Dagmara Dominczyk's personal life bore an uncomfortable resemblance to season 4 of Succession
The actor who plays Karolina recently shared that she and her sisters lost their father while filming a pivotal season 4 scene that felt all too similar
(NOTE: this article contains major spoilers for Succession season 4)
On HBO’s Succession, actor Dagmara Dominiczyk’s carefully curated Karolina isn’t exactly the weepy type; in fact, in the face of a series-defining episode 3 death that left more than a few characters bereft, Karolina’s the first to begin drafting up a statement and organizing the logistics of loss, without a tear spilled.
Dominiczyk, consistently one of the subtlest yet most intriguing performers in the series, skillfully embodies Karolina’s measured energy. It’s an impressive feat, given that while filming the pivotal, jarringly anti-climactic season 4 sequence where patriarch Logan Roy passes from this world to the next, Dominiczyk lost her own father.
“Two days before we shot our very last day of Succession in New York City, our very last day, two days before I showed up to set, my own father, who is, I would say, a gentler, kinder Logan Roy, in the fact that he’s been the biggest presence and force in my whole entire life for me and my sisters, this really one-of-a-kind human being, suddenly died at 69. And we found out through a phone call from a person we’d never met. He was in Poland at the time,” Dominiczyk recalls in a conversation with Rolling Stone’s EJ Dickson.
Understandably, facing a profound real-life loss made Succession’s current installment “a very strange season” for Dominiczyk, who found herself filming Logan’s funeral (a scene that must hail from a future episode) around the same time her own father’s was taking place just outside the city, in New Jersey.
“It just feels like the universe really — I don’t know the way it works, that the death of Succession and the death of Logan Roy coincided with the death of my fucking amazing, complicated father,” she says. “I was supposed to work the next day. And obviously the funeral — I’m not even sure if I’m supposed to tell you there is a funeral, but obviously, we’re assuming there is — we shot that a couple of days before my dad died, too.”
Although Dominiczyk didn’t yet know of her father’s passing when she was filming the sequence on the airplane where Logan takes his last breaths, she still struggled to hold back emotion. Calling the filming process “intimate,” “moving,” and “so fucking weird,” Dominiczyk recalls director Mark Mylod having to remind her that Karolina isn’t as tender-hearted as her portrayer.
“I’m a very emotional person. I wear my heart on my sleeve. I had a hard time not crying on that airplane. This was before my dad died, we shot the episode on the plane,” she shares. “And Mark Mylod would come up and say, ‘Dag, what you’re doing is really beautiful. But Karolina would not [cry.] She’s the voice of reason here. There’s things to do. This is a giant public figure. Please don’t cry.’”