Succession Series Finale: Kendall's Final Scene Was Going To Look A Lot Different

Contains spoilers for "Succession" Season 4 Episode 10 — "With Open Eyes"

After four seasons, "Succession" ended in the way we all expected and in the only way it could — with all of the Roy children as complete failures. Shiv (Sarah Snook), the family's only girl, reneged on her promise to her brothers and allowed the family company Waystar Royco to be sold. Roman (Kieran Culkin) is a broken, bigoted degenerate who realizes each of the Roy kids are "nothing." And then there's Kendall (Jeremy Strong), whose identity is so tied to becoming the CEO of Waystar Royco that he tells Shiv he'll end his own life if he doesn't get what he wants.

The last shot of the entire series sees Kendall staring out at New York's Hudson River in open agony, his late father's bodyman Colin (Scott Nicholson) loitering behind him. According to Strong, though, he provided a pretty stunning alternate ending in one take. 

"Listen to the John Berryman poem that Jesse has named these finales after," Strong said to Vanity Fair. "John Berryman himself died by suicide, jumping into the frozen river. I tried to go into the water after we cut—I got up from that bench and went as fast as I could over the barrier and onto the pilings, and the actor playing Colin raced over. I didn't know I was gonna do that, and he didn't know, but he raced over and stopped me. I don't know whether in that moment I felt that Kendall just wanted to die—I think he did—or if he wanted to be saved by essentially a proxy of his father."

Before that, Strong provided some context about exactly why he took this attempted leap into what was apparently a freezing cold river. "That day, we were shooting down in Battery Park, and it was the coldest day in like, a century in New York," Strong revealed. "One of those days in February that they'd closed schools. I'd never been so cold in my whole life....I found myself thinking about the ninth circle of hell, which in Dante's Inferno is a frozen lake. The worst part of hell is ice cold, and so that scene became about that. It was so cold. It was almost burning."

Fans will very likely argue for years about whether or not Kendall takes a fatal leap into the river — especially on the heels of him telling his sister that he would "die" if he didn't get to be the CEO of the family company. As it turns out, Strong went on to say that he helped inspire the ending shot we did get. 

"As scripted, it was meant to end with an aerial shot where we see Kendall walking, and we see Colin following him. I begged [creator Jesse Armstrong and director Mark Mylod], 'Can we go to the water? I want to keep walking...' I'd never seen waves like that in the East River. It felt biblical. And there was this terrible clanging on some scaffolding nearby. We didn't know what we were looking for, but something profound happened. We only had about eight minutes to shoot that piece at the end because the sun was going down. The water was calling to me. It felt right to all of us."

Fans of "Succession" know that waves and images of water have haunted Kendall from the very beginning. At the end of Season 1 in the episode which, as Strong notes, also takes its title "Nobody is Ever Missing" from John Berryman's poem, Kendall heads off in search of mischief and substances with a waiter during Shiv's wedding and ends up killing the young man when he crashes a car into a river. From there, Kendall's associations with water remain tragic and unsettling; he goes to rehab before his father Logan (Brian Cox) yanks him out early, where he's seen soaking in water. The Season 2 finale, which finds Kendall and Logan at odds, takes place on the family yacht as they decide who will be a patsy for the numerous crimes committed behind the scenes at Waystar Royco. In Season 3, Kendall is seen face-down on a pool float, leading many viewers to think he was taking his own life in that moment.

In Season 4, before this, Kendall's moments in water were more triumphant, diving into the Pacific Ocean after a victorious presentation to investors (even though every word of it was made-up) or his swim in Barbados during the finale itself, during which his siblings swim over to tell him they'll support his bid for CEO. When all is said and done, though, Kendall is a ruined, broken man, staring out at the water, potentially preparing to jump.

So what even happens to Kendall to get to this point, where him throwing himself into a river seems like it could possibly happen after the screen fades to black? Desperate to stop the sale of Waystar Royco to GoJo and Swedish billionaire Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skårsgard), Kendall rallies his siblings, even though Shiv is initially against him thanks to a promise from Matsson that she can be GoJo's American CEO post-takeover. When news breaks that Matsson has screwed Shiv over, she allies herself with Kendall and Roman... but when she's responsible for the tiebreaking vote for or against the sale, she finds herself unable to back Kendall.

Kendall, to put it politely, absolutely loses his mind when Shiv tells him she's changed her mind. Especially when she reminds him of the waiter he killed, his responses are uniquely deranged: when she says he can't be CEO because he "killed someone," he first asks "which?" and then tells his siblings that the absolutely true thing he once confided in them was completely made up. Whether Shiv just can't bear to see her brother win her spot or is horrified by the fact that he was lying before or is lying now about killing a human, her mind is set. She votes to push the sale through, and Kendall, with threats of self-harm hanging in the air, leaves the scene of the crime all together. This is what brings him to the waterfront — and, potentially, his death.

If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline​ by dialing 988 or by calling 1-800-273-TALK (8255)​.