Solandge, the yacht used in Succession, costs $1million a week to hire

The superyacht Solandge

In last night’s Succession Season 2 finale on HBO, the Roy family and their top Waystar-Royco aides spent time onboard Logan Roy’s luxurious Mediterranean yacht, ostensibly on a brief cruise vacation.  However, the Mediterranean cruise was actually intended to give Logan (Brian Cox) the opportunity to take time off to decide who should take the fall to save Waystar-Royco’s tarnished reputation following the company’s mismanagement scandal, and a congressional hearing on the matter.

Logan finally decided that his troubled son Kendall (Jeremy Strong) would be the “blood sacrifice” to save the company.

If you saw last night’s season finale and wondered about the luxurious yacht that provided the setting for the episode, here is everything you need to know about it.

The superyacht in tonight’s episode of Succession Sign up for our newsletter! Get updates on the latest posts and more from Monsters and Critics straight to your inbox. By submitting your information you agree to our T&Cs and Privacy Policy. Length: 85.1 meters Crew: 29 Cost: 1,000,000 euros to rent per week https://t.co/jaPEubbK6m — Dan Diamond (@ddiamond) October 14, 2019
@Succession_HBO is that M/Y Solandge? Used in S2E10? Nice. — Daniel B Nash Sr (@DanielBNashSr1) October 14, 2019

Solandge was the yacht used in the Succession Season 2 finale

The yacht used in last night’s episode of Succession was the famous 85.1-meter Lürssen motor yacht Solandge . Solandge is one of the world’s largest and most iconic luxurious motor superyachts available for charter.

The weekly summer and winter charter price for a Mediterranean cruise is listed as being from €1,000,000 ( currently about $1,102, 642 plus expenses ).

Solandge was first listed for sale in 2015 at an asking price of €179 million. It was finally sold in a deal brokered by the luxury yacht brokerage firm Moran Yacht & Ship in 2017. The deal, said to be the biggest yacht deal of the year in 2017, was reportedly worth €155,000,000.

Solandge was built by Lürssen in 2013. The luxurious granite, marble and wood interior of the yacht was jointly designed by Rodriguez Interiors and Dolker & Voges. The exterior was designed by Espen Øino ( Espen Oeino).

The yacht is able to sleep 12-16 guests in eight large staterooms. It is also able to accommodate a large gathering of overnight party guests in en-suite cabins. Facilities include a sauna, steam room, massage room, beauty salon, gym, sun deck, outdoor swimming pool, dance floor, bar, outdoor cinema, and nightclub.

The boat has a cruising speed of 15 knots and a top speed of 17 knots.

Solange won the Monaco Yacht Club’s La Belle Classe Superyachts award at the 2014 Monaco Yacht Show.

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Market Realist

You, Too, Can Charter the ‘Succession’ Yacht…for $1.1 Million a Week

Who owns the ‘Succession’ yacht? Learn more about the ‘Solandge,’ the 279-foot boat the Roy family boarded in the HBO drama’s second season.

Dan Clarendon - Author

Oct. 15 2021, Published 11:29 a.m. ET

Who owns the Succession yacht? Certainly not Succession star Sarah Snook , who told Page Six on Oct. 12, that she has no interest in such an expense. “You own a boat like that, you’ve got to maintain a boat like that,” said Snook, who plays Shiv Roy on the show. “It’s like $12 mil a year or something like that to maintain. Who wants to spend money on that?…Give the money away; no one needs that much money. There’s a ceiling where money makes you happy, and beyond that, it’s just greed.”

Of course, you don’t have to own the 279-foot yacht featured in the HBO drama ’s second season to enjoy its amenities. You can also charter the luxurious vessel , but you’d still need deep pockets.

Who owns the ‘Succession’ yacht?

The Solandge found a new owner in March 2017, after being listed for sale with Moran Yacht & Ship for 155,000,000 euros (about $180 million). However, the identity of the buyer hasn't been revealed.

Actress J. Smith-Cameron, who plays Gerri Kellman on Succession , discussed the boat with BuzzFeed News in Oct. 2019. “I think it’s a Saudi-owned superyacht . I believe the word ‘Solandge’ is made up of the letters of the kids’ and cousins’ names. I think somebody told me that. It may or may not be true. But it seemed like a good choice because it seemed like a parallel universe for the Roy family.”

BOAT International reported that the Solandge sale was the biggest brokerage deal of 2017 at the time. “We would like to take this opportunity to congratulate her new owner and thank her former owner for recognizing our expertise in selling large quality yachts and entrusting us with the sale of Solandge ,” Moran said upon the sale.

How do you rent the ‘Succession’ yacht?

The Solandge is available for charter through Moran Yacht & Ship, but it will set you back. You can charter the vessel for a summer week in the Mediterranean or a winter week in the Caribbean and the Bahamas, but both charters cost 1,000,000 euros per week, or about $1.16 million.

Moran touts that the Solandge is “one of the finest vessels currently available for charter and is one of the world’s largest and most iconic yachts.” The yacht sleeps 12 guests in eight state rooms, with a private owner’s deck and suite. A crew of 29, meanwhile, sleeps in 15 crew cabins. Built in 2013, the Solandge won the "La Belle Classe Superyachts" award from the Monaco Yacht Club at the 2014 Monaco Yacht Show, and the award for the best exterior at the Monaco Yacht Show Awards.

The Solandge ’s top deck features an outdoor cinema and a nightclub, the main deck features an indoor-outdoor gym, and the lower deck features a dive center, a tender garage, and a sauna. The saloon interior, designed by Aileen Rodriguez, boasts a floor-to-ceiling panel of backlit amethyst quartz, a large bar of amethyst-and-honey onyx, and a dining table under an amethyst-and-rose-quartz chandelier. And don’t forget about the onboard beauty salon, swimming pool, jacuzzi, and helipad!

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yacht used in succession tv show

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Which yacht stars in the TV series 'Succession'?

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By Katia Damborsky   29 October 2019

The 279ft (85m)  charter yacht SOLANDGE is the yacht in HBO’s  Succession. Hitting TV screens in 2019, the season finale of season 2 gives viewers an inside glimpse into life on board the Lurssen luxury yacht in the Mediterranean .

The curtain closed on season 2 of hit HBO show Succession earlier this month, after a dramatic season finale filmed on board SOLANDGE cruising the Mediterranean .

The series gives viewers a peak inside the six-deck superyacht, which can be rented from €1,000,000 (approximately $1,136,000) per week plus expenses.

While the yacht is fictitiously owned by the Roy family in the series, Succession showcases the type of lifestyle you can expect when chartering million-dollar megayachts ; from stylish helicopter departures to zipping between islands on a luxury tender.

The finale of Succession Season 2 is filmed on board superyacht SOLANDGE

Roy family from SUCCESSION on board SOLANDGE yacht during season 2 finale

Succession is an award-winning comedy-drama which centres around the life of the uber-wealthy and highly dysfunctional Roy family.

At the helm of the family is patriarch Logan Roy, a media titan who heads up and controls an international media conglomerate. After his health takes a turn for the worst, his adult children must each face the prospect of becoming heir to the family business. 

Rife with power struggles, backstabbing betrayals and family loyalty, Succession offers a fresh take on abuse, media and wealth in contemporary America.  

Succession showcases the type of lifestyle you can expect when chartering million-dollar megayachts.

The dramatic end to season 2 of Succession premiered in October 2019, with the finale to Succession filmed on board the motor yacht SOLANDGE.

This glamorous setting gave us plenty of scandal; Logan disingenuously suggesting stepping down as CEO, Connor's iPad getting thrown overboard and of course, the shocking final moments where we see Kendall blowing the whistle on his father.

Roy family sit on the aft decks of superyacht SOLANDGE

How much does it cost to rent the yacht in Succession?

The cost of renting luxury yacht SOLANDGE is upwards of 1 million euros (or 1.136 million dollars) per week plus expenses during both the winter and summer. This price does not include the cost of food, drink, fuel dockage, VAT and tips.

SOLANDGE yacht from HBO TV Series SUCCESSION underway

SOLANDGE features in our article, the world’s most expensive charter yachts which cost over $1 million to rent per week .

What does the yacht from Succession look like inside?

Superyacht SOLANDGE main salon and lit up panels

With her Lurssen pedigree, innovative design and stunning selection of amenities,  SOLANDGE is recognised as one of the world’s most iconic superyachts.

She is home to all the facilities you would expect on a yacht of this calibre, including a sleek swimming pool with jet-stream technology and a cutting-edge chromotherapy spa with Hamman and treatment room which both integrate light therapy. 

SOLANDGE yacht spa

Her main deck plays host to the expansive owners’ suite, which enjoys his and hers en suites with adjoining dressing rooms, a private lounge-cum-office and a private deck area with dip pool and intimate seating areas. 

While chartering her, guests can make use out of a fully-stocked wine cellar and an elevator with the capacity for nine.

Inside superyacht SOLANDGE

Luxury yacht SOLANDGE master cabin

SOLANDGE features ornate interiors from Florida-based studio Rodriguez Interiors. A palatial theme is reflected in plush fabrics, a rich colour palette and a selection of semi-precious stones, including amethyst, honey onyx, gold leaf and rose quartz.

The design team behind SOLANDGE has also sourced plenty of glass fixtures from Murano, an island near Venice famed for its rich history of glass-making. 

SUCCESSION yacht main salon

Her opulent finish is evident in the main salon, which is flanked by two walls of LED backlit amethyst that imbue the room with a soft lilac glow.

An elaborate focal point, the walls have been created by slicing a piece of amethyst into tiny segments with diamond wire and gluing them to a glass sheet, before then being covered by a panel of Plexiglass studded with LED lights.

SOLANDGE yacht central staircase

Another talking point aboard the charter yacht is the floating central staircase, which features a sculpted ‘Tree of Life’ statue ascending the full height of the yacht.

In total, 1,423 points of light illuminate the space with a warm glow. Themes of nature continue in the owner’s suite, where backlit mullions depict the Garden of Eden. 

Cinema on luxury yacht SOLANDGE

In total, around 25 wood veneers have been used throughout luxury yacht SOLANDGE. On the lower decks, where there is typically less light, the yacht features darker, ebony finishes; higher up, lighter blondewood and caramel finishes are more prevalent.

Pool area on luxury yacht SOLANDGE

This delicate mix of traditional opulence and contemporary punches of colour and texture lend SOLANDGE an atmosphere quite unlike any yacht.

A motor yacht of her calibre makes the perfect backdrop for Succession, and it’s hoped we’ll see SOLANDGE return to reprise her role as the Roy family’s luxury yacht in season 3.

Aerial image of luxury yacht SOLANDGE

If you’d like to learn more about chartering M/Y SOLANDGE, please get in touch with your preferred yacht charter broker .

More Yacht Information

Solandge yacht charter

85m Lurssen 2013 / 2022

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Header image - The Luxurious Yacht from HBO's Succession: A Deep Dive

The Luxurious Yacht from HBO's Succession: A Deep Dive

HBO's hit series Succession has captivated audiences with its gripping portrayal of a powerful media family's internal struggles. Among the many stunning visual elements featured in the show, Logan Roy's luxurious yacht from Succession has become a symbol of opulence and power. In this article, we'll take an in-depth look at this magnificent vessel, its features, design, and some behind-the-scenes insights.

