yacht in succession

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

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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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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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85m Lurssen 2013 / 2022

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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.

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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.

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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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 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.

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.”

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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The Only <i>Succession</i> Recap You Need Before Season 3 Starts

The Only Succession Recap You Need Before Season 3 Starts

I t’s been a full two years—and a whole pandemic—since the last episode of Succession aired on HBO. Since then in the real world, we’ve watched billionaires cover up sex scandals, sulkily testify in front of congress , and launch rockets into space —but those plutocrats don’t ruin the world with quite as much style as the Roy family. On Oct. 17, season three picks up with the fallout from another Kendall Roy bombshell: instead of shouldering the blame for a major company scandal, he has once again turned on his father. Ahead of Succession ‘s return, here’s a recap what’s happened on the show so far, and where all the major characters stand going into a new season of corporate warfare.

Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong)

Aliases: Ken.W.A, Washington Ken, Mr. Potato Head, Yuppie RoboCop

Job title: N/A

Jeremy Strong as Kendall Roy in 'Succession.'

Can the term “hero’s journey” be used to describe someone so despicable? Kendall Roy has spent the first two seasons of Succession desperately clawing his way to the seat he believes belongs to him: CEO of Waystar Royco. Kendall is deeply insecure, suffers from a never-ending identity crisis and is constantly craving his father’s respect; he wants the top job because its importance has been drilled into the center of his value system his whole life.

In the first season, Kendall attempted to get there through a string of corporate maneuvers against his father: first through a vote of no confidence, and then via a hostile takeover. (Both efforts failed.) The stress of this conflict caused him to relapse into his drug addictions—which ended in the death of a waiter who drowned after Kendall drove them off the road and into a body of water.

Chastened and guilt-ridden, Kendall spent most of season two Zombie-walking under direct orders from his father, gutting the media outlet Vaulter and defending the family ferociously at a congressional hearing. (All the while, he was doing plenty of drugs and stealing batteries from bodegas just to feel something.)

But in the finale, Kendall finally snapped out of his stupor when his father announced that he needed to be the fall-guy for the company’s cruise crimes (A deeper explanation on that in a second). Instead of accepting the blame and the possible prison time, Kendall instead turned the tables, pinning the responsibility on his father in a press conference and calling him a “malignant presence, a bully and a liar” and pronouncing, “This is the day his reign ends.” He strode out of the room, with the document-carrying Greg and the ever-faithful Jess at his side, prepared to wage yet another all-out war against his father.

Despite the jaw-dropping power move, Kendall is still in a tough spot. He’s trying to put all the blame on his father while absolving himself, even though he was leading entertainment operations at the time of the creation of shadow logs. His father still has the ultimate trump card: the secret knowledge that Kendall killed someone.

Logan Roy ( Brian Cox )

Aliases: “L to the Oh-Geeee,” “Uncle Fun,” “The Old Dinosaur,” “Worse Than Hitler”

Job title: Founder of Waystar Royco

Brian Cox as Logan Roy in Season 2 of Succession

Even at 80-years-old, there’s no better manipulator or gaslighter in the Roy family than patriarch Logan. His health continues to fail him—he has suffered a stroke, become disoriented outside his home and peed on the floor several times—but he’s successfully fended off siege after siege through a mixture of bullying, intimidation, and cunning.

In season two, Logan’s most pressing crisis was the public unveiling of Waystar’s cruise scandal, which fell domino by domino. First, a New York Magazine article alleged that cruises executive Lester McClintock had pressured female workers into having sex to renew their contracts. Then, a Waystar whistleblower came forward to expose the details of a whole “wolfpack” culture of sexual exploitation, in which migrant workers were particularly vulnerable to predatory actions and women who resisted or knew too much even went overboard. That precipitated a congressional hearing, in which records were subpoenaed about cover-ups, hush money and deleted shadow logs.

In the season’s final episode, a major shareholder came to Logan and demanded that he step down. But Logan ignored the request and instead assembled his family and inner circle on a giant yacht in order to pit them against each other as if at a Survivor tribal council. Logan eventually settled on Kendall as the most logical and effective choice, and prepped him to announce his admission of guilt in a press conference.

But Logan’s heartlessness—and his penchant for twisting the knife in his victims—backfired. When he told Kendall that Kendall wasn’t a killer, it only made Kendall want to prove him wrong. And Logan’s invocation of the phrase “no real person involved” made clear the extent of his moral depravity as well as how much of Waystar’s rot came from its very core.

Now, Logan is back to fighting on multiple fronts: against his son, wary shareholders demanding his head, legal and congressional authorities. But the man isn’t backing down: the trailer for the new season shows him announcing his attention to go “Full f-cking beast.”

Shiv Roy (Sarah Snook)

Alias: Pinky

Job title: Former chief-of-staff to Gil Eavis, current Waystar shareholder

For good reason, Logan’s only daughter spent most of her professional career keeping her distance from the family business, both to prove her bonafides and to remove herself from the continuous Royco shitshow. She instead moved into the political world and got a job as a key advisor to far-left presidential candidate Gil Eavis, all the while carrying on an affair with fellow political operator Nate Sofrelli. Shiv often displays commitment issues, whether in her professional or personal life: on her wedding night, she asked her new husband Tom for an open relationship.

