The day the press had access to the first episodes of Succession, then a dramatic series that seemed predestined to live in the shadow of Game of Thrones on HBO, journalists raised an idea: screenwriter Jesse Armstrong seemed to be inspired by Rupert’s family Murdoch to inspire the plots of the fiction. The patriarch Logan Roy played by Brian Cox, after all, has four children like Rupert, a strong sentimental curriculum, a total lack of scruples and an empire in the communication sector.
Despite the fact that the Murdochs have wanted to keep their distance from the Emmy-winning series for best drama series (2020 and 2022), new information related to the divorce of Jerry Hall indicates that, in reality, the magnate can not fear more Succession .
“I’ve never seen it,” replied Rupert Murdoch when asked if he was planning to watch the final season of Succession. While no one can confirm if this sentence is true or not, what is clear is that the family is aware of the fiction. You just have to see one of the conditions of the divorce agreement between Rupert Murdoch and Jerry Hall: the model is expressly prohibited from giving ideas to the Succession writers, as Vanity Fair points out.
This information is the culmination of the relationship between the Roys and the Murdochs, especially considering that, as they exposed on The Town podcast, rumors were spreading in Los Angeles that Hall had to hide in his Bel Air mansion during the marriage. to see Succession secretly.
What Jesse Armstrong didn’t include (and would have been wonderful) was that Rupert left his fourth wife via email: “Jerry, I have sadly decided to end our marriage. We have clearly had good times but I have a lot to do… My lawyer in New York will contact you immediately.
Logan Roy has four children. The first, Connor (Alan Ruck), is from his first marriage. He has a more distant relationship with him and, in fact, hardly anything is known about that initial relationship. Later he had Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Shiv (Sarah Snook) and Roman (Kieran Culkin) with his second wife, Caroline (Harriett Walter). Rupert Murdoch’s family history sounds very similar.
In 1956 he married Patricia Booker, with whom he had his daughter Prudence, who remains out of the family business. The marriage, the least publicized and well-known of the four that he has starred in, ended in 1967, when he married the journalist Anna Torv, who worked for his Australian newspaper The Daily Mirror. With her he had three other children from her: Elisabeth, Lachlan and James.
Elisabeth, who started in the acquisitions department of the FX channel then owned by her father, has made a name for herself on television, as a reality TV pundit and geographically distancing herself from her father, living in London. Lachlan is the current president of Fox Corporation, the company resulting from the sale of 20th Century Fox and related companies to Disney, although it is assumed that Rupert Murdoch is still in charge, less visible due to his state of health. He is defined as a reactionary. And finally James is the son with the most liberal label, resigning from the News Corp board of directors over the editorial line of his father’s media.
The most interesting? The family nature of Rupert Murdoch’s company: his sons cannot seize power from him, but once he dies, all four carry equal weight and therefore the struggle for control is significant. “I’ve always suspected that the Succession writers have a mole in the family, because there’s so much they seem to know,†Jim Rutenberg, a New York Times journalist, said of the brotherly rivalry.
In August 2019, Rupert Murdoch called in photographers to celebrate his winery’s 30th anniversary on its grounds in Bel-Air. The Los Angeles Times highlighted the informal appearance of the tycoon at an event with the same profile, where there was an open buffet and the guests had to help themselves. But was winemaking really celebrated?
Among the guests was Mick Jagger, who had been the husband of Jerry Hall, with the couple’s children, Elizabeth and Michael. There was the owner of the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, and the president of The Walt Disney Company, Bob Iger, as well as members of the Hollywood industry such as actor Harvey Keitel. And, in the background, an idea: that casual meeting was actually a social representation to show that Rupert Murdoch was healthier than an oak tree at 88 years of age.
In January 2018, his life had hung by a thread after injuring his sword in a fall on his boat, being transferred to an island in the Caribbean and discovering that there was no open hospital. When he finally received the medical attention he needed, doctors questioned him about old injuries to his vertebrae, to which he replied that they were the fault of his third wife, Wendi Deng, 38 years his junior, who “pushed him against a piano during a fight”.
Among the properties of Waystar Royco, in Logan Roy’s media conglomerate, is a news channel, ATN, with a reputation for being conservative. This is the reason why he has such a bad relationship with Nan Pierce, that she has a more progressive profile channel. And, as has been shown throughout all four seasons, Logan has no sense of loyalty to democracy, using the media for his personal missions and using reactionary presenters. ATN is, in short, a fictionalized version of Fox News, Murdoch’s information channel which is accused of having eroded American democracy.
In fact, Fox News, with a Republican profile and which embraces any idea coming from conservative and reactionary lobbies, is on a tightrope right now, pending trial for defamation and with witnesses as relevant as the presenters Sean Hannity, Tuckerson Carlson or Rupert Murdoch himself. The reason? Fox News would have encouraged conspiracy and fraud theories about the 2020 elections (that is, the idea preached by Donald Trump that Joe Biden had rigged the elections) knowing that these were not true.
And, at the level of the marital and sexual curriculum, Logan and Rupert share their hyperactivity. Logan Roy was first with Connor’s mother, who ended up in a mental institution; later he married Caroline, with whom he had three children; he later married Marcia (Hiam Abbass) for the third time, to whom he was unfaithful with a counselor, Rhea Jarrell (Holly Hunter); and, after Marcia, he had a relationship with Kerry (Zoe Winters), who worked for him and who tried to get a presenting job at ATN.
Rupert Murdoch, on the other hand, has four marriages with Patricia Booker, Anna Torv, Wendi Deng and Jerry Hall, whom he left to start an affair with Ann Lesley Smith, 66, a former model with millionaire marriages behind him. Murdoch proposed to her but the engagement barely lasted two weeks because of Smith’s ultra-conservative ideals and evangelical faith. It is one thing to fuel the racist, conspiracy and homophobic debate from Fox News and quite another to have to listen according to what ideas at home, it seems.
The lives of Rupert Murdoch and Logan Roy are not identical but, in summary, they have a reasonable resemblance.