A Floating Palace: Design and Features

The yacht featured in Succession is known as the Solandge , a 279-foot (85-meter) custom-built vessel by renowned German shipyard Lürssen. Designed by Espen Øino, the Solandge boasts a timeless exterior and a lavish interior crafted by Aileen Rodriguez.

Luxurious Amenities

Some of the yacht's standout features include:

  • Six expansive decks
  • A beach club with a fold-down swim platform
  • A fully equipped gym and spa
  • A large swimming pool
  • An outdoor cinema
  • A glass-enclosed elevator

The Solandge can accommodate up to 16 guests across eight opulent staterooms, each with its own en-suite bathroom and state-of-the-art entertainment system. The master suite features a private deck, a study, and a luxurious bathroom with a Jacuzzi.

A Glimpse Behind the Scenes

Succession filmed aboard the Solandge for several days during production. To shoot the scenes set on the yacht, the production crew worked closely with the yacht's crew to ensure smooth sailing and adherence to maritime regulations.

Real-life Ownership and Charter Opportunities

In real life, the Solandge is owned by a private individual and is not part of the Roy family's fictional fleet. However, the yacht is available for charter , with rates starting at a staggering €1 million per week.

The Yacht's Role in the Show

The yacht serves as a backdrop for some of the show's most pivotal moments, with its opulence and grandeur reflecting the excesses of the Roy family. The vessel's striking presence serves as a visual reminder of the immense wealth and power wielded by the show's central characters.

The Solandge, featured in HBO's Succession, is a floating palace that exemplifies the extravagant lifestyle of the ultra-wealthy. With its breathtaking design, state-of-the-art amenities, and memorable role in the series, it's no wonder that this stunning yacht has captured the imaginations of viewers around the world. So, the next time you watch Succession, keep an eye out for the Solandge and marvel at this extraordinary vessel.

Author image - Ben Hunter

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yacht used in succession tv show

You Too Can Charter the Yacht on Succession

' src=

The fourth, and final, season of HBO’s Succession has just started, and it picks up where season three ended, with some of the most crucial scenes taking place on a 279-foot megayacht cruising in the Adriatic not far from Dubrovnik, Croatia.

At that time, the fictional Roy family, owners of the media giant Waystar (if you don’t think of Fox and Rupert Murdoch you’re not paying attention) have gathered for a critical business meeting. The first evening on board, Logan, the patriarch, announces that he will have to fire one of them (or another leader of the company) to satisfy his investors and troublesome Congressional investigators.

yacht used in succession tv show

The yacht, Solandge , a $174 million Lürssen launched in 2013, is a perfect setting for a corporate beheading. Indeed, Mark Mylod, the show’s director, said it was “the ultimate gilded cage to trap these characters in” with the metaphor of throwing one of them overboard.

Solandge , as it turns out, is close to gilded; the interior does not include gold, but it does include 49 different marble and granite surfaces, and 30 types of wood. It holds 12 guests in eight cabins plus 29 crew in 15 cabins. Its six decks include a private owner’s deck, where the bulwarks have been lowered so they don’t interfere with the view from the bed.

Elsewhere, Solandge has a helipad, a dance floor with a DJ setup on the upper deck, a Jacuzzi, a fully stocked wine cellar, spa, massage room, elevator, and what Moran, which charters it, calls “a number of bars, buffet areas and even a large swimming pool.”

yacht used in succession tv show

The toys include diving equipment, three Yamaha WaveRunners, wakeboards, kayaks and four tenders, including a 36-foot Fjord.

Solandge is powered by two 2,660-hp CATs. It  cruises at 15 knots, tops out at 18 knots, and has a range of 6,000 nm.

You don’t have to own a media company to charter Solandge , but owning something would help. It charters for 1 million Euros plus expenses a week, winter and summer, adding up to a total of $1,166,472, roughly. Read more at  https://www.moranyachts.com/luxury-yachts/solandge-3/?yacht-type=luxury-yachts-charter and see  the video below:

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Season 2 finale of Succession filmed on board Mega Yacht Solandge – Photo © HBO

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This image is featured as part of the article All you need to know about SOLANDGE, the yacht from ‘Succession’ .

Season 2 finale of Succession filmed on board Mega Yacht Solandge - Photo © HBO

Please contact CharterWorld - the luxury yacht charter specialist - for more on superyacht news item "Season 2 finale of Succession filmed on board Mega Yacht Solandge - Photo © HBO".

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Succession Creator Jesse Armstrong on the ‘Blood Sacrifice,’ Fan Theories, and That Finale Twist

Portrait of Jen Chaney

In the interest of getting more perspective on what happened in Succession ’s superb season-two finale , Vulture turned to the man in charge of it all. No, not Logan Roy. We spoke to Jesse Armstrong, the creator of Succession and the writer of “This Is Not for Tears” to find out what went down between Kendall and his father , how they filmed the episode on an actual yacht, and why Logan has such a cryptic smile on his face at the end of the season. Here’s what Armstrong had to say, with the caveat that he is very committed to letting viewers reach their own conclusions about what they saw. “I’m happy to leave it for people to decide,” he says.

I want to ask you about the John Berryman poem “ Dream Song 29 .” The title of this season’s finale, “This Is Not for Tears,” comes from that poem. So does the title of last season’s finale, “Nobody Is Ever Missing,” Can you talk about the relationship between that poem and the show? Yeah, I’ll try. I’m a bit averse to doing too much analysis because I want people to have their own reaction to the show. The show is the best expression of the show. Forgive me if I’m reluctant to over-explicate or make things plain.

Nevertheless, it’s true about that poem. It has a terrifying sense of that feeling Kendall has at the end of the last season, wondering if something could have happened. In Berryman’s poem’s case, in the end, [a death] hasn’t happened. But it has happened to Kendall. When I was looking at possibilities, that line struck me as pertinent to this episode as well.

When you broke the story for the season and decided there was going to be a blood sacrifice, did you consider sacrificing characters other than Kendall? Or was it always going to be Kendall? The structure was down early on. The ending came even before that [“blood sacrifice”] phrase from Logan. We enjoyed rehearsing the different people Logan might consider, but [Kendall] was set from early on.

Episode nine ends with Logan calling for a sacrifice. I feel like a lot of viewers got so focused on that question that we didn’t wonder, What would happen next? How might the person being sacrificed respond? Were you intentionally directing us that way, so that we wouldn’t think about the ending? No, that wasn’t a mislead. We tend not to do obfuscation or red herrings. I was happy that the ending might be a surprise and a shock. Not revealing precisely what Greg’s and Kendall’s intentions and thoughts are, that’s really quite brief. On the whole, that wasn’t an idea to mislead.

I was curious about where the episode was filmed. Where did you shoot and how did you find that beautiful yacht? That was the great work of Scott Ferguson, our producer. [Episode director] Mark Mylod and I were pretty demanding about the kind of opulence that these people have. We said, “If we’re going to do this, we should reflect what it really is like.” Scott had a hell of a job trying to find one of these yachts. As you can imagine, the people who own them are not the sort of people who are interested in doing a film-shoot deal. It was tough to find, but Scott persevered. There were discussions about where it could be if it wasn’t on a yacht. He really came through and managed to find an affordable way to do this. For a number of reasons, we really wanted it to be on a yacht.

I’m guessing one of those reasons is that the Roys are isolated and trapped. They can’t just walk out when they’re on a boat. Exactly. It has loads of practical advantages that have resonances to stuff that happens in the show, that’s resonant to stuff that’s happening in the real world. It was what we really wanted.

Where was it shot? In Croatia, nearer to Drašnice.

Were the interiors on the yacht as well, or on a soundstage? Oh no, that’s all on location. We do almost everything on location. I think it’s good for the show. So all of those interiors are the real interiors.

I’m going to ask you a couple of things that you may or may not want to talk about in too much detail. But I’m going to ask you out of curiosity.  I’ll try to say something if I can.

At the end of the finale, it’s clear that Greg held on to some of those documents that he and Tom had been burning. He seems to have them in his possession when Kendall is speaking during the press conference. But we don’t actually see Kendall and Greg discuss this. I assume that’s something they worked out on the plane. Is that a fair assumption? And why did you want to leave that out — just for the sense of surprise? I’m happy to leave it for people to decide. Me and Nic [Braun] and Jeremy [Strong] discuss this kind of stuff and they’re happy with the advantage we have. I think it’s fun for people to make their own decisions about precisely where those agreements and decisions are made. There’s enough in the episode that would lead you to make some assumptions.

There’s a wonderful close-up on Brian Cox’s face in the final moments of the episode, as Logan watches Kendall throw him under the bus. He flashes a little hint of a smile, or at least what I perceived as a smile. Was that in the script? There’s a script direction for him to give that kind of look. Brian’s so brilliant that you get many layers. He’s such an amazing actor. He’s giving a brilliant performance, and I like that people, as you do in life, are trying to make a decision about what he’s feeling.

My colleagues and I had a debate after the episode: Is it fair to assume that Logan was genuinely surprised by what Kendall did? Earlier in the episode, one of the shareholders suggests that he should step down. Is it possible he sacrificed Kendall knowing that Kendall might retaliate? Okay, wow. It’s fun to hear that people are coming up with their own interpretations like that. It feels unseemly, given the work we all do to create [the show], to then impose some binary decisions. I’ll just say, the show is the best version of the show. I’m happy for people to engage with it.

Looking ahead, at what point in the process are you with regard to season three? Do you have a general sense of where it might go? Yeah, I like to open up the writers’ room with a bunch of things to test everyone or give them things to react against. I haven’t started it yet, but I have a bunch of research and a bunch of thoughts about what should happen, but they will be very much open to being fortified, disproved, kicked around, laughed at, and expunged.

When does the writers’ room regroup for season three? Within a month or so.

You wrote this season quite some time ago. But watching it at this particular moment, as we read about whistle-blowers and people testifying on the Hill as part of Trump’s impeachment inquiry, that really added another layer to the experience. Do you think about that broader political context in terms of how the show will land, or is it something you can’t even contemplate? What we don’t do, obviously, is try and predict that the ambassador to Ukraine will be fired or something like that. We heavily research. I come with a ton of stuff. We check out everything we do with other people. We’re in the culture just like everyone else is, and it’s a show that has a relationship to the real world. All the writers and myself have feelings and thoughts about what’s happening in the U.S. and the wider world. We’re not ripping stuff straight from the headlines and throwing it into the show. We’re taking what feels like it’s around and fitting it to the characters we have. Then we’re in a good place to accidentally hit on themes in reality. They are lucky hits.

  • jesse armstrong

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Succession Season 2 Finale Recap: Who Did Logan Throw Overboard?

Click here to read the full article.

Succession ‘s Roy family wrapped up Season 2 by hashing out their issues aboard a luxury yacht… and one key character went down with the ship.

Sunday’s finale starts back in D.C., with a bewildered Cousin Greg withering under the glaring spotlight of a tough Congressional inquiry, while Logan takes a call from a big-time shareholder, warning him that someone needs to take the fall for the cruise ship scandal… and “we feel that probably it should be you.” Logan doesn’t love that idea, of course, and gathers his brood in Venice for a stay aboard his decadent mega-yacht. (It’s almost like a Below Deck Med crossover episode.) There’s plenty of drama afoot: Willa’s play got hammered by bad reviews, Kendall brought Naomi Pierce along… and Tom is very flustered about Shiv planning a threesome with him and an old female friend.