But in season two, Shiv was successfully reeled back into Waystar by her father, who offered her the top job in private—only for him to yoink back the proposal at a tense dinner with the Pierces, their rival media magnate company. Logan was so resistant to Shiv taking over that he nearly tanked the entire deal with the Pierces—which he needed to win his proxy battle—in order to avoid promising her the top slot.

Back in the fold and lacking a plan B, Shiv had no choice but to play the game on her father’s terms. She intimidated a crucial witness into not testifying in front of congress; she waged a ferocious power struggle with Rhea Jarrell (Holly Hunter), a media executive who also gunned Logan’s favor in season two. Shiv’s masterstroke against Rhea came in the episode “Dundee”: when she learned that the whistleblower was about to come forward with allegations, she convinced her father to choose Rhea as the next CEO, knowing that the position would soon be toxic.

In the season finale, Shiv was also a crucial voice in steering Logan toward picking Ken as the fall guy. It’s clear that she has her father’s ear in crucial situations—but on the other hand, he’s backstabbed her plenty of times before. For now, her allegiance lies with her father and against the brother she has tried to destroy several times over.

Roman Roy (Kieran Culkin)

Aka Dr. Moron, “Revolting little worm”

Job title: chief operating officer, Waystar Royco

Early on, Roman was portrayed as little more than a malicious, spoiled brat; a Joe Pesci-type grifter and egomaniac. (In an infamous season one scene, he masturbated to his corner office view.) In season two, his efforts to impress his father on a rocket launch by rushing it forward backfired spectacularly when the rocket exploded on takeoff.

But Roman has also proved himself analytically agile and strangely empathetic. He fared well at the company’s management training program and led a negotiation-turned-hostage situation in Turkey with impressive resolve and courage. He has also been carrying on a—let’s say, unique—psychosexual relationship with Gerri, who plays the role of his mother figure, mentor and forbidden love. At the moment, Roman’s proximity to Gerri gives him cover and a potential path to the top–but his strong, complex relationship with his defecting brother complicates things.

Connor Roy (Alan Ruck)

Aka the First Pancake

Job title: Broadway producer

Alan Ruck as Connor Roy and Brian Cox as Logan Roy.

The only person who takes the eldest Roy son seriously is himself. The hyperdecanting, bread-making, fake-Napoleon’s-penis-buying estate manager ran a very unsuccessful campaign for president predicated on wiping out taxes (and he did not, in fact, “wipe the floor with [Gil Eavis] in a debate” as he claimed). His subsequent attempt to be the next great Broadway mogul also evaporated, as his escort-turned-girlfriend Willa’s play bombed so hard she threw an iPad into the sea.

Connor is now in a financial hole so deep his asked his father for a “little hundred mil,” causing Logan to respond with some fatherly tact: “Everybody thinks you’re a joke and you’re f-cking embarrassing me.” In an attempt to dig himself out, Connor generously offered to be the fall guy for the cruise fiasco in exchange for compensation, weaving a story in which he was the “eminence grise” of the family. The idea was met with smirks by everyone at the table. Connor has mostly served as comedic relief to the show’s real machinations; that trend is unlikely to end any time soon.

Tom Wambsgams (Matthew MacFadyen)

Aka “Smirking block of domestic feta,” “The Cunt of Monte Cristo”

Job title: Chairman of Global Broadcast News at ATN

Matthew Macfadyen and J. Smith-Cameron in 'Succession.'

As I wrote last year, Tom is a “groveling, gutless man with terrible instincts, terrible work ethic and a foot perpetually in his mouth.” In season two, he failed on nearly all fronts: he got one-upped by his former whipping boy Greg, who successfully blackmailed him into a better position; he advocated the worst news slogan ever (“We Hear For You”), and made a fool of himself on C-Span at the hands of Gil Eavis. The only reason he wasn’t ousted from the company is because, in the words of Kendall, “he’s not a big enough skull.”

To top it all off, Tom’s recent marriage to Shiv is crumbling. She wants to sleep around, whereas he’s terrified by the idea of a threesome. In one of the most miserable couple’s beach getaways of all time, Tom wonders to Shiv if he would be less sad if he left her. “A lot of the time I think I’m really pretty unhappy,” he says.

Gregory Hirsch (Nicholas Braun)

AKA Greg the Egg, “you beautiful Ichabod Crane f-ck,” “you little Machiavellian f-ck,” Benign Fungus

Job title: ???

Braun has been the undeniable breakout star of Succession thanks to his portrayal of bumbling-yet-conniving Greg, the kind of guy stutters his way through his threats. (Unrelatedly, Braun’s “Do You Have the Antibodies” was unironically one of the best songs of 2020.) Since the first episode, Greg has been used as a pawn by the higher-ups in the family, and he leveraged each of those opportunities into bigger positions and paydays. He first blackmailed Kendall, who amusedly gave him an apartment and made him his courier and confidante; he then blackmailed Tom, who unsuccessfully tried to suppress the monster he had created.

