Nicholas Braun on Zola, Succession rumours and, yep, those Crocs (2024)

On a warm afternoon in New York City last autumn, a very tall man wearing a protective facemask, clear-framed glasses and a black baseball cap sidled up to a vlogger on a busy sidewalk to nervously profess his adoration of the vlogger’s pizza review series. The vlogger, who was filming while awaiting a guest, was a little uneasy – in truth, he appeared quite keen for the man to go away – until the stranger pulled down his mask to reveal the lower half of his face: it was Nicholas Braun, known to many as Cousin Greg from the Emmy-winning, Murdoch-baiting, culture-dominating series Succession.

“I just wanted to be like, ‘Man, thanks for the entertainment,’” Braun recalls. “I kind of looked like a schlub.” The vlogger changed his tune dramatically, as he was a massive fan of Succession. Then things got really weird: Jon Bon Jovi turned up – the vlogger’s guest and also, it transpired, a fan of Braun – and then that most unlikely of trios ate pizza together on the side of the street. “I guess that’s why Succession is crazy sometimes, because that doesn’t happen unless he’s like, ‘You’re fucking Cousin Greg!’” Only in New York, only in a pandemic, only when you’re in the best show on TV.

In the early seconds of the exchange, which is available to watch on YouTube, you can see shades of Braun’s now-iconic character, a mixture of awkwardness and chutzpah that is unmistakably Greg. But it’s only a flicker, which disappears once the initial tension is diffused. The overwhelming takeaway from the encounter is Braun’s earnestness, unbridled by the success he has enjoyed for the best part of his 20-year career on screen. It’s very difficult to imagine anyone else of his stature (he was nominated for an acting Emmy a few nights before the encounter) assuming the position of fan like that, as more often than not he is on the receiving end of it. Cousin Greg is, and this is not an exaggeration, everyone’s favourite TV character. Just ask Virgil Abloh, who recently slid into Braun’s DMs and sent him a custom pair of Off-White trainers. As the gawkish outsider of the Roy family, one of the world’s most powerful media dynasties, he brings humour and humanity in his self-consciousness, his eagerness to please and his quiet ambition.

When I mention the pizza review as we speak over Zoom, Braun, 33, lights up at the memory. He’s sitting in his New York apartment with tousled hair, looking not much like Greg at all, even though he’s currently spending most of his days filming the long-awaited new series. I’m trying to parse what exactly has kept him so level-headed, after three years of Succession and much longer with a very different, far more rabid audience as a Disney stalwart in his teens. It wasn’t the first time he had cold-approached someone he admired, he tells me. He once asked Vin Diesel for a selfie and, even ballsier, at 19, approached Quentin Tarantino on an aeroplane with a torn-out magazine ad for his film Minutemen. “I was like, ‘Quentin? Mr Tarantino? Hey, I just want to say I’m an actor. I love your films. I hope I get to work with you someday.’ He was in the window seat, so I had to lean over a person to give it to him.”

His groundedness, as I read it at least, can be chalked up to a piece of advice given to him by Daniel Petrie, the director of his first movie, a made-for-TV melodrama called Walter And Henry, when he was just 12 years old. It was extremely simple, a comment that most children his age would have shrugged off as the allure of fame and money drew them deeper and deeper into the mechanism of Hollywood. To paraphrase, it was: don’t let acting and fame become the crux of your wellbeing. But Braun took it seriously, even as he watched his teenage costars, including Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato, become superstars. He’s still thinking about it today, when his profile is the highest it has ever been, at least among the adult population. It means that when someone comes up to him on the street, invariably calling him “Cousin Greg” (it happens a lot), he appreciates it but doesn’t let it inflate his ego. He has learned to find his self-worth in things apart from the approval of others, an impressive achievement in an increasingly gamified entertainment industry. “I do love when people love the show,” he says, “but if it makes me feel so much better about myself that someone said this to me, I think I need to work on my self-esteem more.”

We meet Succession’s Greg Hirsch – great-nephew of Brian Cox’s irascible powerhouse Logan Roy – in the opening episode, at a low point as he flops out of the Waystar Royco’s management training scheme. On placement at one of the organisation’s various theme parks while high, he vomits through the eyeholes of a cartoon character costume, traumatising a bunch of children in the process. But thereafter he attaches himself to the family unit like a limpet and begins a steady climb up the corporate ladder, making his way through the cruises division, where he is ordered to destroy evidence of a sex scandal, and, later, to the company’s Fox News analogue, ATN. As the episodes roll on, he trades his grubby khakis for designer suits and slicks back a mop of hair. “It’s sort of in the nature of the guy who comes in from throwing up through the mask that if he’s going to be in this room full of sharks, he has to acquire some of those skills.”