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Roman’s there, too, after escaping that unpleasant hostage situation, and he might have a deal to take Waystar private — along with a cellphone video of Karl defecating in a bucket. He, Kendall and Shiv speculate about who might be the next CEO, now that Rhea is out. It could be Greg, even! (Kendall: “Are you ready to step up?” Greg, not hearing: “It’s a fungus, they think? A benign fungus.”) When Logan arrives, Laird tells him the private money deal is all but done, and sings Roman’s praises in closing the deal. But Roman speaks up and reveals he thinks the deal is “probably bulls–t” and exposes how Laird stands to benefit from it financially. Karl sides with Roman, and Logan says no deal, with an angry Laird sarcastically wishing them luck with the coming shareholder revolt.

Logan is a bit shellshocked when confiding in Kendall, but he says no to bringing in Stewie again, and the mood is grim. (Even Tom knows there’s going to be “a head on a spike.”) Connor comes begging to Logan for one of his newspapers to cook up some good reviews for Willa’s play… and oh, a loan of “a little hundred mill” (!). Logan says yes — but only if he gives up his silly presidential bid. Then he invites everyone to drink up tonight… because tomorrow, they’ll have to come up with a plan together. Roman gleefully starts taking bets on who’s getting canned, and Logan raises some alarms about Naomi joining Kendall on the boat. “I just don’t want you f–ked on drugs,” he bluntly tells his son, and a compliant Kendall sends her away the next morning. Plus, Tom finds a way to ruin the threesome before it even starts, concluding he’s just not feeling that “naughty.” (Not a shock, to be honest.)

When day breaks, Connor orders a full bottle of Burgundy for breakfast before Logan announces that, if they have to get rid of somebody, “the obvious choice is me.” The rest talk him out of it, though, and Logan insists he needs “one meaningful skull” to serve up to the shareholders, promising to take care of whoever volunteers. Kendall throws Gerri to the wolves, but Logan shoots that down: “There is no one more loyal than Gerri.” Roman suggests Frank, and Frank deflects to Karl. When Gerri’s name comes up again, Roman leaps to her defense (a little forcefully), and then suggests Tom, since he’s head of cruises. Kendall piles on, citing his Congressional meltdown, and even Shiv says that “Tom looks logical.”

Kendall thinks Tom isn’t a big enough skull, though, and Roman recommends they spice his sacrifice up with “some Greg sprinkles.” (Greg: “I object.” Roman: “Who cares?”) Connor volunteers himself, in hopes of grabbing a golden parachute, but Logan walks away from the table, thinking they have “half an idea” and they’ll finish up later. He and Kendall take an emergency meeting with Stewy, offering to accept the hostile takeover on certain terms… but Stewy flatly says no. He shrugs off Kendall’s anger, thinking he and Sandy have the shareholders on their side. Meanwhile, Shiv and Tom share a private beachside picnic, and Tom fumes about how she threw him under the bus — and how she sprung an open marriage on him on their wedding night. (“I am not a hippie!”) He confesses he’s been “pretty unhappy” with her, and works up the nerve to talk to Shiv’s dad. Actually, though, he just sits down next to Logan and takes an awkward bite of his chicken before fleeing.

Shiv huddles with Logan, and he promises if Tom is the victim, “I’ll take care of him.” Then he drops a bombshell: “Ken works… it hurts.” But “it plays,” too, he thinks. He turns to his daughter and asks her what she thinks, noting that this is a job for a future CEO. Shiv hesitates, but then tells her dad: “Just not Tom… Please. For me.” Later, she calls in Kendall to see Logan… and Kendall sees the writing on the wall. Logan says Tom and Greg won’t work, and the shareholders won’t accept him stepping down himself. (Which is a lie, but anyway.) An ashen-faced Kendall assures him it’s OK, as Logan prepares him to confess: He knew everything about the cruise troubles, and will take the fall.

Kendall needs to know, though: “Did you ever think I could do it?” (Be the CEO of Waystar, he means.) Logan stammers and delays until he concludes: “You’re not a killer. You have to be a killer.” Kendall realizes he might deserve this after what happened with the caterer at Shiv’s wedding, but Logan brushes all that off: “It’s nothing.” Kendall kisses his dad on the cheek, and they head in to tell the rest. Roman protests, but shuts up quickly when Logan tells him he’ll be elevated to full COO. Kendall jets home to face the media in a press conference — in an echo of his TV interview in the Season 2 premiere — but when he sits down, he announces that his father is a “malignant presence, a bully and a liar” and knew about all the wrongdoing at Waystar. He even offers incriminating records with Logan’s signature on them — thanks, Greg! — and concludes of his father: “I think this is the day his reign ends.” Whoa. The Roy family war, though? It’s only just begun.

Alright, it’s your turn: Give tonight’s finale a grade in our poll below, and then hit the comments to share your thoughts.

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yacht used in succession tv show

Inside the Stylishly Satirical World of HBO’s “Succession”

Designing the dysfunctional dynasty.

By Cathy Whitlock

In our ongoing series Screening Room , we go behind the scenes with the uber-talented production designers and set decorators of today’s most visually alluring TV shows and movies for a deep dive on how they whipped up such indelible backdrops. This week we chat with the Emmy Award-winning and two-time Oscar-nominated set decorator George DeTitta Jr. about the understated uber luxe interiors he created for the billionaire Roy family in HBO’s  satirical drama Succession.

A well-televised takeover, attention-grabbing headlines, sibling backstabbing, and the FBI knocking at the door—it’s just another day in the life of the Roy family.

HBO’s highly addictive drama Succession is the story of the battle for wealth and power between family patriarch Logan Roy (Brian Cox) and his four scheming siblings as they seek the mantle of global media and entertainment empire Waystar Royco. Season Three finds the beleaguered scion Kendall (Jeremy Strong) staging a coup for the company while daughter Shiv (Sarah Cook) and brothers Roman (Kieran Culkin) and Connor (Alan Ruck) plot and form alliances. As the saying goes, let the games begin.

yacht used in succession tv show

The lives of the upper one percent (in this case, the upper 0.0001 percent) have long held a fascination as their flashy, opulent lifestyles are often the stuff of dreams and fantasy. While the Roys’ wealth and life inside the bubble is front and center, the sumptuous settings are a study in understated sophistication. Created by production designer Stephen Carter and set decorator George DeTitta Jr., this season’s playgrounds include sleek glass-lined offices in the sky, private jets and a yacht that double as executive boardrooms along with the requisite penthouses and luxury five-star plus hotels.

yacht used in succession tv show

Primarily set in Manhattan, the interiors reflect that Roy is from old European money. “From the very beginning, the Roys’ were a showy type of family,” says DeTitta, “and we never took the approach that their wealth was something you had to see, so we didn’t do glitzy. We just approached it the way these people tend to live.”

Carter and DeTitta began the process three years ago, doing a deep dive into the lives of billionaire families (that would be the Murdochs, Redstones, and Bronfmans), keeping the same aesthetic throughout. Designing the environs of the uber-rich can represent a challenge as the locations have to be top-notch (be it a boar-hunting lodge in Hungary or a house in the Hamptons), and the quality of antiques, workmanship and materials have to be first rate. Keeping an eye on the difference between decorating with old and new money is also an important consideration.

yacht used in succession tv show

“This season’s changes have the same approach, and we have added some different interiors including lavish iconic New York City hotels,” says the Emmy Award-winning and two-time Oscar-nominated set decorator. “We shot at the Lotte New York Palace, Pierre, and the Plaza during the pandemic when no one was there. It was the trifecta of New York hotels. The Palace was so beautiful and perfect the way it was; all we had to do was change a chair or two. We also dressed an entire room at the Plaza; it was the same room Truman Capote threw his famous black and white ball set in 1966. We brought every piece of furniture in for that scene,” he details.

yacht used in succession tv show

A mix of modern and old school traditional, the Waystar Royco corporate headquarters was built on location at World Trade Center 3. “We started with a raw space and once again put it back together (the previous seasons were at World Trade Center 7). We gave Shiv a nice space and figured at this point she is the so-called CEO so we made it comfortable with a feminine touch and different from the other offices,” he notes.  “We wanted to give Logan a sense of old money feel, so I added a great old desk and furniture with warm tones.”

yacht used in succession tv show

This season debuts the apartment of Kendall’s ex-wife Rava (Natalie Gold) and her children filmed on location at the historic Woolworth Building (once the tallest in Manhattan). “We took over the penthouse apartment, and since one of their models had not sold, we emptied it and used some of the existing furniture, brought in art, and went to town on that place,” he says. “We wanted it to feel homier with the kids and introduced their lives into the overall feel of the apartment. It became an ongoing process and turned out beautifully.” Kendall also gets new digs on the 90 th floor of a building in Hudson Yards filled with contemporary art and mid-century modern furniture. “We went a little starker on the interiors, keeping his character in mind.”

yacht used in succession tv show

Viewers will get a peek into the Hamptons compound of new character Josh Aaaronson (Adrien Brody), a minority stakeholder in Waystar. The house, where he takes Kendall and Roy for a long fact-finding walk, was chosen for its long stretch of beach, a rarity these days. Ready for its close-up, the house boasts a white sectional sofa, chrome and leather chairs, and the pièce de résistance, 22-foot-tall floor to ceiling windows with a jaw-dropping view of the ocean.

Design devotees will be happy to see the return of Logan’s magnificent Fifth Avenue penthouse with views of the Metropolitan Museum and Central Park (designed on a soundstage at Long Island City’s Silvercup East Studio). The monotone color palette of creams, golds, and beiges with thoughtfully placed portraits and elegant furnishings sourced from the likes of Newel Props (owned by Newel Antiques) and l st dibs remains simply stunning.

As Logan Roy muses, “My life is not for everyone.” This might be true, but perhaps a percentage of it would be interesting.

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How ‘Succession’ Built a ‘Killer’ Season Finale

“ Deep Dive ” is a in-depth podcast and video essay series with the stars, creators and crafts team behind an exceptional piece of filmmaking. For this edition, the IndieWire Crafts team partnered with HBO to take a closer look at the Season 2 finale, Episode 10 of “ Succession ” — “This Is Not for Tears” — with creator Jesse Armstrong , executive producer and director Mark Mylod, actors Brian Cox and Jeremy Strong , as well as seven members of the crafts team.

It was the season finale that had everyone talking, with an ending that was both shocking and, in retrospect, a completely logical conclusion for Logan (Brian Cox), Kendall (Jeremy Strong), and the rest of the Roy family. Now climb aboard their $150 million yacht to find out how such a perfect episode of television was made.

In the podcast below, the filmmakers, along with actors Brian Cox and Jeremy Strong, pull back the curtain on filming the iconic “You’re not a killer” scene as well as Logan’s final smirk. Editor Bill Henry reveals the ways he needed to pull back in the editing room, even losing parts of scenes, to ensure what happens at the press conference remained a surprise, but still stayed true to Kendall’s journey to betray his father. Composer Nicholas Britell shares the music he wrote to capture the demons that brought Kendall to this dramatic decision.

