Succession 's Dagmara Domińczyk lost her own father just days after filming Logan Roy's funeral
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Sometimes life imitates art in the cruelest ways.
On Succession, Dagmara Domińczyk plays loyal, no-nonsense, severely-bobbed publicist Karolina Novotney and in the show's final season, Karolina helps usher in the next era after her boss, Logan Roy (Brian Cox), suddenly bites the proverbial dust.
Just days before the very last day of filming, and days after Succession shot Logan's funeral, Domińczyk's own father unexpectedly died.
"It just feels like the universe really — I don't know the way it works, that the death of Succession and the death of Logan Roy coincided with the death of my f---ing amazing, complicated father," Domińczyk said in an interview with Rolling Stone, sharing how the events of the hit show helped with her own grieving.
Macall Polay/HBO Dagmara Domińczyk, and her no-nonsense bob, on 'Succession'
In the third episode of season 4, Logan dies while on a plane en route to Sweden, and his children are barely able to get on the phone in time to say goodbye to their beloved (that might be a strong word) respected patriarch.
Domińczyk's father, whom she referred to as a "gentler, kinder Logan Roy" and "the biggest presence and force in my whole entire life" died suddenly at age 69. He was in Poland and she was in New Jersey, and so she found out "through a phone call from a person we'd never met."
Domińczyk noted that her dad and Cox "had a lot of similar qualities in how the carry themselves in the world," so filming the character's death on the plane proved difficult for her. Unlike Karolina, she is a "very emotional person" who wears "my heart on my sleeve."
The actress said she had a "hard time not crying on that airplane" during Logan's death scenes even before the loss of her own father. Director Mark Mylod asked her not to get emotional as it was out of character for the always reserved Karolina, she said. Mylod, meanwhile, had his own water-work worries.
And so Karolina remained the calm, cool, and collected head in the situation, steering the response to Logan Roy's death.
"This is what she's been trained to do," The Lost Daughter star says of Karolina. "We all need someone who doesn't fall apart, who's looking at the bigger picture. And I think that was Karolina's MO: 'I'm the only female here right now. It's a roomful of boys who are probably shitting their pants thinking, what the f---'s gonna happen?'"
"I guess I pulled it together," Domińczyk said of watching the episode back for the first time, sharing that seeing Karolina's reserve helped with her own real-life grief.
"I was watching it alone at night with my dog on my husband's recliner, and I knew what the episode was. My dad died two months ago, but in terms of sudden, traumatic loss, it could have happened two days ago," Domińczyk said.
"I started watching the episode, and this vein started throbbing in my head. I thought I was gonna have an aneurysm. And of course, I cried and cried and I thought it was brilliant," she continued. "The episode was so good and so tense and so amazingly orchestrated and put together, that for a moment, I was able to take myself out of my own grief and just be in the story. But it was really, really, really difficult."
Sign up for Entertainment Weekly's free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.
Related content:
