Boat Scene in 1 Take

    How 'Succession' Trapped the Roy Family in a 'VIP Room' of Grief in Episode 3. Director Mark Mylod discusses turning a sadistic camera on the Roy siblings as they grapple with complex ...

  12. What Yacht Was Used in Succession

    What Yacht was Used in Succession. SOLANDGE is the yacht featured in HBO's famous TV series "Succession." The 85.1-meter Lurssen motor yacht is among the most luxurious and iconic motor superyachts. The show's director, Adam McKay, used the yacht as a prominent backdrop in Season 2.

  13. This Is Not for Tears

    List of episodes. " This Is Not for Tears " is the tenth and final episode of the second season of the American satirical comedy-drama television series Succession, and the 20th episode overall. It was written by series creator Jesse Armstrong and directed by Mark Mylod, and originally aired on HBO on October 13, 2019.

  14. 'Succession' Season 4, Episode 3 Recap: 'Connor's Wedding'

    Of the three catastrophic weddings on the show—preceded by Tom and Shiv's and Lady Caroline and Peter Munion's — theirs is by far the most romantic. • Kendall: "We'll get a funeral ...

  15. Succession Season 2 Finale Recap: Who Did Logan Throw Overboard?

    Succession's Roy family wrapped up Season 2 by hashing out their issues aboard a luxury yacht… and one key character went down with the ship. Sunday's finale starts back in D.C., with a ...

  16. On "Succession," Everything Is Up in the Air

    The setting: a yacht in New York Harbor decked with red-white-and-blue bunting, providing free media hoopla for Connor's Presidential campaign, a one-per-cent bid in every sense of the term.

  17. Inside the Luxe Sets of HBO's Succession

    A well-televised takeover, attention-grabbing headlines, sibling backstabbing, and the FBI knocking at the door—it's just another day in the life of the Roy family. HBO's highly addictive drama Succession is the story of the battle for wealth and power between family patriarch Logan Roy (Brian Cox) and his four scheming siblings as they ...

  18. Succession Yacht: Solandge Yacht

    The yacht used in the second season is the Solandge. The yacht has a cost of 160 million dollars and has a capacity of 20 people. Moreover, the yacht is actually a whopping 200 feet long. The interior is to die for. Imagine having a pool, hot tub, and even a bar on the ocean while vacationing. Moreover, the family spent time on this amazing sea ...

  19. How Succession, Billions and Other Rich TV Shows Get the Details Right

    Succession used Solandge, a 279-foot yacht belonging to a Saudi prince, in its second season. Courtesy of HBO. Nevertheless, their wedding needed to feel lavish, but with plastic flowers that ...

  20. The Real C.E.O. of "Succession"

    When Jesse Armstrong, the writer and creator of the HBO series " Succession ," arrived on set at Amerigo Vespucci Airport, in Florence, one morning in June, he was faced with an extravagant ...

  21. Yachts in TV and film: Glass Onion, Tenet and Argylle

    Succession Yacht: Solandge Lurssen's 85.1 metre superyacht Solandge took a starring role in the second series of Sky Atlantic's Succession.The climactic final episode, in which Brian Cox's Logan Roy makes a life-changing decision, is based entirely on the yacht and showcases its first-class facilities.

  22. Where was 'Succession' filmed? The locations used from seasons one to

    In sharp contrast, the season ends with the Roys amid blue skies and seas in the Aegean Sea and Croatia. This was filmed on the island of Korcula, both on the 279-foot charter yacht Solandge and in the Old Town, taking in the 15th-century St Mark's Cathedral and shoreside restaurant Cupido. Pinterest. Getty Images.

  23. 'Refuge of the last dreamers': the Laos city suspended in time

    A commuter boat speeds its way up the Nam Khan River [Jack Picone/Al Jazeera] Later, the sun sets in a giant ball of fiery orange and red, its rays kicking off the Mekong and painting its banks a ...