You can listen to the podcast above, or by subscribing via Apple Podcasts , Spotify , or Overcast .

What you learn in the podcast above is how an episode of “Succession” gets made: How Armstrong intentionally over-writes episodes that he, Mylod, and the editors will trim whole scenes from in the editing room, as the show is allowed to constantly hone TV’s sharpest blade cuts. What’s remarkable — and is reflected in the video essays below — is how this applies at all stages of creation. “Succession” is a tightly structured piece of storytelling that is kept fresh by creatives who are constantly able to improvise and react to what unfolds. Adds Armstrong, “[Our] craftspeople are doing things that you couldn’t verbalize because they do them with rhythm. And they’re [involved] with all the choices that are there to be made, and you’re in sync with them — it just means that my work is much easier.”

Succession Deep Dive - Episode 1

Capturing the Roys: Revealing Reactions

On “Succession,” scenes are shot by two to three camera operators who are given a tremendous amount of freedom and encouragement to follow their instincts. Listening and reacting to characters, they pan and reframe to capture what they instinctively feel is most interesting. “The camera reacts with the speed of a human being rather than somebody who knows what’s going to happen next,” Armstrong said. “And that lets the comedy and drama play in a way which I think subliminally makes you feel like you’re in the room.”

This means the camera operators will often move off the character who is speaking, putting as much significance on those reacting to the speaker. “It isn’t just, ‘OK, grab that line.’ It’s as much about finding what’s going on underneath the surface,” Mark Mylod, who directed the Season 2 finale, said. The real gold is when the operators capture a character reacting “when they don’t think they’re being watched by other characters, but the camera is catching that moment, [and] we as an audience are let into their unconscious in a way. It’s a window into their souls.”

With three cameras rolling, scenes around the dinner table offer a lot of windows into a number of different souls. “With the amount that we shoot, and the number of cameras, and the number of takes when we have the time, and the level of improvisation and the subtlety of the actors who we’re working with,” Armstrong said, “it is infinite how you could cut the scenes. So, when I think of that, it makes me want to throw up.”

How to bring all these revealing moments together is the job of “Succession” editors Ken Eluto and BIll Henry. In the video essay above, Henry takes you inside the important breakfast table aboard Logan’s yacht in the Season 2 finale and explains how the syncopated rhythms of a scene like that are akin to cutting a musical.

Deep Dive - Succession - Episode 2

The Gilded Cage: Crafting an Uncomfortable Luxury

It’s part of the DNA of “Succession” that viewers travel with the Roy family to places of extreme wealth and privilege. In a serialized narrative with virtually no standing sets, most new episodes take audiences somewhere new and extravagant, and the Season 2 finale is no exception as everyone climbs aboard Logan Roy’s $150 million yacht.

But how does the filmmaking team behind “Succession” avoid fetishizing the extreme wealth they’re satirizing? Just the act of peeling back the curtain on the extreme luxury we never get to see has a natural voyeuristic pleasure for the viewer.

In the video essay above, production designer Stephen Carter, executive producer and director Mark Mylod, cinematographer Patrick Capone, and series creator Jesse Armstrong analyze how a subtle use of filmmaking craft directs the viewer to focus on the discomfort the Roy family feels inside its gilded cages.

“We want to make sure that the audience, rather than being sort of seduced by the wealth porn side of things, really feels the neglect or the unimportance to them of all this expensive paraphernalia,” Carter said.

Deep Dive - Succession Ep03

Not a Killer: Getting Into Kendall’s Head

There’s a darkness that hangs over Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong) in Season 2 of “Succession.” Ever since the car crashed into the lake at the end of Season 1 — resulting in the death of the waiter and the subsequent cover-up of that death by Logan — Kendall has been mentally and spiritually tortured. In the video essay above, we go inside how Mylod and composer Nicholas Britell bring the viewer inside that torment by connecting it to the moment that caused it.

“Whenever we put the character in water, we make him vulnerable,” Mylod said. “We metaphorically crucify him, in the water.”

Composer Nicholas Britell describes the music he wrote for the Season 1 finale’s car crash as Kendall’s “true moment of darkness.” And it’s that music, “Kendall’s Return,” that the composer and editor Bill Henry bring back at key moments of Season 2 where that darkness, and the memory of the young man’s death, weighs particularly heavy on Kendall.

In fact, it’s that music that accompanies Kendall as he enters Logan’s state room for the famous “You have to be a killer” scene during the Season 2 finale. In the second part of this essay, we go behind the shooting of that scene with Mylod, Strong, Henry, and cinematographer Patrick Capone.

VIEW ALL DEEP DIVE COVERAGE

BARBIE, from left: Ryan Gosling, Margot Robbie, 2023. ph: Jaap Buitendijk / © Warner Bos. / Courtesy Everett Collection

What happened in the 'Succession' season 2 finale?

Let's recap all the drama from the 'Succession' season 2 finale before you start those new episodes

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Brian Cox, Jeremy Strong in Succession season 2 episode 9, Succession season 2 finale

Our favorite dysfunctional billionaires are back! Succession season 3 kicked off on October 17, but before you click play on those fresh-from-the-oven episodes, let's catch up with the Roys and everything that happened in that drama-filled Succession season 2 finale, which aired a whopping two years ago due to COVID-related delays. 

Could you believe what Kendall did during that press conference? Or how bumbling Cousin Greg has turned into a veritable power player? What do you think is going to happen with Tom and Shiv's marriage? 

From the core Roys to the schemers that encircle them, here's a complete refresher on how did season 2 of Succession end, just in time for new episodes to hit HBO Max .

*Warning: It goes without saying but there are major spoilers ahead, people!*

  • Is Succession on Netflix ? How to watch the hit series
  • How many seasons of Succession will there be? Inside season four and beyond
  • Succession filming locations : Enter the world of Waystar Royco
  • What is Succession based on ? Behind the show's real-life inspiration
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'Succession' season 2 finale: What went down?

Season two of Succession simultaneously dealt both with the rise of Logan Roy's successor—would it be Kendall, Siobhan, Roman or, LOL, Connor?—and with the potential downfall of the media empire that he ruthlessly built over the years, as rumor has it that the company's cruise ship division has been acting as a major cover-up for serious crimes, including murder and sexual assault. 

The Succession season 2 finale, entitled "This is Not for Tears," finds the Roy family and its Waystar Royco cohorts on a—what else?—luxury yacht strategizing which member of the clan would be offered up as a "blood sacrifice" to take the fall for the cruise scandal ahead of the shareholders' meeting. 

Would it be Logan himself, like the investors suggest? Unlikely. How about Tom, Shiv's husband and the head of Waystar Royco’s amusement park and cruise division, with "some Greg sprinkles"? Maybe Roman, who's "widely known as a terrible person"?

In the end, they decide on middle son Kendall Roy, who had already spent the better part of season two acting as his dad's punching bag. According to the plan, Kendall would take the blame for the cruise division crisis and announce his resignation from Waystar Royco during a news conference. Instead, Kendall pulls a total 180 and publicly betrays his father, revealing to the press that he has hard evidence—remember those damning documents that Cousin Greg filched before Tom could destroy them?—that Logan not only knew about the criminal cruise cover-ups, but he personally signed off on them. 

"The truth is that my father is a malignant presence, a bully and a liar...this is the day his reign ends," Kendall tells the press, ripping up the pre-approved statement Logan wanted him to read, as the rest of the Roy dynasty watches the televised report in shock. The final shot of Succession season 2? A close-up of Logan Roy with a hint of a Mona Lisa smile on his face, whether out of being stunned or impressed, we don't know.

Backstabbing, boardroom drama, big-ass boats—what more could you want from a Succession finale? You'll have to watch season three to find out how that epic cliffhanger plays out.

Succession airs Sunday nights at 9pm ET/PT on HBO and HBO Max in the US, and on Monday nights at 9pm on Sky Atlantic in the UK.

Christina Izzo is the Deputy Editor of My Imperfect Life. 

More generally, she is a writer-editor covering food and drink, travel, lifestyle and culture in New York City. She was previously the Features Editor at Rachael Ray In Season and Reveal , as well as the Food & Drink Editor and chief restaurant critic at Time Out New York . 

When she’s not doing all that, she can probably be found eating cheese somewhere. 

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Behind the scenes of HBO hit 'Succession': How set designer Stephen H. Carter used a $145 million Hamptons mansion and a yacht in Croatia to bring the billionaire characters' lifestyle to the screen

  • HBO's hit show "Succession" follows the billionaire Roy family through an internal battle for power over their aging father's media conglomerate.
  • From castles to glistening yachts, viewers are treated to sweeping sets befitting this billionaire lifestyle.
  • Business Insider caught up with Stephen H. Carter, the show's production designer, to find out how he put the show's look together.
  • Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories .

Insider Today

Season one of HBO hit show Succession chronicled the billionaire Roy family's internal battle for power over their aging father's media conglomerate, Waystar Royco. While the season took viewers through multiple grandiose sets, the Roys' world centered on Logan's apartment on NYC's so-called Millionaires Row.

The pilot pulled together several locations for the home, including the Harold Pratt House and the Irish-American Historical Society in NYC. After that, production designer Stephen H. Carter built a permanent replica on set.

Carter made subtle tweaks, though, like improving the floor plan so camerawork was easier. He also nixed some of the pricier details, like the library — only briefly glimpsed in episode one, it was easy to elide.

As the show's cachet snowballed via multiple Emmy nominations, "Succession's" budgets expanded. So, too, did its onscreen horizons — and Carter was tasked with sending the Roys and their acolytes out into the world.

The most valuable material on this set was foam

In season two, episode three, "Hunting," several members of the Roy family and the company's executives embark on a  hunting trip in Hungary.

The scene, though, was shot much closer to HBO's New York City headquarters — out on Long Island, at Oheka Castle , one of America's biggest private homes. Built by Robber Baron-era investment banker Otto Kahn, it incorporates a strange safeguard: After a previous mansion burned to the ground, Kahn insisted it be made of concrete to ensure it was fireproof.

That chilly brutalism is unlike any other property on the East End, but redolent of Eastern European estates. It also posed an intriguing problem for Carter.

"You're not allowed to hammer nails into the walls to hang art — in some rooms, you can't add as much as a thumb tack, so we had to create an artificial paneling system where we could attach all the art and taxidermy," Carter told Business Insider. Those stuffed animals' heads viewers get a glimpse of  — including the five-foot antler racks — were actually handcrafted from foam to make them light enough not to drag. 

Logan Roy's inner child? Think Austin Powers.

Another new location for season two: the so-called Summer Palace, Logan's weekend retreat.

It's another 20,000-square-foot mega mansion, most recently listed for sale at $145 million in 2019, but this one wasn't built in the Gilded Age. Instead, it was constructed in 1960 for Henry Ford II, grandson of the car magnate. Carter kitted it out with a shagadelic lushness.

"I figured when Royco would have been consolidated with Waystar, that's when Logan would feel like he had made it, and that would have been the late 60s and early 70s. Until then, he would have been maneuvering, a young man going to parties, trying to figure out who his first wife would be. That's the point that things are most indelible on you," he explained of how Logan's taste was shaped. "So we made the décor here trying to be sort of classy, I guess, but within what would have been considered modern and practical in the late 1960s."