Director Adam McKay (Anchorman, Step Brothers, The Big Short), who executive produces Succession and helmed the pilot, tells me he knew he had found his Greg as soon as Braun walked out of the audition. “He’s really smart, he’s handsome, he’s talented, yet at the same time incredibly vulnerable,” McKay says, “and it’s a mixture you don’t see quite as much these days. It reminds me a little bit of how actors were in the 1970s, when you would have these leading men and women that were vulnerable, flawed, slightly different.” He and Succession head writer Jesse Armstrong were immediately impressed by Braun’s ability to riff and improvise and add layers to the character. “He is able to do that thing which I always love in actors: he’s able to do two things at once all the time,” Armstrong says, “dumb and clever, high status and low status.” In many ways, Braun embodies the show’s unique balance between comedy and tragedy: Greg is one of the more outrightly comedic characters, but Braun’s deeply emotive eyes imbue him with an endearing rawness. You feel embarrassed for him. You feel sad for him, even when you’re laughing at him. And, more than anything, you want him to go on and win it all.

In some ways, Greg is like ten per cent of Braun taken to its fullest extreme. To bring the character to life, he leans into his anxious side. “I guess I’m one of those people who is not, like, instantly comfortable with people; it takes me a while to know what version of myself I’m going to be with somebody.” Greg is also a composite of awkward individuals he has come across in his life, including a guy he once saw dancing unabashedly at a wedding. In the lead-up to his audition for the show, he would drop himself into conversations with strangers and force himself to live in that awkwardness for as long as he could tolerate it. “When there’s any kind of awkward silence, I’m like, ‘OK, probably time to go.’ But I think Greg doesn’t have that voice in his head.”

A natural overthinker, Braun considers every detail of his character, down to the clothing Greg wears. “I would tell the costume designers his first suit is a $100-$300 suit. A lot of it was about what’s in Greg’s bank account.” He envies costar Matthew Macfadyen’s ability to switch off from his character between takes, something he struggles with. Instead, he replays each scene over and over in his head, ruing missed opportunities and isolating what he could have said and done that would have suited the scene better. “I like being very particular about what I want to achieve,” he says.

He thrives on the energy of being surrounded by his supremely talented costars, particularly when they get to share the screen as an ensemble. On occasion during these family gatherings, they try out “loose” takes, in which the camera runs on beyond the scripted lines and improvisation is encouraged. Braun offers up one delicious example: in the series two finale, the entire family is gathered around a breakfast table on a yacht in the Mediterranean, discussing who should be offered as a sacrificial lamb to assuage publicunrest about the crimes committed on the company’s cruise ships. It is exactly what this show does best: narcissistic, entitled, yet somehow endearing rich white people trying to eat each other alive. “What about Tom with some fucking Greg sprinkles?” Kieran Culkin’s Roman suggests. “I object, I really do,” Greg responds, “I’m more than a sprinkle.” In the cut that made it to air, their interaction is heated but it peters out as other scalps are offered up. “That’s really one of the few moments I get with Roman where we actually look each other in the eye and have a moment.” But there were several takes that escalated. In one, Culkin got up, walked round the table and jumped on Braun’s back, knocking him to the floor, and the two of them started wrestling. “That’s kind of the freedom we all get when we’re doing these scenes. It’s not a one-minute take, it’s a six-minute take, so you can’t leave your headspace and everyone is sort of forced to stay super present for the entirety of the scene.”

During Braun’s childhood, his father, a former creative director for Warner Music renowned for codesigning The Rolling Stones’ tongue logo, made a late-career pivot to acting in his fifties and Braun would accompany him on the audition circuit, eventually developing a taste for the craft himself. He soon became laser-focused on carving out a career and the two of them would scan bootleg versions of the industry breakdowns and send out postcards to casting directors with headshots attached, hoping to eventually get noticed. After landing a couple of small projects in the early 2000s, his Disney career began in 2005 with Sky High, a comedy about a high school for superheroes in which he played a character with the underwhelming ability to turn his skin a fluorescent yellow. It threatened to become all-consuming as he became one of the Mickey Mouse corp’s go-to supporting players, starring next in Minutemen, a sci-fi about time-travelling teenagers, and then Princess Protection Program with Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato. “When you do a movie with Selena or Demi, you know, and they’re, like, being groomed in a way for being the next big thing, you kind of sense it.”

