Is Succession's Lukas Matsson based on a real person?
Succession wasted no time in welcoming back Alexander Skarsgard as the tech entrepreneur Lukas Matsson in season four episode two. As the potential new owner of Waystar and Co, Lukas is an essential part of the story - but if the Roys are loosely based on the Murdoch family, is Lukas also based on a real-life person? Find out here…
Although there is no specific person who the show’s creator, Jesse Armstrong, has cited as being an inspiration for Lukas Matsson, there are several very similar figures who could fit the description. Perhaps the most obvious is Daniel Ek, the co-founder and CEO of Spotify who, like Lukas, is a Swedish billionaire with a media platform. He also acquired the podcast company Ringer in a nearly $200 million deal. Sound familiar?
A reference from Sandy regarding Lukas in season three could also hint that Peter Theil partly inspires Lukas’ character. In the show, Sandy asks Logan: "How will you feel if he starts micro-dosing and tweeting about angels again?" Peter, the German-American co-founder of PayPal, backed the psychedelic start-up Atai Life Sciences.
Chatting about his role, Alexander explained: "Once he focuses on a task he is almost unstoppable and it's almost like a fun challenge to him to see if he can do this if he can pull it off. He has to figure out a way to work with the different members of the family and the different members of the board."
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He added: "We shot up in the fjords, up in the mountains — it was spectacularly beautiful. It’s a company retreat, basically, an opportunity for relaxation but also hard negotiations about how to move forward. Obviously, my character's Swedish, but it's a neighboring country, and it was quite fun to get out of New York and shoot something on kind of Matsson's turf."
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