At the end of last season, Greg chose to turn down a $250 million inheritance from his ornery grandfather in order to remain with Waystar—and then proceeded to side with Kendall in the coming civil war, giving him the incriminating documents that he was supposed to burn. Greg is taking a big risk here, siding with the renegade as opposed to the company line, and he will probably try to use his leverage to cut a deal to avoid any sort of consequences for his role in the cover up. His self-centered wiliness makes him one of the biggest wild cards going into next season.

Also, it shouldn’t be overlooked that Greg was responsible for one of the most eloquent one-liners in TV history: “If it is to be said, so it be… so it is.”

What about the rest?

Sandy and Stewy , two rival businessmen with shares in Waystar, are still in the midst of an effort to buy out the company and pressure shareholders to dispatch the Roys and give them full control. (An ever-important shareholder meeting looms.) Kendall is still smitten with Naomi Pierce , who is something like Kendall’s drug-loving counterpart of her own twisted media dynasty. Gerri Killman , the company’s General Counsel, is smart, strategic and respected by everyone in the family, especially Roman; she will play a crucial role in the company’s survival going forward. Marcia Roy , Logan’s wife, his currently separated from him following his dalliance with Rhea Jarrell , who walked away from the CEO job once she realized how disastrous the company’s situation was.

Who are the new arrivals?

Season two had a fantastic supporting guest cast (featuring Holly Hunter and Cherry Jones), and season three looks to be no different. Adrien Brody plays wealthy activist and investor Josh Aaronson; Alexander Skarsgård plays tech CEO Lukas Mattson; Sanaa Lathan plays high-powered lawyer Lisa Arthur.

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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

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

A post shared by Succession (@succession) A photo posted by on

'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.

The ILIA Multi Stick pictured in a pink, textured template

As a self-proclaimed blush connoisseur, I swear by ILIA's cheek and lip stick and hopefully, when my work is done, you will too.

By Naomi Jamieson Published 28 September 23

Emma Chamberlain attends the 2023 Vanity Fair Oscar Party Hosted By Radhika Jones at Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts on March 12, 2023 in Beverly Hills, California/ in a pink watercolor template

If you've been looking for a new, signature hair look for fall, Emma Chamberlain may have just come *through* for you...

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How ‘Succession’ Trapped the Roy Family in a ‘VIP Room’ of Grief in Episode 3

Sarah shachat, associate craft editor.

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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 ( Brian Cox ). The inescapability of that truth, as much as any tears, denial, guilt, and/or panic, is what makes Episode 3, “Connor’s Wedding,” so affecting. The rhythm of the edit and, as director Mark Mylod put it, the “sadism” of the camera reinforces that reality, refusing to let the Roys beg, browbeat, or weasel their way past the one force even Logan couldn’t cow: time.

Mylod and cinematographer Patrick Capone hammer home the helplessness of this moment and the illogical gravity of grief by delivering maybe the fullest version of the visual and dramatic approach that has made “ Succession ” so remarkable. They, veteran camera operators Gregor Tavenner and Ethan Borsuk, and the shows’ actors stress-tested the series’ preference for shooting as freshly as possible with as long a take as possible. The limit for takes on “Succession” is usually about 10 minutes, as the show shoots with film that must be reloaded once the reel is used up. But for the sequence where the siblings learn that Logan died en route to Sweden (putting business over family until the very end), Mylod and the actors wanted to cover about 30 pages of material in one go.

Related Stories Brian Cox: Cinema Is in a ‘Very Bad Way’ — and Marvel and DC Are to Blame ‘Succession’ Star J. Smith-Cameron: TV Only Has ‘Safe’ Shows Post-Strikes

“That felt like it really needed to be an unbroken take, an unflinching take,” Mylod told IndieWire. “Normally, if there’s a [dramatic] moment, we explore it fully and even go beyond it, so having to artificially say, ‘OK, we have to cut there because the camera’s run out,’ felt just a little less than satisfying, even though the work that the actors and everybody was doing was fantastic. Patrick Capone, my brilliant friend and DP, was the key to it. The camera team basically worked out a way where they could have the two camera operators hide a bunch of film magazines around the set all over the place. Perhaps even a third camera body to pick up at some point. And [we just went] for it [and] I’m so glad we did. I’m really proud of that take.”

The Roy siblings embracing each other in Episode 3 of Season 4 of

The show’s two cameras dance around the actors, exposing how small Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Shiv ( Sarah Snook ), and Roman (Kieran Culkin) are by moving through the scene with them and reacting like an unseen person in the room who is turning to us and oh-so-quietly whispering, “What the fuck?” For this massive 30-minute take, a third camera was added so that as one camera did a quick reload, at least one operator was always following the siblings wherever they went and however they navigated the multiple decks of the ship to find somewhere less exposed to process the shock of losing their father.

But one of the great joys of “Succession” has always been that the trappings of wealth do not necessarily afford the Roys any dignity. Setting Connor’s (Alan Ruck) wedding aboard a yacht in the New York harbor, underneath a bright and beautiful blue sky, played a key part in how Mylod and Capone use composition to create the feeling of sudden, isolating grief. “The positioning of the boat with the stern facing out into New York Harbor was to me a lovely visual contradiction,” Mylod said.