Even at such a young age, he knew that kind of life wasn’t right for him, at least not back then. At 13 he turned down the opportunity to test for a lead role in a major sitcom that might have made his name because of the implications it would have on the back end of his adolescence. “The opportunities to be the lead of a Disney Channel series felt scary to me. It felt like a commitment that might come around to bite me in the ass.” Instead, he attended a boarding school and got to live like a normal teenager. He went to prom and did all the other vital teenage stuff, setting aside some time in the summers to act. After he finished school, he moved into adult-aimed work and what followed was a nine-year period of smaller films and a slew of TV shows that either fizzled out or never made it to air. His lofty stature – he’s 6ft 7in, but he used to tell casting agents he was 6ft 5in – was a bit of a hindrance at times. He was too baby-faced to play a grown-up, too tall to be a son. He found himself questioning, but never regretting, his decision. “I was looking at the Twilight people and I was like, ‘Man, that must be awesome.’ But then, you know, it dies down and it changes. I think I’ve just believed in the slow rise and to make sure that I focus on my work and that I remain an artist and not necessarily go towards the thing that would get me the most fame the most quickly.”

Braun takes his acting seriously. While he’s not a Daniel Day-Lewis method actor, he makes a lot of effort to embody his characters. For a now-cancelled movie a couple of summers ago, he took a throwaway line in the script about a character’s allegiances to “juggalos” – the fan group of the rap-metal group Insane Clown Posse – as a cue to fly out to their annual, five-day festival, The Gathering Of The Juggalos, in Oklahoma City, and immerse himself in their aesthetically unsettling culture. After a day of moshing and drinking “the grossest alcohol we could get”, he found himself on stage with a hundred other juggalos for an almost ceremonial experience in which they were all drenched in a soft drink called Faygo – a kind of juggalo baptism. “I felt disgusting. My skin was just layers and layers of soda, dirt and sweat.” It helped him realise that his character wasn’t, in fact, a juggalo. (He has only good things to say about the juggalo community, incidentally: “They’re kind of sweet, you know.”)

In his new movie, Zola – an exhilarating, 90-minute thriller based on a real-life stripper’s Twitter thread about a “hoe trip” gone wrong – Braun plays Derrek, the cuckolded, chinstrap-adorned boyfriend of the wayward antagonist, Stefani, who follows her, whining and moaning, on an odyssey through Miami’s seedy underbelly. He took things even further. “I felt this relationship was kind of eating him up,” he says. Braun lost some weight. He put lesions on his skin. He subsisted on only candy and coffee. “I was just on this really weird, thin, kind of manic energy.” It worked: he is hilarious and a little devastating as this comically tragic man.

Braun doesn’t need to be able to directly relate to every character he plays, but if he can, even just a little bit, it helps. He’s too self-aware to have found himself so deeply embedded in the kind of abusive relationship that Derrek and Stefani have, but he has experienced the grain of it. “[My relationships that came closest to that] didn’t go on very long. You know, it would be a few weeks of obsession and, like... I don’t like feeling that powerless. I kind of run away from relationships where I know, ‘OK, I care too much about this. They don’t care as much as me. I gotta get out.’”

For a large portion of the pandemic, Braun was stuck in Los Angeles, as he awaited the long-delayed restart of production on Succession. He crashed with his old friend Christopher Mintz-Plasse, “McLovin” from Superbad. They built Lego together, binged Love Is Blind and other dating shows (Braun is working on a script, a “social horror movie” about them. “I find reality shows to be kind of horrific”) and made silly videos to post on social media. They also jammed together (Braun was in a band when he was younger and still loves to make music) and later in the summer he wound up crafting one of the first pandemic hits, “Antibodies (Do You Have The)”. It began as a throwaway video he posted on Instagram to his 176,000 followers calling for “musical people” to help turn some lyrics, which he screamed in a quasi-British accent, into a song. “Do you have the antibodies, do you want to be with me?” The musical people obliged and turned it into a post-punk masterpiece about finding love in the lockdown era. What started as a joke turned into a major flex: Braun is now signed to Atlantic Records and his single has been played more than a million times across Spotify and YouTube, with a portion of profits (from streams and its accompanying merch, including a mask that reads “Mask on, pants off”) going to health-focused charities in the US.

The video for the song featured a woman he had gone on some socially distanced dates with, adding a bit of real-life romance to the whole thing. Are they still together? “We’re not together, just because, you know, she lives in LA. I wasn’t sure when I’d ever get to LA again. It was a great pandemic romance.”

