‘Succession’ relies on a family that bends but won’t break

Is there a line you can’t cross with family? The Roys are determined to find out.

“Succession’s” first family, a collective of power, wealth and cruelty, turn on each other without thinking, doing whatever they need to do to get ahead. But through two seasons of the HBO family drama, they always come back to each other.

Now, the third season, which premiered Sunday, returns in the aftermath of Kendall’s (Jeremy Strong) betrayal, a public reveal of the Roys’ — and Waystar Royco’s — greatest crimes. The saddest son has stood on his own for once and put his family and his legacy in the crosshairs.

Is this the final breaking point for the Roys?

“There’s a safety net of ‘I can be as horrible to my siblings and eviscerate them and it’s still ‘see you at Thanksgiving,”” Kieran Culkin, the 39-year-old New York native who plays youngest son Roman, told the Daily News.

“Roman does hold onto this idea of the family, of us as a unit. I think that’s something he really does actually hold dear. So of course we’re going to get together for Dad’s birthday and Thanksgiving and Christmas … Go hard, tear each other apart, crush them in the company, see you at Christmas.”

It’s the thinnest of lines, one that gets narrower with each backstabbing. Shiv (Sarah Snook) puts out a press release on Kendall. Roman goes behind Shiv’s back. Connor (Alan Ruck) is more interested in his presidential campaign than Waystar Royco, other than seeing his family’s company as a means to the end.

But no matter what, they keep finding their way back to each other.

“We’re all we have. Who else would have us?” said Alan Ruck, who plays Connor. “I have Willa and this is one of the more stable relationships in the show. The old man is on his third wife and it’s not going that well. Shiv and Tom, train wreck. Roman, Kendall, it’s just not good. They don’t know how to hang onto anybody.”

The actors say the Roys are just like any other family, broken and damaged. But the money changes the playing field. It exacerbates the drama. These siblings are fighting over Daddy’s love, but they’re also fighting for a billion-dollar media conglomerate. When they run away, they do it on private jets and yachts. And Daddy’s love comes with a CEO title and a board seat.

“It’s Shakespearean,” said Brian Cox, who plays Roy patriarch Logan.

The 75-year-old actor brought it back to nature vs. nurture, but in a way, the Roy children are fated by both: raised in a world of privilege and taught that only winning matters; second isn’t an option. Under those rules, how can anyone expect children to grow up healthy and stable? But that’s the only way Logan knows.

“Of all the characters I’ve ever played, he’s probably the most resilient, and his resilience is always quite astounding. It’s never what we expect. His survival mechanism is incredible. He’s a bit of a Superman — he’s got quite Superman tendencies — but he doesn’t think of himself that way. He’s survived the most awful things because he’s learned not to attach himself in the wrong way,” Cox told The News.

“Once you attach yourself, you can get destroyed by it. But the one thing he is attached to, whether he likes it or not, is his children…and yet at the same time, they’re regular pains in the f--king a--. They really are. That’s what you have to deal with on a regular basis. It’s tedious as well, because there’s a part of him that says, ‘for the love of God, let’s just stop, let’s behave ourselves for five minutes.’ But they’re incapable of doing that.”

By Cox’s telling — and Logan’s — he is only trying to prepare his children to take his throne. But none are qualified. Kendall gained power and immediately betrayed his family. Shiv has “verbal diarrhea,” Cox said. And Roman is “a little f--king adolescent.”

“He’s just such a dirty wee boy,” Cox said.

For the Roys, Cox said, “there is no happy ending.”

“They don’t deal in those things. There just is or isn’t. It is or it’s not. Logan understands that because it’s all about the work. He’s completely dedicated to the work and he’s completely dedicated to how the work pans out,” he said.

“He doesn’t want anybody impeding that, and his kids are their own worst enemies on that front. Work isn’t getting done while Kendall’s kvetching around the place. Keep the ball rolling, keep the ship sailing.”

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