“On the one hand, you have all the freedom of the water and the harbor and the great adventure of New York City out beyond. But at the same time, these characters are trapped in this little glass cage, in this VIP room, trapped in their grief and in their frustration of not being able to get the knowledge or comfort they seek. That, to me, was the perfect visual juxtaposition. And so when Kendall finally goes up onto the deck, that’s the first time you can properly breathe,” Mylod said.

Succession Season 4 Episode 3 Jeremy Strong Sarah Snook

But one of the ingenious things about the episode is that the visuals don’t draw attention to themselves as technical feats. In fact, the show deliberately diffuses most of the bravura camera moves with quick cut-ins so that nothing feels like a “Oner” with a Capital O, and so the perspective of the camera never distracts from the emotion of the sequence.

“One of the things I’m most proud of in the whole way that we’ve evolved this way of shooting is this dance that’s evolved between the camera operators and the actors over the years,” Mylod said. “We’ve tried to evolve this idea of the camera, and therefore by extension the viewer and sometimes the characters themselves, barely keeping up with events. The whole way in which we try to manifest [this approach] is that we rarely rehearse, and we never rehearse with cameras. We throw the actors and the camera operators together into a space, with sometimes very little guidance from me. They’ve just learned to anticipate one another – I don’t know of any other show that does that in quite the same way – and I’m really proud of it.”

The frisson of the actor and camera scrambling for perspective and control is beautifully, heartbreakingly counterbalanced in Logan’s death scene by cutting back to the scene onboard the airplane. The episode uses each new shot of Tom (Matthew MacFadyen) on the plane as a kind of punctuation mark that only feeds the desperation and denial on the boat.

Roman, Shiv, and Kendall Roy in a private room on a yacht in Episode 3 of Season 4 of

“The biggest single dilemma, for me anyway, was the aircraft side of [Logan’s death sequence] initially. Particularly during that 30-page section, a lot of that was supposed to be played off in that you’d hear Tom on the phone, obviously, and that was Matthew live [on the call] each time. But you wouldn’t necessarily cut to the aircraft much, if at all, during that section. But we thought we’d shoot it anyway, and Matthew and the rest of the cast on the plane were so damn compelling. It was really hard to get the balance between intercutting the boat and the aircraft at that point in the story,” Mylod said. “We ended up cutting to Matthew’s side of the call a lot more than we originally intended because he was so good.”

The other moment in the episode that was both planned and surprising was the final shot: Kendall alone on the tarmac after his father’s body is taken off the plane. That was always the final moment of the script, but Mylod didn’t call cut. “We let the moment play on. And actually, you know, in certain takes, Jeremy’s character broke down completely, emotionally. One of the takes, one of my favorites, was a continuation of the one we actually used. The moon happened to be rising very beautifully behind him.”

In that unused take, Mylod let the camera roll past Kendall getting into his car, the ambulance driving away, the police cars leaving, and the press trudging away on the other side of the fence. Mylod held on a very “lone and level sands” composition of just the plane sitting on the runway. “There was that lovely kind of emptying of the stage, you know. The play is over, and all the players exiting. That was really beautiful and very emotional for me,” Mylod said. “It would’ve been beautiful, and Nicholas Britell would’ve scored the hell out of it. But the right moment was [the one in the episode]. It’s the zenith, all the complications and contradictions going through Kendall’s head, seeing his father’s body there.”

Nothing better encapsulates the visual sensibility of “Succession” than that preference for finding landscapes that betray the characters’ ambitions, making them look small, showing them at that peak moment when their emotions leak through, and then cutting away. Much like Logan himself, the show’s cameras always put business over pleasure.

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Superyachts

SOLANDGE Yacht – Incredible $150M Superyacht

The SOLANDGE is an 85m superyacht that Lurssen Shipyard built in Germany.

Featuring an exterior design from Espen Øino International and interior design from Rodriguez Interiors and Dolker & Voges, SOLANDGE was delivered in 2013.

	Solandge
	85m (279ft)
	12
	29


	Rodriguez Interiors
	2013
	18 knots
	Caterpillar
	2899 tons
	US $150 million
	US $15 million

SOLANDGE yacht interior

The lavish interior of the SOLANDGE yacht was designed in collaboration by Rodriguez Interiors and Dolker & Voges . Classic elegance and a dash of luxury define the interior of the superyacht, with marble, granite, and alternative wood features.

There is accommodation for 12 guests across seven staterooms. The master deck features a panoramic view with 180-degree windows. Additional accommodation includes a VIP room, two doubles, and two twin cabins.

The sundeck of SOLANDGE features a DJ booth and dance floor. The traditional beach club is the perfect spot for guests to enjoy the water and includes a large rainforest-style shower.

The tender garage features an advanced system that can tell guests the temperature of the water and the speed of the winds. This helps guests choose between diving in for a swim or kayaking easy.

A fully equipped health spa with a massage room, sauna, and gym leading to a glass-edged pool is on board. The yacht also features two jacuzzis and numerous other areas perfect for guests to socialize together.

The garage is filled with water toys for guests to enjoy, such as jet skis, scuba equipment, kayaks, and fishing equipment.

Guests can also enjoy a large movie theatre, a vast main salon with a bar, and a games room.

There is accommodation for 29 crew members onboard to ensure a luxury experience for guests.

