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Succession star J Smith-Cameron: ‘There’s a bewildered vulnerability to middle age that is ripe to be explored’

The actor famous for playing Gerri Kellman on starring opposite Mark Rylance on the London stage, her recent emergency operation, and her thoughts on the US election

When J Smith-Cameron tells me that she wishes we’d been able to meet in a bar rather than a rehearsal room near Waterloo station – we’re on a sofa beside a galley kitchen, listening to the sighs of a cranky immersion heater – I’m caught between believing her, and assuming she’s just playing the trouper. If it takes one to know one, she does indeed strike me as a martini kind of a woman; like Gerri Kellman, the character she played with such brilliance in the TV show Succession, I can just picture her biting decisively on an olive in the low-lit gloom of a Manhattan hotel. “Everything is fine, apart from me being a little behind.” Never forget that she is a pro: long before Succession creator and showrunner Jesse Armstrong arrived with his one-percenter monsters, at which point she became famous in a whole new way, Smith-Cameron was a bona fide, Tony award-winning Broadway star.

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