Boats and planes were the big addition to season two

After a yacht was nixed from season one's sets, Carter said he was thrilled to find both a plane and a boat on the call sheet for season two.

It was no G5 for Logan Roy, though, but a customized 737 that was recreated on a soundstage. The dividers between the cabins were a deliberate move on Carter's part to maximize the characters' opportunities for eavesdropping on each other.

As part of his research, he also toured the workshops of a firm that specializes in jet interiors. Carter was staggered to see one hallway filled with bolts of fabric, including one that resembled mylar — but was actually woven gold alloy.

"The bolts weren't for new projects, but leftovers," he said. "The company kept getting calls to come in and relay carpets or reupholster seats after someone spilled red wine."

Scouting locations on the high seas

The team wanted to hire a boat that it could set-dress for the show. Unfortunately, per Carter, that posed a challenge specific to the superyacht world.

"We spent a lot of time looking at boats, but when we'd see one with a great look, we would keep finding out it was owned by someone whose money was covered in blood — so we couldn't do business with them for ethical reasons," Carter said.

Eventually, in Cannes, they found one that checked both ethical and aesthetic boxes — at least on the outside. The interior, though, was distractingly glitzy.

Carter shipped some unlikely items, like huge pieces of heavy Japanese paper, to Dubrovnik, Croatia, where they would be shooting. He used them to hide the walls of the entry passage, which were translucent, backlit purple stone.

"A little disco bling to me," he laughed of the yacht's original look. "That certainly wasn't very Marcia and Logan." Groovy, baby.

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yacht used in succession tv show

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Where was ‘Succession’ filmed?

Succession season 2

With the announcement that it will be the last, the prospect of Succession’s season four becomes even more intriguing. Over just 10 more episodes, that tantalising prospect in the show’s title must finally be resolved: who will triumph in this titanic family struggle and take on leadership of Waystar Royco?

Giving us a magnificent array of irredeemably awful characters, immaculately written and beautifully played, Jesse Armstrong’s show has been one of television’s greatest pleasures, and it’s also offered some of the best money-no-object locations from around the world. While we prepare for this Battle Roy-ale, here’s a tour of the highlights from seasons one to three and a taste of what’s coming in season four. As always with Succession, expect the views to be beautiful and the behaviour to be very ugly indeed.

Atlantic Ocean Road Norway

Season four

As the Roys regather after their Italian showdown at the end of season three, we find them back in New York. We see all four gather at Peter McManus Café, an Irish bar on Seventh Avenue that claims it’s the oldest in the city, before heading out for karaoke. They also dine at Jean-Georges in Trump Tower, while Tom visits the Mark Hotel on 77th Street.

The production also enjoys a stint on the West Coast, where the star location is a spectacular property in the Pacific Palisades in Santa Monica. A mansion on San Onofre Drive, just at the edge of the mountains and the State Park, takes in six bedrooms, including a master with a roof that opens to the stars, indoor and outdoor ‘Zen gardens’, a rooftop deck with pool and a 20-seat cinema. Built by property developer Ardie Tavangarian, it’s available to let – though be warned; it was estimated to be the second most expensive house in California in 2021.

The big news for season four is a trip to  Norway , home to Lukas Matsson. The tech mogul gives the Roys a tour of his part of the country, including several locations on the west coast. As producer Scott Ferguson told Variety, the opportunity was too good to turn down: “Norway is a glorious, natural setting. It immediately seemed like a perfect place for a family gathering in the series. We studied different countries, but we realised Norway just has this exceptional landscape – like nowhere else in the world.”

The locations here include some familiar: the extraordinary islet-hopping Atlantic Ocean Road, featured in Bond outing  No Time To Die  as the ultimate car-chase challenge, and the Juvet Landscape Hotel. This eco-resort outside the village of Valldal was seen in the sci-fi movie  Ex Machina , and is made up of nine timber pods with floor-to-ceiling windows, along with a spa and converted barn dining room – the perfect home for a tech billionaire in 2023, in other words.

There’s also a reunion afoot, with Roys meeting key Royco staff at the summit of Nesaksla mountain close to the town of Andalsnes. We see the Eggen Restaurant here, with its 360-degree views of the Romsdalshorn and Vengetindene mountains and the Rauma River, as well as the Romsdalen Gondola, a cable car that transports them the 708 metres from ground level. Filming also took place further south on Kjeragbolten, a mountain to the east of Stavanger famed for waterfalls and a suspended stone, where we find some rather energetic activities going on amid the negotiations and ever-present backstabbing.

Season Four of ‘Succession’ can be seen from Monday 27 March 2023 on Sky Atlantic and NOWTV.

Villa Cetinale in Tuscany

Season three

After the explosive drawing of battle lines that ends season two, we find Kendall holed up in the apartment of his ex-wife Rava in New York . This expansive home is played by the five-bedroom Pavilion A of the famed Woolworth Building, at 2 Park Place in Tribeca. Opened in 1912, the neo-gothic early skyscraper was once the tallest building in the world, and remains one of the most expensive. Kendall also has a new home of his own, revealed in episode three, filmed on the 90th floor at 35 Hudson Yards, part of the newly redeveloped neighbourhood in Chelsea that also featured in series The Flight Attendant . We’re back here in episode seven for Kendall’s 40th birthday in episode seven, filmed in the development’s arts venue The Shed after it was given a makeover that includes a treehouse and an abstract expression of his mother’s birthing canal.

While Kendall is in New York, Logan retreats to Sarajevo, where he bunkers down in the Hotel Clio. This was in fact filmed in Ellenville, a town in upstate New York, at the Honor’s Haven Retreat & Conference. Similar trickery is employed for Episode six’s visit to Richmond, Virginia and the Future Freedom Summit, where the Roys meet a pair of presidential hopefuls. For the location of the summit, the production filmed the exterior of the Jefferson Hotel in Richmond but shot the interiors back in New York, at The Plaza on Fifth Avenue. This venerable hotel provided its Palm Court, Terrace Room and Grand Ballroom, previously seen in various combinations in classics such as  Funny Girl ,  North by Northwest ,  Arthur  and  Sleepless in Seattle .

Another of the city’s great hotels, the New York Marriott Marquis on Broadway, is the venue for episode five’s Waystar RoyCo shareholder meeting, while also featured in the season are The Pierre, A Taj Hotel, New York on East 61st Street, the Sheraton New York Times Square Hotel on West 53rd, and the Mandarin Oriental on Columbus Circle. Another notable New York location is the Cooper Union Foundation Building in NoHo, a brownstone from the 1850s housing a private college whose Great Hall is an established venue for speeches and art shows. It’s here that we see Cousin Greg meeting his grandfather Ewan in episode two.

After season two’s unforgettable ‘boars on the floor’ sequence, there’s also a return to the Hamptons. This time, it’s Logan and Roman alone, travelling separately in episode four to the island mansion of shareholder Josh Aaronson (Adrien Brody). His glass-walled waterfront property is in fact a private home in Wainscott, carefully shot to hide the neighbouring houses, while the surrounding area was filmed in nearby Montauk and the beaches of Shadmoor State Park and Kirk Park.

For the finale, season three goes one better than season two’s yacht trip with a Roy outing to Tuscany . British showrunner Armstrong admitted to Vulture that this was something of an in-joke for his countrymen: “I don’t know how much of a social signifier it is to Americans – anybody who can go abroad is really rich,” he said, "but [Tuscany] has this particular flavour for the English upper class. Some call it Chiantishire, in a slightly sickening way."

However the region resonates, the shoot provides some spectacular views, filmed by the same Italian crew who worked on the House of Gucci . In the starring role is Villa Cetinale in the small town of Sovicille, a 17th-century building with 13 bedrooms, a private chapel and extensive gardens, which became the wedding venue. The Roys, meanwhile, are in residence at Villa La Foce near the spa town of Chianciano Terme, with Kendall at the five-bedroom (plus, as we see, a pool) Villa Bonriposi in Legoli. We also see Shiv and Tom touring the bathing pool in the spa village of Bagno Vignoni, a full complement of Roy siblings dining with their mother at La Terrazza Del Chiostro in Pienza, and Shiv at her mother’s bachelorette party in the medieval town of Cortona.

Rivalling even Tuscany for beauty is another Italian location: the holiday home of GoJo’s Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgard), which Roman visits on a whistlestop diversion in episode eight. Though we’re led to believe this is overlooking Lake Maggiore, it is in fact Villa La Casssinella on Lake Como . With a main villa, pool house with cinema and gym, formal gardens and an astonishing view, it’s only right that Matsson declares himself bored of it.

The shows second season rings some changes with a greater number of locations used especially outside New York. Before...

The show’s second season rings some changes, with a greater number of locations used, especially outside New York . Before then, though, we’re introduced to a new home in Manhattan for Shiv and Tom, filmed in an unspecified penthouse overlooking Brooklyn Bridge, and we see Kendall in Del Posto on 10th Avenue, the most lavish of NYC’s Italian restaurants.

In episode two, the family celebrate a child’s birthday at one of the company’s adventure parks, Brightstar – in fact, Six Flags Great Escape in Queensbury, upstate New York, the same location where in Season One we see Cousin Greg vomiting into his chicken costume. In episode six, we’re nearby at Whiteface Lodge, Lake Placid, a palatial timber resort in the Adirondacks that serves as the setting for the Argestes media conference.

Before that, episode one gives us a move reminiscent of season one’s family trip to the New Mexico ranch of eldest brother Connor, when we’re taken to a summit in Logan’s new house in the Hamptons , where a highly symbolic raccoon is causing a stink in the chimney. This is really the Henry Ford Estate at Jule Pond, in Mecox Bay, Southampton, built by Henry Ford II in 1960 and, with 42 acres and the largest ocean frontage in the region, recently valued at $175 million. Later, in episode five, the Roys visit business rivals the Pierces at another mansion, filmed at Salutation Manor in Glen Cove, on the north shore of Long Island. Situated on its own 48-acre island, this was built by a grandson of financier JP Morgan in 1919 and, with its long gallery corridors and formal drawing rooms, very much looks like it.

One of the season’s most gruelling scenes comes in episode three at the company retreat in Hungary, after a day shooting, drinking and plotting. Despite the ambience of old European royal residence, this was in fact shot close to Salutation Manor, at Oheka Castle in Huntington. Built (and named after) financier Otto Hermann Kahn in the 1910s, it’s a 127-roomed fairytale castle in the French style, down to the perfectly symmetrical sunken garden, used in photographic form as Kane’s Xanadu in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane and now a hotel.

There’s also a return to the UK, this time to Logan’s hometown of Dundee, where he’s honoured at the new space-age riverside V&A Museum, and also Glasgow , where filming took place around George Square, and also doubled for scenes set in London . While there, the production took the opportunity to fly to Iceland for the season’s opening shots of Kendall in a rehab centre. According to producer/director Mark Mylod, this had originally been set at the Blue Lagoon spa close to Reykjavik but was hurriedly relocated after contractual difficulties. “With about a week to go, we were locationless, which was a little bit scary,” he told Filmmaker Magazine . “I’d been a big fan of  Black Mirror  and remembered a house I’d seen on an episode [season four’s Crocodile ], which I knew was in Iceland. It happened to be available, and we jumped all over that. It was a fantastically stark location.”