Luxury designer Espen Øino International penned the exterior of the SOLANDGE yacht. The exterior features harmonious lines and has a balanced proportion that encases the versatile and spacious areas of the yacht.

She was built by Lurssen in their shipyard in Germany and delivered in 2013 to the owners.

She is one of the largest and most luxurious charter yachts in the world. She underwent a major refit in 2019. Her hull is steel with an aluminum superstructure and a teak deck.

Specifications

The 85.1m superyacht has a beam of 13.8m with a draft of 3.9m. The SOLANDGE yacht has a volume of 2899 gross tons. She has a range of 6000 nautical miles with a cruising speed of 15 knots.

Her two Caterpillar engines give her a maximum speed of 17 knots. The $150 million yacht has an annual running cost of $15 million.

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The most spectacular yachts in film and TV

The glitz and glamour of superyachts makes them ideal stars for everything from box-office blockbusters to the latest Netflix drama...

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

Yacht: aquarius.

The 45 metre Mengi Yay motor yacht Aquarius makes an appearance in the opening of the trailer for Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery , the follow-up to the Acadamy Award-winning murder mystery Knives Out starring Daniel Craig. Delivered in 2016, the yacht can sleep up to 10 guests and eight crew across her three decks. Aquarius has a top speed of 15 knots that will no doubt be put to the test in Rian Johnson's sequel, which is set to be released on Netflix in December.

Triangle of Sadness

Yacht: christina o.

Dark comedy Triangle of Sadness follows a fashion model celebrity couple who are invited on board a superyacht cruise for the ultra-rich, but the vessel ends up sinking, leaving its guests and crew stranded on an island. The 99.15 metre classic superyacht Christina O is the star of the film, which suitably premiered at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. Christina O was famously owned by Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Socrates Onassis who transformed her from an anti-submarine frigate to a luxury superyacht that has welcomed the likes of Winston Churchill, JF Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe and Frank Sinatra on board. Actor Woody Harrelson joins its star-studded guest list as he plays the role of the captain in the film.

Inventing Anna

Yacht: leight star.

The 42.67 metre motor yacht Leight Star was featured in the Netflix docudrama Inventing Anna, based on the true story of fraudster socialite Anna Delvey. The yacht was renamed Caprilla for the episode and sees protagonist Anna Sorokin stepping out of a Chris Craft tender and onto the swim platform to join her friends in Ibiza (before outstaying her welcome). Leight Star was built in 1984 by the American shipyard Sun State. Her top deck, which is used mostly for sun lounging, can double as a helipad for guests looking to arrive in style.

No Time to Die

Yacht: spirit 46.

A Spirit 46 sailing yacht takes a starring role in the James Bond film No Time to Die . The 14 metre sailing yacht features in the film, which catches up with Bond following his departure from active service. This is not the first time Spirit Yachts has collaborated with the Bond franchise. In 2006, the 16.4-metre sailing yacht Spirit featured heavily in Daniel Craig's first Bond film Casino Royale when it became the first sailing yacht to travel up Venice's Grand Canal in 300 years.

Yacht: Planet Nine

The 73 metre explorer yacht Planet Nine takes centre stage in Christopher Nolan’s time travelling blockbuster Tenet . Spanning seven countries, Tenet follows protagonist David Washington as he fights to ensure the survival of the whole world. Delivered in 2018, the ice-classed explorer Planet Nine features a large helicopter hangar and pair of superyacht elevators connecting all five decks. Elsewhere, the yacht boasts a panoramic observatory lounge, a boot room for heli-skiing activities and a cinema on the upper deck.

6 Underground

Yacht: kismet.

The 95.2 metre Lürssen superyacht Whisper (ex Kismet ) plays a pivotal role in Michael Bay’s newly released Netflix debut 6 Underground . Starring Ryan Reynolds, 6 Underground sees a team of international operatives tasked with taking down a notorious dictator. The Espen Øino -designed superyacht is the setting for the climactic final scenes of the film which sees Whisper , the final stronghold of the dictator, dramatically blown up.

Yacht: Solandge

Lürssen’s 85.1 metre superyacht Solandge took a starring role in the second series of Sky Atlantic’s Succession . The climactic final episode, in which Brian Cox’s Logan Roy makes a life-changing decision, is based entirely on the yacht and showcases its first-class facilities. Scenes of the episode journeyed from Solandge’s massive indoor and outdoor gym on the main deck to the outdoor cinema and nightclub. Elsewhere, Solandge features a full dive centre, extensive spa with a sauna, steam room, massage room and beauty salon, as well as a generous swimming pool on the sun deck.

Murder Mystery

Yacht: sarastar.

The 60 metre Mondomarine superyacht Sarastar is the setting for Netflix film Murder Mystery . The action follows a stagnant married couple played by Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston who join a billionaire on board his family yacht. They are soon caught up in an Agatha Christie-style murder mystery on board and it doesn’t take long for the couple to become prime suspects.

Yacht: Turquoise

The 55.4 metre superyacht Turquoise stars in the Sky Atlantic drama Riviera . Set in the French Riviera, the series follows American art curator Georgina Clios, whose life is upended after her billionaire husband Constantine dies in a yacht accident. Turquoise was built by Turkish yard Turquoise Yachts in 2011 with an all-British design team behind her build: her exterior is the work of Ed Dubois with London studio H2 Yacht Design styling her lavish interiors, which can accommodate up to 12 guests and 13 crew.