In September 2020, he attended the virtual Emmys – he was nominated in the Outstanding Supporting Actor In A Drama Series category for Succession – in a crisp Paul Smith suit and a pair of dark blue Crocs (adorned with pins and studs spelling out “Antibodies”), creating shock waves in the menswear community still felt today (not for nothing, Justin Bieber has just released his own line of the divisive shoes). It was a viral red-carpet moment in a year lacking them, representing the loungewear boom and flexing Braun’s own personal style at the same time. Even if you hated the Crocs, you respected Braun’s bravado all the same. Days later, he posted a video to his Instagram jokingly addressing his followers’ disturbing thirst messages. “There’s been a bunch of people saying they want me to hit them with my car, like in a sexy way,” he said, “or stomp on their neck with my Crocs, these kind of violent-sexy-type things.”

The Crocs were his attempt to climb out of the celebrity styling hole and imprint his personality onto his outfit. “It doesn’t feel good when you’re wearing stuff you don’t like – you feel like a mannequin or something. You’re like, ‘Yeah, they put the clothes on me and here I am looking nice and slick, but it doesn’t actually feel like me.’ So I guess I’m trying to find ways to do this that feel good to me and in brands that I like and, I mean, Crocs felt like the right thing for an at-home Emmys.”

He now owns ten pairs of Crocs, wearing them three to four times a week, and is expanding into more straightforwardly fashionable footwear thanks to his new pal Virgil Abloh, as he makes deeper forays into the world of high fashion. “I still don’t feel like I’m made to be in the fashion world,” he says, “but it gets more fun the more you learn about it.”

Braun is now “fully vaxxed up”, which has removed some of the anxiety of shooting a major TV show mid-pandemic. As our conversation turns to said show – rivalled only by Marvel and Star Wars for the severity of the omerta its stars are forced to keep – it becomes a sparring match as I hit him with a barrage of questions he dodges skilfully. How much have they filmed already? “Some.” Does Covid come into the storyline? “I shan’t say.” Can you tell me anything at all? “I play Greg.” He laughs and shifts in his seat, evidently slightly uneasy about being so unforthcoming. Finally, I beg for one tiny morsel about the state of the best relationship on TV, between Greg and Matthew Macfadyen’s Tom Wambsgans, the slithery-but-lovable brother-in-law who plays Greg’s best friend, boss and chief tormentor all rolled into one. Are they going to be on opposite sides this series now that, as the series two finale revealed, Greg appears to have helped Jeremy Strong’s Kendall Roy wage war against his father? “Tom and Greg’s relationship continues to be rocky. And there’s a deep love for one another under it all. That’s all I can say.” Not much of anything really, but I’ll take it. He will say that the buzz on set has never been better and the rapport with his costars remains strong. The situation is perhaps helped, he says, by the fact that Culkin, who is liable to lean into his character’s eccentricities, is unable to stick his fingers in Braun’s drinks, due to strict Covid measures.

Whether or not the show addresses Covid, it will stand out from the previous series, if only aesthetically, as the cast and crew have been grounded in New York, meaning that gallivanting to yachts in Croatia or estates in Scotland is not an option. But he says they adjusted quickly to their new way of working, which involves mask-wearing, rigorous testing and social distancing on set. “You can’t even be annoyed. There’s nothing you can do.” And it’s not going to harm the best aspect of the show: the various dynamics between the Roys. “The scenes haven’t been affected. I think we’re tighter than ever.”

Given Succession’s popularity, Braun’s fame today is very different to how it was during his time with Disney, particularly when you take into account the complications that social media brings. But, as he did in his youth, he has found a way to cope with it (avoiding Twitter, for the most part). “You kind of just have to give yourself over to it. I have no power over any of it.”

He’s conscious but pragmatic about the way the internet gives people the open-ended ability to laud or criticise celebrities. “It can be anxiety-inducing. But, at the end of the day, I’ve got to just try to be myself and not to judge myself. Because, you know, what can I really do?”

I observe that the way he uses Instagram, posting highly self-aware and silly videos of himself, (the Crocs, for one, and another in which he jokingly attempts to court Kim Kardashian), feels brave to me precisely because they feel distinctly like the Braun I’m talking to today. It’s not a committee-run project, it’s just him and his phone, on a whim. It seems that, in a way, he’s revealing his true self to a massive audience. And, sure, he says, it’s made him more relaxed, but he’s not trying to build a profile and harvest likes. He’s just having fun and being himself, kind of like the way that director once told him to.

“I’m like, ‘Well, if anybody still follows me after hearing me say the stuff I’ve been saying, then cool, then they liked me.’ Or they think I’m interesting, at least. I’ll go with that. Yeah.”

Catch-up on series 1 & 2 of Succession, available to own digitally and on Sky On-Demand and NOW

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