In sharp contrast, the season ends with the Roys amid blue skies and seas in the Aegean Sea and Croatia . This was filmed on the island of Korcula , both on the 279-foot charter yacht Solandge and in the Old Town, taking in the 15th-century St Mark’s Cathedral and shoreside restaurant Cupido.

The base for both the show and the Roy family at its centre is New York City. At its heart are two locations patriarch...

The base for both the show and the Roy family at its centre is New York City . At its heart are two locations, patriarch Logan’s house on Fifth Avenue and the head office of his Waystar Royco empire. The home, a high-ceilinged Billionaire’s Row townhouse straight out of the Gilded Age, is created mostly in a studio. When we see the lobby, though, it’s really the entrance to the American Irish Historical Society, which is indeed on Fifth Avenue, overlooking the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Central Park. The offices, meanwhile, are recreated in two empty areas in the World Trade Center, in blocks 4 and 7, giving the authentic top-of-the-world views over Midtown Manhattan.

Season one also shows us a variety of other NYC spots, from the company gala held in the Cunard Building on Broadway in episode four to the East New York Freight Tunnel, a graffiti-heavy section of unused railroad track that provides the entrance to the elite event visited for the bachelor party of Tom (Matthew Macfadyen) in episode eight. We also see the Downtown Manhattan Heliport at Pier 6, where the family choppers out in the first episode for a high-stakes game of rounders starring rogue son Roman (Kieran Culkin), and the Bellevue Hospital, the revered institution on First Avenue where Logan is taken when he suffers a stroke.

For the final two episodes, the show moves to the UK for Shiv’s wedding. This takes place at the home of her English mother, Lady Caroline (Harriet Walter), filmed at Eastnor Castle in Herefordshire , a fantastical faux-medieval construction from the 19th century that has featured on film and TV for 50 years, including the BBC’s children’s classic  The Box of Delights  and Madonna’s reviled biopic of Wallace Simpson,  W.E.  (2012).

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On “Succession,” Everything Is Up in the Air

yacht used in succession tv show

The trailer for this week’s episode of “ Succession ” promised another set-piece Roy wedding—this time that of Connor Roy, the eldest and oftenest-overlooked of Logan Roy’s four children, and his ever-blonder, ever more couture-clad bride-to-be, Willa. The setting: a yacht in New York Harbor decked with red-white-and-blue bunting, providing free media hoopla for Connor’s Presidential campaign, a one-per-cent bid in every sense of the term. The tricky confluence of timing: the shaky culmination of Logan’s deal with GoJo’s Lukas Matsson, which—thanks to the three younger Roy children seeking to squeeze more money out of the deal—Logan is now obliged to fly to Stockholm to secure. “Today’s the day,” Logan says in the trailer, as he boards the plane with Tom Wambsgans, his son-in-law and lieutenant of the moment. “Strategic refocus. Clean out the stalls. A bit more aggressive.”

Actually, that would be “a bit more fucking aggressive”—the opening moments of the episode, which broadcast on Sunday night, revealed that the line had been cleaned up for the promo. And those would be Logan’s final words—at least the last ones that viewers of “Succession” will hear him deliver. Fifteen-odd minutes into the episode, after the Roy offspring have gathered aboard the wedding boat, Tom calls the siblings: their father has been taken ill in the bathroom of the P.J. “It’s very, very bad,” Tom says. Logan is dying—or quite possibly has already died, but, without a medical professional present, who can say for sure?—at thirty thousand feet above the Eastern Seaboard.

When Jesse Armstrong, the show’s creator, admitted earlier this year that this season would be “Succession” ’s last, he reminded those who might want the show to unspool forever that “there’s a promise in the title”—somewhere along the line, in one way or another, Logan Roy was always going to surrender control of the company. The previous seasons showed Logan dangling the prize in front of each of his three younger children successively—Connor, of course, never got a look-in—before deciding to sell to Matsson, his heir of choice. Last week’s episode suggested that, rather than retiring to the golf course or some equivalent anteroom of mortality, Logan might build himself another empire within the newsroom of ATN. (“You’re fucking pirates!” Logan roared at his staff in the episode, all Henry V on St. Crispin’s Day.) Instead, mortality has made itself felt at the most inconvenient of moments. The deal with Matsson, like Logan’s plane, is up in the air; and the Roy siblings, as Connor’s love boat casts off from its East River pier, are literally unmoored.

Speaking on Friday, two days before the show’s airing, Armstrong acknowledged that, with seven episodes still to come, the timing of Logan’s death would likely be a shock to the audience. “I want the show to be organic and connected to reality,” he told me. “The business stuff that plays out across all the seasons is reflective of the real world—people who work in media and finance would recognize it as the shape of things that are happening, and a lot of the show is the playing out of the personal and bureaucratic dynamics within those structures. But that’s not all of life. Also, we get hit by unexpected events. So how do you make the authorial decision to make a thing happen?” He went on, “We once had a therapist jump into a swimming pool and break his teeth—that’s an unusual thing to happen that didn’t have to happen. And, on the bigger end, sometimes people die, and it’s a bit of a decision when that happens.”

Logan’s death does come as a surprise, as death so often does. But it’s also been intimated from the very first episode of the series, when, not long after his eightieth birthday, Logan experiences a brain hemorrhage while negotiating with his kids during a helicopter journey. There have been subsequent health scares: the funny turn he experienced while hiking around Josh Aaronson’s private island in the fourth episode of Season 3, followed, in the next episode , by a U.T.I.-induced bout of psychosis. The frailer Logan gets, the more fiercely he growls. Even the green juice supplied in a previous episode by Kerry, Logan’s “friend, assistant, and adviser,” is not enough to delay the boss’s scheduled appointment with the ultimate regulator in—as it were—the sky.

The heart of “Connor’s Wedding,” as the episode is titled, is a protracted phone call from airplane to yacht lounge. During the call, the Roy siblings learn, first, that their father has been stricken, then grow cognizant that he has been struck down. The scene ran for twenty or thirty pages, Armstrong explained, and the cast and crew filmed it at least once in a single take. “I was keen on doing it by phone call, because that’s so often how we get news, and people can be a bit adrift if you are in a different physical space from the drama of whatever is unfolding,” he said. The device allows Armstrong and his director, Mark Mylod, to dramatize the uncertainty: the viewer, like the Roy siblings, is kept at a distance from the crisis. Mylod refrains from depicting Logan’s final moments explicitly, and Armstrong’s script amplifies the way in which the experience of an intimate’s death is both utterly ordinary and entirely surreal: “The plane people are lovely, they’re good people. I think he’s—I think they’ve made him very comfortable” is how Tom characterizes the already expired Logan to his children. Each of the three younger Roys gets a harrowing moment with the phone held up to their insentient father’s ear—an opportunity to speak their own final words to the man who is undertaking this transatlantic journey only because the three of them have essentially forced him to do it. The possibility that one sibling or another will push their father to a physical breaking point has been an oft-repeated theme in the show. Finally, they’ve all done it, together.

Killing Logan off in Episode 3 came at one substantial cost: the loss of Brian Cox as a central character for the remainder of the series. “That was my one regret about doing it, the slightly personal feeling of him not being there all through the journey,” Armstrong said. “Though, as you’ll see in later episodes, his presence is sort of felt throughout the season.” But, Armstrong explained, the death had to come now in order to make it feel organic. “Part of making it embedded in the show was not putting it at Episode 9, because then we’re creating a narrative whereby death is somehow the thing that happens as the bitter cherry on the cake of the show, and I think that wouldn’t be quite right, because that’s not how the shape of life is,” he said.

One of Armstrong’s guiding observations while creating “Succession” has been to note how quickly individuals adapt even to dramatically changed circumstances. (The table read for the pilot was held on the day of the Presidential election in 2016, followed in the evening by what was expected to be a celebratory gathering. The election result was, Armstrong told me for a Profile , in 2021, “such a shock—then five, ten minutes later, everyone’s living in a new reality . . . quite oriented towards how it affects them, and what they will do next.”) The children’s individual, immediate reactions to the reality of their father’s death are distinct and unpredictable, as children’s reactions to a parent’s death so often are. Shiv’s tough carapace dissolves at first: she whimpers with pain as she registers that her brothers failed to get her to the phone fast enough. But when she is asked, after Logan’s plane lands at Teterboro Airport, whether she wants to see the body, she declines. “He’s not going to get angry if we don’t,” she says, her face a mask of anguish. Roman, too, reverts to childishness, sitting on the floor of the yacht’s lounge rather than taking an armchair. Before he, alone of the siblings, goes to see Logan’s body on the jet, he removes the jacket, which, in the course of the show’s several seasons, he has started to wear as the costume of adulthood. By the time he descends the plane’s staircase, following the E.M.T.s who bear the lumpish, blanket-swaddled form of his father’s corpse strapped to a gurney, Roman has lost the jacket entirely, and is back in his vulnerable shirtsleeves.

Connor, whose wedding has been royally fucked, blurts out his own painful truth: “Oh, man, he never even liked me.” Then he goes ahead with his vows to the woman who is honest enough to admit when pushed that, yes, “there is something about money and safety” as her reason for marrying him. Meanwhile, Kendall—who is better acquainted with death than any of his siblings, having caused the drowning of a waiter at the end of the first season, and by nearly drowning himself toward the end of the third—shows an instinct for self-interest that is, in the end, as Logan-like as anything he has ever done. “What we do today will always be what we did the day our father died,” Kendall tells Shiv and Roman. “So let’s grieve and whatever, but not do anything that restricts our future freedom of movement.” A bit more fucking aggressive indeed. ♦

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yacht used in succession tv show

Now you can rent the stunning superyacht that featured in hit HBO TV drama Succession - but you'll need a spare £850K floating around to hire it for a week

  • The German-built Solandge is 280ft long and considered to be one of the finest motorboats in the world 
  • It features a panoramic top deck that consists of a beach club area with a dance floor, DJ station and bar
  • The superyacht sleeps 12 guests in eight stunning staterooms and has a large owner's deck and suite 

By Jennifer Newton for MailOnline

Published: 12:36 EDT, 24 October 2019 | Updated: 10:18 EDT, 13 December 2019

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You can now step onboard the stunning superyacht that featured in the hit TV drama Succession - but you'll need deep pockets to do so.

That's because it costs up to $1.1million (£850,000) to rent it for a week.

The vessel, called the Solandge, is considered one of the finest motorboats in the world and provided the setting for the dramatic season two finale of the HBO show.

The pool onboard the Solandge, the stunning superyacht that featured in the hit TV drama Succession

The pool onboard the Solandge, the stunning superyacht that featured in the hit TV drama Succession

This is the 280ft boat's impressive panoramic top deck, which has a beach club area with a hot tub

This is the 280ft boat's impressive panoramic top deck, which has a beach club area with a hot tub 

The interior boasts a movie theatre, pictured, as well as a large main salon with a bar, a games room and seating areas

The interior boasts a movie theatre, pictured, as well as a large main salon with a bar, a games room and seating areas

The Solandge, pictured, is considered one of the finest motorboats in the world

The Solandge, pictured, is considered one of the finest motorboats in the world

The 280ft boat features a panoramic top deck that consists of a beach club area with a customised dance floor, DJ station, hot tub and bar.