Yacht: Haida 1929

Classic motor yacht Haida 1929 plays a starring role in Meryl Streep’s exuberant rendition of Money, Money, Money in the hit musical film Mamma Mia!. Built in 1929 , she is one of the oldest yachts still sailing today and offers guests a taste of yachting in the 1930s. She has had 12 owners in her lifetime and saw service in the Second World War and had long been admired by owner No 12 who extensively refitted this piece of maritime history over 16 months. In Mamma Mia! , Meryl Streep, Christine Baranski and Julie Walters are seen riding jet skis and drinking champagne in a dream world on board the superyacht.

The Wolf on Wall Street

M3 (previously Lady M ) played a crucial role in 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street . When Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) hits the big time, he splashes out on the luxury yacht and names it Naomi after his second wife (as played by Margot Robbie). However, the film takes a disastrous turn when the superyacht sinks during a stormy passage between Porto Cervo and Capri — a scene that closely mirrors Belfort’s real-life yachting disaster in 1997. Directed by Martin Scorcese, The Wolf of Wall Street was one of the most successful movies of 2013, grossing more than $116 million at the box office.

Yacht: Aria I

Daniel Craig's recent turns as 007 brought a new generation of beautiful sailing yachts onto the big screen, the most notable of which being Aria I . This 56 metre steel schooner from Pruva Yachting starred in the 2012 film Skyfall as Chimera , the yacht which carried James Bond to villain Raoul Silva's island hideaway. Preparing the yacht for filming was an arduous process, including re-upholstering inside and out.

American Assasian

Yacht: itama 62.

Michael Keaton and Dylan O’Brien were the big names in the 2017 counter-terrorism thriller American Assassin , based on Vince Flynn’s 2010 novel of the same name, but the real star was surely the Itama 62. This 19 metre speedboat stole the show in a spectacular chase scene, which involved O’Brien jumping onto the moving yacht. Built in Italy as part of the Ferretti Group’s extensive range, the Itama 62 has a top speed of 40 knots thanks to twin MAN V12 engines and can accommodate up to six guests in three cabins.

Yacht: Usher

When US comedy series Entourage was given the Hollywood treatment in 2015 it was only fitting that the party-loving boys should be seen living the high life on a glamorous yacht. Delta Marine ’s 2007 launch Usher (formerly Mr Terrible ) took on a starring role by hosting a yacht party in the film’s opening scene, before lead character Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier) embarks on a disastrous career directing movies.

Mission OceanX

Yacht: alucia2 and a triton 3300/3 submersible.

BBC Studios Natural History Unit, National Geographic and OceanX recently announced a six-episode documentary series called Mission OceanX . Produced and narrated by James Cameron, the series will explore the farthest reaches of the Indian Ocean and take audiences aboard the maiden voyage of Alucia2 , the "most advanced and powerful exploration, scientific research and media production vessel the world has ever seen". The explorer yacht builds on the capabilities of OceanX's iconic research vessel Alucia (now Hydra ), which made history in 2012 by capturing the first video footage of the elusive giant squid . Mission OceanX will also feature a Triton 3300/3 submersible from Triton Submarines , which promises to "help uncover new wonders [and] capture never-before-seen imagery of life below the surface".

Last year, James Cameron sat down with Stewart Campbell, BOAT International 's Editor in Chief, to discuss the Titanic, Cameron's love of the deep ocean and the OceanGate submersible disasters .

Bonus entry: Argylle

Tender: sportjet 520.

This spy thriller is directed by Michael Vaughn, the mind behind the much-beloved action-comedy Kingsman . The plot follows Bryce Dallas Howard as author Elly Conway, as she learns that the plots of her best-selling espionage novels are starting to mirror the actions of a real-life spy organisation. The Williams SportJet 520 tender features in several high-octane chase scenes alongside other big names Henry Cavill (as the titular spy Argylle), Bryan Cranston and Dua Lipa.

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Where was ‘Succession’ filmed?

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.

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.

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 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 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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The Real C.E.O. of “Succession”

When Jesse Armstrong, the writer and creator of the HBO series “ Succession ,” arrived on set at Amerigo Vespucci Airport, in Florence, one morning in June, he was faced with an extravagant decision. The scene to be shot was from the first episode of Season 3, in which various members of the Roy family—the dysfunctional media dynasty whose power struggles the show acidly chronicles—have just disembarked from the yacht on which, in the Season 2 finale, they bobbed in gilded captivity. Two planes had been positioned together on the tarmac: a Boeing 737, rented at a price of more than a hundred thousand dollars, and a smaller Falcon business jet. Tracks had been laid for a dolly shot. The temperature was already climbing into the eighties, and a crew of more than two hundred people bustled about the runway, perspiring in high-visibility vests.

The scene hinged on a surprise. In the final moments of the previous episode, Logan Roy, the volatile patriarch, was aboard the yacht, watching a live stream of Kendall Roy, one of his four ambitious offspring, at a press conference in New York, where he had been sent to publicly shoulder the consequences of a scandal in the cruise-ship division of Waystar Royco, the family conglomerate. Instead of offering himself up as a sacrifice, however, Kendall had stuck the knife into his father. The new season, which begins airing in October, picks up the story moments later, with Logan, the rest of the family, and Logan’s most loyal executives still in Europe, calculating how to counter Kendall’s move.

