The agony of Tom Wambsgans, Succession’s only real human being
Late in the new episode of Succession, there’s a disturbing outbreak of real human emotion. “Do you really want to get into a full accounting of all the pain in our marriage?” Tom Wambsgans asks estranged wife Shiv Roy. “Because if you do, I can do that.”
Tom’s voice is cracked and raw. These aren’t the emotions we associate with Succession’s most tragicomic character, the show’s perpetual clown prince. Tom, superbly played by Matthew Macfadyen, is usually to be found attempting to ingratiate himself with his billionaire in-laws (the Roys being loosely based on the Murdochs). Or lording it over a flunky. That underling is inevitably cousin Greg, the eternal patsy and inspiration for Wambsgans’s go-to quote: “you can’t make a Tomlette without breaking some Gregs”.
Succession is playing the hits as it returns for its fourth and final series. Tyrannical tycoon Logan Roy launches expletives from deep within his mesh of protective cardigans. His dysfunctional children – Shiv, Kendall, Roman and Connor – remain both infantile in their neediness and murderous in their ambition.
But amid the f-bombs, showrunner Jesse Armstrong drops an emotional cluster grenade in the final minutes of the season opener when Shiv returns to the apartment she shared with Tom before the breakup. In a scene so dimly-lit it could have come from the later years of Game of Thrones, they reckon with the implosion of their marriage.
The meeting is their first since Tom betrayed Shiv and her siblings by allying with Logan in the finale of series three. Their belated confrontation advances the plot in so far as it confirms the marriage is a bust. However, its true purpose is to draw a contrast between Tom and Shiv.
Tom married into the Roys. He’s a stranger in a strange land. That was made clear in the very first episode when he attempted to charm Logan by buying him a Patek Philippe watch, despite Shiv pointing out that you can’t buy a gift for the man who owns the world.
Since then, Tom has slithered up the corporate ladder at Waystar Royco. And it turns out he did have a gift for Logan: the head of the tycoon’s daughter delivered when Tom blew the whistle on her plan to dethrone her dad.
But what this latest exchange with Shiv reveals is that, embedded deep in Logan’s bunker, Tom still doesn’t fit in. The crack in his voice when Shiv discusses their marriage confirms that under the ambition and the bullying there reside traces of an actual human being. Perhaps that’s why Shiv looked so surprised after Tom asks if she wanted a full accounting of the hurt in their relationship. Real emotion is not something she encounters day-to-day.
That isn’t to say that Tom’s situation has been clarified to any meaningful extent. Without Shiv what does he represent to Logan? He brings this up at Logan’s forlorn birthday party: “Whatever happens, we’ll always be good, right?” he asks. Logan’s response is ambivalent. “If we’re good, we’re good.” “That’s heartening,” shoots back a visibly disheartened Tom. “I am heartened by that.”
Tom grew up in Minnesota, the son of a prominent lawyer, and is Ivy League educated. But compared to the Roys he might as well have spent his childhood down a coal mine. They are all monsters: how could they not be, with bulldozing sociopath Logan for a father? Tom, by contrast, chose to become a monster, but never quite pulls it off, his eyes flashing with agonised humanity. That’s why Tom is the show’s most tragic creation.
“He does have a relative innocence to him,” Succession director Mark Mylod said of Tom in an interview with The Ringer. “He certainly is the underdog in terms of thinking that he can play in that cage with a species that is so beyond his understanding.”
The Roys walk into a room expecting the furniture to re-arrange itself. Tom is forever shapeshifting. With Logan, he is obsequious, with Greg he’s both bully and best pal. Macfadyen says that he modulates Tom's voice depending on the company. He’s a smarmy chameleon.
“I don’t know how he’s managed to make such an obsequious and bullying character likeable, but he has,” said Sarah Snook, who plays Shiv. “He’s one of those actors who’s got such love and empathy and compassion and curiosity for the world that he can really fashion a character into anything he wants.”
“In a show that’s about power and its manifestations, Matthew is very good at playing a character who is the crux of a number of different power relationships,” agreed Jesse Armstrong. “He’s good at showing Tom’s willingness to shape and adjust his personality to fit into the power structure.”
That is partly down to Armstrong’s scripts. But most of the credit must to go Macfadyen, who, from the outset, has identified in Tom a note of tragedy. This tragedy is bound up in comedy. Tom's predicament – that of an ordinary person marooned with the Roys – is funny because it is so pathetic. Macfadyen filters that into a performance that blends desperation and slapstick. He is, in the same heartbeat, hilarious and teetering on a meltdown.
“When someone’s too poker faced and laboured, it’s boring,” Macfadyen told The Ringer. “People like Steve Martin and John Cleese and a lot of what they do, a lot of the ludicrousness, is informed by rage. It’s being out of control. And I think that’s a good way in.”
That Tom is a normal guy pretending to be dysfunctional has become increasingly obvious through Succession. At the end of season one, the play-acting falls away when Shiv tells him that she wants an open marriage. This happens just after they’ve tied the knot. There is a part of Tom that wants to scream in her face. “I kinda wish, I guess maybe,” Tom says when she lays out her plan, “we’d talked about this before our wedding night.”
He repeats those sentiments in series two. “I just wonder if the sad I’d be without you is less than the sad I get from being with you.” It’s heartbreaking. As is the back-and-forth in which Tom reveals that he hopes to get Shiv pregnant so that she has a baby while he’s potentially in prison (“nine to 12 months is what I’m hoping I might serve”). “I might need something Shiv… otherwise what is the point of all this?” She replies that she doesn’t want to be his “incubator”. “You’re making it sound horrible, Shiv,” he snaps. “It’s supposed to be nice.” Tom, it seemed, wanted to build something for the future; while Shiv saw Tom as something more temporary.
But Shiv is ultimately unmoved by Tom’s misery, and they fail to connect during their face-to-face in the latest episode. Tom sold out Shiv to her father and feels the weight of the betrayal in every fibre. Footloose and fancy free, he and Greg have labelled themselves the “Disgusting Brothers” – but it’s obvious that with Tom the “disgust” is directed inwards.
She isn’t happy about the betrayal. She does, however, understand it: she’d do the same without a second thought. Why is he so overwrought? He destroyed their marriage – but it was to get ahead. It’s a price she would have happily paid (she was completely okay with him volunteering to take the blame for a sexual abuse coverup at that Waystar subsidiary and potentially going to prison).
“There are some things I wouldn’t mind explaining,” he tells Shiv. She has no idea what he means. The marriage is a bust: it’s time to move on. The scene ends with Tom and Shiv stretched on the bed. They hold hands but the gulf between them is vast. Shiv lives in a world where people are commodities, life a series of transactions. But Tom is a guy out of his depth, pretending he doesn’t have a soul, and never quite pulling it off. In that space between who he is and who he wants to be resides both the comedy and the horror of Succession.
Series 4 of Succession is on Sky Atlantic and NOW