The bridge deck is ideal for relaxation and casual dining as it has a spacious seating area.

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There is also a fully-equipped health spa - featuring a massage room, gym and sauna - which leads out onto a glass-edged pool.

The interior also boasts a movie theatre, a large main salon with bar, a games room and seating areas.

One of the living areas on the Solandge, which was the result of a collaboration between Rodriguez Interiors and Dolker & Voges

One of the living areas on the Solandge, which was the result of a collaboration between Rodriguez Interiors and Dolker & Voges

The German-built boat is so large that it comes with an enormous crew of 29, who sleep in 15 cabins

The German-built boat is so large that it comes with an enormous crew of 29, who sleep in 15 cabins

The interior of the ultra-luxurious yacht exudes elegance with wooden floors that have borders of honey, onyx and stone

The interior of the ultra-luxurious yacht exudes elegance with wooden floors that have borders of honey, onyx and stone

The yacht was chartered by Moran Yacht and Ship, which said the Solandge is 'the perfect combination of performance and luxury'

The yacht was chartered by Moran Yacht and Ship, which said the Solandge is 'the perfect combination of performance and luxury'

When guests first board the ship, they are greeted by the breathtaking main saloon, pictured

When guests first board the ship, they are greeted by the breathtaking main saloon, pictured 

The Solandge sleeps 12 guests in eight stunning staterooms and has a large owner's deck and suite.

Guest rooms include a VIP suite, which can be converted into two spacious cabins, and a further two doubles and two twin cabins.

The German-built boat is so large that it comes with an enormous crew of 29 who sleep in 15 cabins.

When guests first board the ship, they are greeted by the breathtaking main saloon, which boasts two magnificent walls of back-lit amethyst.

The Solandge sleeps 12 guests in eight stunning staterooms and has a large owner's deck and suite

The Solandge sleeps 12 guests in eight stunning staterooms and has a large owner's deck and suite

The stunning gold-leaf ceilings are lit by Schonbeck chandeliers that drip with amethyst and rose quartz

The stunning gold-leaf ceilings are lit by Schonbeck chandeliers that drip with amethyst and rose quartz

Guest rooms include a VIP suite that can be converted into two spacious cabins and a further two doubles and two twin cabins

Guest rooms include a VIP suite that can be converted into two spacious cabins and a further two doubles and two twin cabins

One of the luxurious bathrooms onboard the Solandge. The interior has 50 different marble and granite surfaces along with 30 alternative kinds of wood throughout

One of the luxurious bathrooms onboard the Solandge. The interior has 50 different marble and granite surfaces along with 30 alternative kinds of wood throughout

There is a fully-equipped health spa featuring a massage room, gym and sauna, pictured

There is a fully-equipped health spa featuring a massage room, gym and sauna, pictured 

The interior of the ultra-luxurious yacht exudes elegance with wooden floors that have borders of honey, onyx and stone.

The stunning gold-leaf ceilings are lit by Schonbeck chandeliers that are dripping with amethyst and rose quartz crystals.

The Solandge was a collaboration between Rodriguez Interiors and Dolker & Voges, which used 50 different marble and granite surfaces along with 30 alternative kinds of wood throughout. 

A scene from the season two finale of Succession, which used the Solandge as a filming location

 A scene from the season two finale of Succession, which used the Solandge as a filming location 

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Share or comment on this article: You can rent the stunning superyacht that featured in hit HBO TV drama Succession for £850,000

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Succession illustration

‘Rich People Don’t Use Napkin Rings’: How ‘Succession,’ ‘Billions’ and Other Helipad Dramas Get the Details Just Right

The zeitgeist’s favorite shows about billionaires behaving badly live and die by the details, from watches to wine to yacht design., by jay cheshes.

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This net-zero modern farmhouse in new york’s hudson valley can be yours for $9.8 million, forget butlers. private security is now the ultimate service for the ultra-wealthy., why wealthy people are leaving their fortune to their pets.

In other words, if the fictional lives portrayed on Succession and its growing list of imitators feel awfully familiar, it might be because while you’ve been watching the shows, they’ve been watching you . 

Extreme wealth, more often skewered than celebrated, dominates the chatter about television these days, from masters of the hedge-fund universe sparring with federal prosecutors on Billions to the familial power plays on Succession to the vacation foibles of the merely rich on The White Lotus . And the popularity of these shows—a subgenre that we’ve termed Helipad Drama—among the demographic they feature is linked directly to how well the art imitates life. 

Succession’s Kendall Roy leaving jet

To create an authentic visual universe for Succession ’s media mogul Logan Roy, played by Brian Cox, and his fictional brood to inhabit, production designer Stephen Carter pored over publications catering to wealthy readers, including this one. He learned about the Murdochs and the Bronfmans and other dynasties, about their homes and cars and yachts, as well as the corporate boardrooms they occupied. “I don’t run with the billionaire set myself, so there was a lot of education,” he says. 

Notice: It’s not just any wine Cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun) swills during season three of Succession , but a cult bottle of Pingus from Spain’s Ribera del Duero region—a magnum from 1998, no less, all but impossible to find. And it’s not just any old villa where Aubrey Plaza’s Harper and her frenemy Daphne (Meghann Fahy) ditch their spouses for a night in the second season of The White Lotus, but the 16th-century home of a Sicilian count. 

With these shows’ binge-ability and viral moments, each visual choice is under a microscope, scrutinized online in single-frame screengrabs, from running tallies of every Aston Martin, Bentley and Ferrari driven by Damian Lewis’s Bobby Axelrod on Billions to the many watches worn—and occasionally discarded—on Succession . 

A bottle of Pingus wine

“Our props team and wardrobe team and my team are always trying to get the details right,” says Carter. “But we also try to keep it fairly subtle, so nothing feels like a big product-placement advertisement. It’s a delicate balance between fetishizing the products and the wealth they suggest and just sort of having it correct.” 

The bling is a bit more overt on Billions, to convey just how far Axelrod has come from his humble working-class roots. “It was really about trying to sell the amount of privilege people with extreme wealth have and the access and power that comes with that,” says Michael Shaw , production designer on the show’s first two seasons. “A lot of rich people can buy really nice wine, but not everybody can buy a football team.” Which explains why Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, makes a cameo in the second season as Axelrod considers buying his own pro franchise. 

The particulars get harder to nail—and those outside consultants become more essential—when a production hits the road. “If you do take characters we’re familiar with and put them somewhere unfamiliar, you better be sure that new environment, the rules of that world, are still going to work,” says Mylod. “It felt risky to us as soon as we left New York for the first time.” 

The White Lotus, Harper and Daphne leave their main vacation to rent the home of an Italian count.

When the series moved to Italy for two episodes in the third season, shooting just as pandemic travel restrictions began easing in 2021, the producers turned to British travel and event planner Emily FitzRoy for help. FitzRoy organizes high-end Italian vacations through her company, Bellini Travel , booking some of the country’s most spectacular villas for her elite clientele. “For the last 25 years, I’ve essentially been looking after more benevolent versions of the Roy family, in Italy,” she says. 

FitzRoy introduced the Succession team to La Foce , a 3,500-acre estate with manicured gardens, south of Siena, and to La Casinella , an eight-bedroom villa reachable only by boat, on the shores of Lake Como, which had never been used for a film shoot. (Want to stay there, too? It’s available to rent starting at $160,000 a week.) Both properties were featured prominently. “Emily got us into some really fantastic locations that I don’t think we’d have gotten into otherwise,” Carter says. 

After the initial scouting trip, the production kept FitzRoy on as a consultant during the Italy shoot. “They said, ‘Can you come over and make sure everything looks authentic and true to how this family would travel?’ ” she recalls. Among other things, she advised on the type of Champagne to serve (Bollinger, though she also pushed “Winston Churchill’s favorite, Pol Roger”) and whether to use a clipboard or an iPad when checking in guests for a destination wedding (the latter, of course). 

Gothic drawing room by Pugin in Eastnor castle in Britain

The art and antiques that fill the home of the affair’s host—Tom Hollander’s over-extended expat, Quentin—all came with the property, the seven-bedroom Villa Elena, owned by interior designer Jacques Garcia . More often, works featured on shows such as The White Lotus are chosen by advisers who curate production sets as they would private homes. 

Fanny Pereire, who worked on the pilots for Billions and Succession, has a full-time job securing art for TV and film. Her process starts with a wish list of original works. She then secures single-use permission to feature each piece from the copyright holders, generally by paying out fees to artists or estates. The works shown on-screen are mostly very good official copies of sometimes priceless originals, laser-printed on canvas and touched up by the show’s art department to add brushstroke texture. After shooting wraps, Pereire usually films herself slashing the approved fakes—she’s contractually obligated to destroy or return the works—and sometimes sends them back to the artist in pieces, as proof of destruction. 

Those works, often lurking in the background, subtly move the story forward, adding insight into a particular character or scene, whether it’s the Basquiat hanging ostentatiously outside Axelrod’s office or the giant photo of a melting glacier by Frank Thiel in the boardroom at the Roy family’s corporate headquarters.

“We’re telling a story, and hopefully if we do our job right, just as the production design or the costumes will tell you something about the character, the art will, too, without being part of the dialogue,” says Pereire. 

The Mona Lisa may have played a central role in last year’s hit Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, but the other art on display in the lair of tech-bro villain Miles Bron (Edward Norton) was selected with equally precise intent. Director Rian Johnson winkingly hung a 1961 Mark Rothko abstraction upside down, as a nod to Bron’s bloviating ignorance. 

Succession wedding at England's Eastnor Castle

The backdrops for all this art, the homes and offices where the action goes down, are sometimes shot on location or, just as often, on a constructed set. Succession’ s Waystar Royco offices are a mix of the two, filmed on a vacant floor in New York’s 7 World Trade Center. 

While the original set for Logan’s sprawling Fifth Avenue apartment was designed by Carter and his team at New York’s Silvercup Studios , several of the high-end Manhattan digs featured on Succession are real residences awaiting new owners. In the third season, Kendall’s ex-wife lives in a condo in the iconic Woolworth building that sold last year for $19.975 million; younger brother Roman (Kieran Culkin) has lived in an 11,000-square-foot townhouse in Chelsea, recently listed for $22 million. “We get a deal on these places because they’re on the market,” says Mylod. “The idea being: If they’re on the show, maybe they’ll sell more quickly.” 

A fresh crop of marquee homes and apartments will appear in the new season. Word has it, one is a sprawling penthouse in one of the tallest buildings on New York’s Upper West Side and another floats 85 stories in the sky. “There’s a lot of good new stuff,” Carter says, while remaining tight-lipped on details. “It’s going to be a good, wild ride.” 

Billions Bobby Axelrod and his Range Rover

The interiors devised by the production-design teams on Succession and Billions often have an intentionally sterile, impersonal quality. “Early on, I wanted things to feel kind of staged,” Carter says. “You want to feel these aren’t people who have the time or inclination to spend the time actually decorating their own places. They have a team of people who are paid to do it, and they’re probably a little scared for their jobs, so they make choices straight out of the magazines everybody’s been looking at.” 

“There’s a whole world of making a car interior practical for shooting,” says Carter. “The cars in the show often are picked not just because they look super cool and stylish, but because they’re actually going to be shoot-friendly.” 