“It’s a moment of indecision,” Armstrong said of the tarmac scene, above the drone of idling jet engines. Though the previous season ended with a closeup of an inscrutable smile on Logan’s face, “this is the moment at which you get the sense that Logan is worried.” In the new script, Logan chooses to divide his forces into two camps: one party will return to America while he and others fly elsewhere. Armstrong’s decision that morning involved the placement of the two rented planes, which airport staff had parked close together. As he put it to me, his concern was that having two planes visible at the outset of the scene would preëmpt the story: “I think a viewer’s sense would be: ‘They can all travel together on the big plane. So why is there a second plane?’ ”

An embarrassment of airplanes: a very “Succession” problem. The show, a word-of-mouth hit, is known for its faithful depiction of the bountiful resources and anesthetized habits of the very wealthy. On an excursion from the yacht in Croatia, Logan’s son-in-law, Tom Wambsgans, instructs the pilot of a small boat, “Next cove, please, Julius,” so that he and his wife, Shiv, can be ferried to a sublime coastal spot for the unhappiest picnic ever. Armstrong—whose display of personal indulgence, in spite of his professional success, so far extends only to showing up to the Season 3 writers’ room in an extremely nice blue cashmere sweater—is a good-natured stickler for verisimilitude. The playwright Lucy Prebble, who is one of the show’s writers, recalls “someone coming in and saying, ‘We can’t have two helicopters,’ and noting how many tens of thousands of dollars they cost, and Jesse just saying, in a really relaxed way, ‘I think we probably need two.’ ” “Succession” documents wealth but it does not fetishize it, with the possible exception of a backless wool turtleneck dress worn by Shiv in an episode of Season 2; the garment was so delectably impractical that it inspired a flurry of online shopping. In general, the show makes affluence look vaguely diseased, and emphasizes the ways in which even the very rich cannot be entirely insulated from the drudgery of inconvenience. Mark Mylod, who has directed close to half the episodes of “Succession,” and is also an executive producer, told me, “We try to find situations where the characters cannot control the world, whether the weather’s bad or they are stuck in traffic.” For last season’s finale, Mylod filmed scenes on the yacht in the middle of the day, beneath harsh, overhead sunlight, in order to make the characters seem uncomfortably exposed, physically and emotionally. When, in the same episode, Logan is obliged to conduct a humbling video call with one of his corporation’s major shareholders, it is not from the comfort of his Audi but, rather, from the grim patio of a service station on a busy highway.

At the Florence terminal, the drawbacks of private plane travel—being ferried in cramped vans to wait on a scorching, gritty, noisy airport apron, as opposed to sharing a large, air-conditioned terminal with commercial passengers—were identical to the drawbacks of shooting high-end television in an inhospitable location. The actors clutched their scripts while members of the hair-and-makeup team attended to them, attempting to keep sweat and grime in abeyance. Will Tracy and Tony Roche, two of the show’s writers, hid under a small awning, using their phones to read Armstrong’s script for a forthcoming episode. Given the prevailing discomfort, Armstrong had to weigh how much of a disruption it was going to be creatively, physically, and emotionally to preserve the revelation of a second plane. In consultation with Mylod, who was directing the episode, a decision was reached not to compromise narrative integrity: the Falcon would be towed out of sight. To Armstrong’s relief, a driver on a small white tug had removed the offending plane within fifteen minutes. “I thought it was going to be a huge deal to move a plane,” Armstrong told me, once the Falcon had been shunted aside. He sounded amused, even a little wondering. “But, luckily, it took just one little man.”

The table read of the pilot episode of “Succession” took place in Manhattan on November 8, 2016: Election Day. That evening, the cast and the rest of the team gathered at the home of Adam McKay —an executive producer of the show, and the director of the pilot—for a party that was expected to celebrate the victory of Hillary Clinton . Matthew Macfadyen, the British actor who plays Tom Wambsgans, told me, “We watched the results come in, and everyone wandered off into the night—good for storytelling, bad for humanity.” Armstrong’s most significant memory of the occasion was how quickly attendees accommodated to what initially seemed to be earth-shattering news. “It was such a shock—then five, ten minutes later, everyone’s living in a new reality,” he said. Even in calamity, he observed, many people are “quite oriented towards how it affects them, and what they will do next.”