Because a real airplane cabin can be constricting for a long shoot with multiple characters, Carter built his own version in the studio, modeling the Roy family’s corporate jet in part after Rupert Murdoch’s 737. To get a feel for the fabrics and dimensions, he visited Cabin Crafters , a New Jersey–based company that specializes in private-aircraft interiors. “We were very realistic about it,” he says. “I think we maybe tweaked the width of the fuselage by four inches.” 

Finding a megayacht for maritime scenes shot off the Croatian coast in the second season presented other, unexpected, obstacles. Some of the most impressive vessels, Carter says, were “categorically off the table because, essentially, they’re blood-diamond boats. The pedigree is too unpalatable for HBO to be able to say we’re going to do business with this owner.” Producers eventually settled on the 279-foot Solandge , available to charter for $1 million a week. 

Damian Lewis as Bobby

And it’s not just the physical trappings of wealth that are steeped in reality on Succession . “I think they do a good job of addressing some of the issues that are faced in this world of people with exorbitant resources,” says Clay Cockrell, LCSW , a New York therapist with a slew of wealthy word-of-mouth clients. “Issues of isolation, sometimes guilt, sometimes shame, power struggles between family members, distrust for outsiders.” 

Even for fans who might recognize a bit of themselves in these shows, there are thrills to be found watching the antiheroes squirm. “Any really good, over-the-top presentation that takes place in a world that you are familiar with can be lots of fun,” says Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. “Just like many people who had lives in organized crime were really into The Sopranos… sometimes watching your own world burlesqued, made a caricature of, is pleasing just by the fact that your world is important enough to be made fun of.” 

Solandge, a 279-foot yacht, featured on Succession in Season 2

Nevertheless, their wedding needed to feel lavish, but with plastic flowers that wouldn’t wilt over the course of an extended shoot and inedible canapés that wouldn’t turn brown in the sun. Sarah Haywood , an event planner based in London, advised on the festivities, filmed at Eastnor Castle in Herefordshire in the West Midlands of England. “I worked with the writers, who would email me questions about the order of the day,” she says. “The timing, the dress, everybody’s wedding attire, what sorts of things a couple like that might do for their guests.” 

And the barely seen details are just as important. “There were things that had nothing to do with the story line at all, were not referenced, were not used—but they were there,” Haywood says. Recalling previous wedding-weekend itineraries, Haywood suggested the guests might need waterproof boots in case the weather turned inclement and the grounds muddy, so a Hunter Wellington-boots box appears in the background of one scene. 

The right food and drink add yet another layer. Both Axelrod and his nemesis, US Attorney Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti), love to dine out in New York, visiting the city’s buzziest restaurants (some now shuttered), from Sushi Nakazawa and Momofuku Ko to Del Posto and Daniel . “In the first season, it was really hard to get in anywhere,” says Shaw. “After the show came out, the second season everybody wanted us in.” 

On Billions, David Lynch’s Broken Heart hangs in Mike Price’s office.

“Whenever we’ve shot in a restaurant in New York,” Mylod says, “the first thing I do is talk to the owner—where’s the power table, what would they order?— just to get the basic feng shui of shooting.” 

On Succession, drinking and dining tend to be weaponized in the service of satire. Meals often veer into the grotesque, such as Tom and Cousin Greg choking down contraband songbirds under cloth napkins—“to mask the shame,” as Tom says—and the Roy siblings picking buckshot out of their mother’s stew of freshly killed pigeon. A family summit at the clan’s summer palace in the Hamptons ends with the staff dumping a whole tray of lobsters into the trash out back. (They order in pizza instead.) “There is great opportunity to sort of point out the excess with the food,” says Carter. 

When you’re in the business of re-creating worlds with rigor and authenticity, there’s perhaps no greater achievement than dreaming up a simulacrum that outstrips reality. Like students surpassing their teacher, the Billions team created such a compelling backdrop when they built the offices of Axe Capital—shot on location in Rockland County, N.Y.—that an investment firm later hired Shaw to consult on its real offices, in Manhattan’s shiny Hudson Yards. 

“The owners of the company wanted the interior to feel like the Billions world,” says Shaw. “That was life really imitating art.” 

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  1. Which yacht stars in the TV series 'Succession'?

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  2. Which yacht stars in the TV series 'Succession'?

    yacht used in succession tv show

  3. All you need to know about SOLANDGE, the yacht from ‘Succession

    yacht used in succession tv show

  4. Who Owns the ‘Succession’ Yacht? Info on the ‘Solandge’ Vessel From the

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  5. Get to Know The Yacht in The “Succession” Season 2 Finale

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  6. Which yacht stars in the TV series 'Succession'?

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  1. Billion Dollar Business Deal Gone Wrong

COMMENTS

  1. All you need to know about SOLANDGE, the yacht from 'Succession'

    Construction. Luxury yacht SOLANDGE measures 85.1m/279.2ft and was launched from the Lurssen shipyard in Germany in 2013 before going on to win the Exterior Design category at the Monaco Yacht Show Awards 2014, as well as making it to the finals at three other awards shows that same year. Her exterior styling is the work of renowned designer ...

  2. Solandge, the yacht used in Succession, costs $1million a week to hire

    Watch on. Solandge was first listed for sale in 2015 at an asking price of €179 million. It was finally sold in a deal brokered by the luxury yacht brokerage firm Moran Yacht & Ship in 2017. The ...

  3. Who Owns the 'Succession' Yacht? Info on the 'Solandge' Vessel From the

    The Solandge found a new owner in March 2017, after being listed for sale with Moran Yacht & Ship for 155,000,000 euros (about $180 million). However, the identity of the buyer hasn't been ...

  4. Which yacht stars in the TV series 'Succession'?

    By Katia Damborsky 29 October 2019. The 279ft (85m) charter yacht SOLANDGE is the yacht in HBO's Succession. Hitting TV screens in 2019, the season finale of season 2 gives viewers an inside glimpse into life on board the Lurssen luxury yacht in the Mediterranean. The curtain closed on season 2 of hit HBO show Succession earlier this month ...

  5. The Luxurious Yacht from HBO's Succession: A Deep Dive

    The Luxurious Yacht from HBO's Succession: A Deep Dive HBO's hit series Succession has captivated audiences with its gripping portrayal of a powerful media family's internal struggles. Among the many stunning visual elements featured in the show, Logan Roy's luxurious yacht from Succession has become a symbol of opulence and power.

  6. This Is Not for Tears

    List of episodes. " This Is Not for Tears " is the tenth and final episode of the second season of the American satirical comedy-drama television series Succession, and the 20th episode overall. It was written by series creator Jesse Armstrong and directed by Mark Mylod, and originally aired on HBO on October 13, 2019.

  7. You Too Can Charter the Yacht on Succession

    You Too Can Charter the Yacht on Succession. The fourth, and final, season of HBO's Succession has just started, and it picks up where season three ended, with some of the most crucial scenes taking place on a 279-foot megayacht cruising in the Adriatic not far from Dubrovnik, Croatia. At that time, the fictional Roy family, owners of the ...

  8. Let's Talk About the Yacht Clothes on "Succession"

    October 14, 2019. Roman Roy (Kieran Culkin), who, unlike some of the other characters in "Succession," almost never changes his costume, stands in the main dining room of a yacht in the show ...

  9. Season 2 finale of Succession filmed on board Mega Yacht Solandge

    Mega yacht AMADEA for sale and to attend Monaco Yacht Show 2019 Van der Valk Shipyard announce 35m explorer yacht SAMBA Abeking & Rasmussen's 41-meter superyacht NURJA relaunched after refit

  10. Jesse Armstrong 'Succession' Finale Interview

    "Succession" creator Jesse Armstrong discusses the season-two finale of the HBO series about the Roy family, how they filmed the episode on an actual yacht, and why Logan has such a cryptic ...

  11. Succession Season 2 Finale Recap: Who Did Logan Throw Overboard?

    Succession's Roy family wrapped up Season 2 by hashing out their issues aboard a luxury yacht… and one key character went down with the ship. Sunday's finale starts back in D.C., with a ...

  12. Inside the Luxe Sets of HBO's Succession

    In our ongoing series Screening Room, we go behind the scenes with the uber-talented production designers and set decorators of today's most visually alluring TV shows and movies for a deep dive on how they whipped up such indelible backdrops. This week we chat with the Emmy Award-winning and two-time Oscar-nominated set decorator George DeTitta Jr. about the understated uber luxe interiors ...

  13. 'Succession' Episode 3: Filming the Boat Scene in 1 Take

    Macall B. Polay / HBO. It feels weird to spoiler warn something " Succession " has built towards and hinted at since the pilot. But spoilers abound! Death comes for us all, even for Logan Roy ...

  14. Here's Where the Roy Family Visit in Italy in 'Succession' Episode 8

    By Roxy Simons. TV & Film Reporter (SEO) Episode 8 of Succession saw the Roy family jet off to Italy for Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Roman (Kieran Culkin) and Shiv's (Sarah Snook) mother Caroline ...

  15. How 'Succession' Built a 'Killer' Season Finale

    There's a darkness that hangs over Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong) in Season 2 of "Succession.". Ever since the car crashed into the lake at the end of Season 1 — resulting in the death of the ...

  16. What happened in the 'Succession' season 2 finale?

    The Succession season 2 finale, entitled "This is Not for Tears," finds the Roy family and its Waystar Royco cohorts on a—what else?—luxury yacht strategizing which member of the clan would be offered up as a "blood sacrifice" to take the fall for the cruise scandal ahead of the shareholders' meeting.. Would it be Logan himself, like the investors suggest?

  17. How the Set Designer of 'Succession' Brought the Show to Life

    Behind the scenes of HBO hit 'Succession': How set designer Stephen H. Carter used a $145 million Hamptons mansion and a yacht in Croatia to bring the billionaire characters' lifestyle to the ...

  18. Where was 'Succession' filmed? The locations used from seasons one to

    In sharp contrast, the season ends with the Roys amid blue skies and seas in the Aegean Sea and Croatia. This was filmed on the island of Korcula, both on the 279-foot charter yacht Solandge and in the Old Town, taking in the 15th-century St Mark's Cathedral and shoreside restaurant Cupido. Pinterest. Getty Images.

  19. On "Succession," Everything Is Up in the Air

    The setting: a yacht in New York Harbor decked with red-white-and-blue bunting, providing free media hoopla for Connor's Presidential campaign, a one-per-cent bid in every sense of the term ...

  20. The yacht that featured in HBO's Succession can be rented for £850K

    The pool onboard the Solandge, the stunning superyacht that featured in the hit TV drama Succession This is the 280ft boat's impressive panoramic top deck, which has a beach club area with a hot tub

  21. How Succession, Billions and Other Rich TV Shows Get the Details Right

    By Jay Cheshes. March 4, 2023. When HBO's Succession premiered in June 2018, the scathing satire about a powerful family at war with itself got some behavioral tics of its uber-rich New Yorkers ...

  22. Succession, season 2 finale recap: stone-cold killer Kendall sets the

    The finale of Shakespearean dramedy Succession's breakout second season was a tour de force of yacht-based back-stabbing and dysfunctional family psychodrama, with a killer twist in the tail.