The first episodes of “Succession,” which aired in the summer of 2018, established an elliptical relationship to contemporary reality: there would be no specific references to Trump . But, with the U.S. government turned over to a leader with a transparently chaotic, transactional, and rapacious nature, the show met the national mood. “Succession” would have been equally entertaining had Hillary Clinton become President, but it wouldn’t have felt so timely if it hadn’t appeared after the election of Trump—a candidacy championed by Fox News , whose core strategy of chasing ratings by spreading fear is not dissimilar to that of ATN, the news organization owned by Waystar Royco. The opening credit sequence of “Succession” includes a cheeky shot of an ATN news ticker; in Season 2, it reads, “ gender fluid illegals may be entering the country ‘twice .’ ”

For some viewers, Armstrong’s thoroughgoing commitment to a curdled view of humanity—as the Roys jockey for position, they trade such endearments as “the cunt of Monte Cristo”—made the show at once intolerable and irresistible. “ I hate everyone on ‘Succession’ and I can’t stop watching, ” a typical headline read. The show is so unsettling, in part, because it offers no vantage points exterior to its scrupulously rendered universe—there is no outsider figure who is easier to identify with than the amoral protagonists. The Roy family’s outsider, Cousin Greg , is as calculating as any member of the clan with whom he seeks to ingratiate himself. Culture critics have popularized the term “wealth porn” to characterize shows, such as “ Billions ” or “ Gossip Girl ,” that lavish attention on the consumption habits of the absurdly wealthy. But, if the shiny surface of “Succession” bears a relation to pornography, it is less because it titillates than because it partakes of pornography’s deadening relentlessness.

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“Succession” also withholds cheap catharsis. Kendall’s backsliding with drugs is only the most overt example of the show’s gothic sensibility: all the Roys have been poisoned by the toxic nature of the family fortune, and Armstrong refuses to impose on them the kind of artificial personal growth that fosters an easy bond with the audience. The closest that “Succession” has come to giving its characters a respite from their crabbed emotional confinement is when Kendall, at a particularly low ebb, begs Shiv for a hug. She awkwardly complies, but only after saying in astonishment, “Give you a hug ?”

Given the care that Armstrong puts into making “Succession” a complex viewing experience, he is reluctant to explicate the show too much, as if it were reducible to a tidy set of themes and intentions. Nevertheless, his ambitions in “Succession” are driven not by a voyeuristic fascination with the rich—or by a righteous desire to expose the perfidies of inequity—but by a wish to tell, through the specific medium of a contemporary media dynasty, a more universal story about power and family relations, and to show how those forces can torque an individual’s humanity. It’s not so much “Billions” as “ Buddenbrooks ,” with more money and less grain. In one of a series of conversations during the making of Season 3, Armstrong told me, “One of the things that strikes me when I’ve read about these families—whether it be the Maxwells or the Redstones or the Julio-Claudians—is that, when you get that combination of money, power, and family relations, things get so complicated that you can justify actions to yourself that are pretty unhealthy to your well-being as a human being. Or you don’t even need to justify them, because the actions are baked into your being.” The infighting can become so darkly satisfying that it consumes one’s life: “For people who come from powerful families, there is nothing in life quite as interesting as being at court.” Indeed, almost nobody in a rich family steps away from the drama. “For these people to be excluded from the flame of money and power, I think, would feel a bit like death,” Armstrong said.

Armstrong’s interest in how human beings work—in what they say, and what they leave unsaid—is combined with a gift for comic dialogue that bounces from the demotic to the lewd to the baroque. Upon arriving at the family’s Hamptons estate, Logan demands that the doors be opened, noting, “It smells like the cheesemonger died and left his dick in the Brie.” When Cousin Greg is grilled at a congressional hearing, he responds to one question by saying, “Uh, if it is to be said, so it be, so it is”—a tortured circumvention of “Yes.” The uneasy simultaneity of comedy and drama that “Succession” depends on is a consequence of Armstrong’s unwillingness to save his characters from themselves. The writer and director Chris Morris, on whose recent movie “The Day Shall Come” Armstrong worked as a writer, told me, “Each of the characters in ‘Succession’ gives you the capacity to hope that they might snap out of the trap of their own existence. Jesse is the perfect sadist, because he is horrible to each one in turn, and yet he offers the audience just enough to hope that the characters might this time not disgrace themselves in the way that we kind of know they will. It is basically like a cat playing with a mouse and not killing it.”

A certain pitilessness, Armstrong told me, is not a bad thing for a work of fiction to have. “How can you be true about human beings?” he said. “That is a preoccupation.” He went on, “Without getting too highfalutin, there’s that quote from Marx, in ‘ The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte ,’ where he says men and women make their own history, but not the circumstances of their own making.” (The original text is less taut: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”) Armstrong continued, “For me, a lot of the art and the work of the show is in that territory between what’s history in the broadest sense, what’s family history, what’s tradition, and what’s the room for one’s own choices, and your own making of your life and your world. And there’s a gap there, which that mysterious thing about human personality fills.”

Whether Armstrong is on set at one of the foreign locales that give “Succession” its glossy atmosphere of sterile, moneyed internationalism or at Silvercup Studios in Queens—where the set of Logan Roy’s Fifth Avenue apartment, modelled on the mansion owned by the Council on Foreign Relations, is maintained—he is “like the mayor of a small town,” Jon Brown, a writer for the show, told me. Brown recalled, “I was in his office one day, and he was trying to write an episode, and someone came in and said, ‘Jesse, the caterers have made an ice sculpture, and they would like you to come and look at it,’ and Jesse had to put his episode down to go and look at it. He has these civic duties to keep everyone happy.”

When Armstrong is not issuing the equivalent of mayoral proclamations, he works in a rented room in a converted department store in Brixton, a neighborhood in South London. The office is spacious and airy but modestly equipped, with a wall of bookshelves and a teakettle on a side table. He keeps a carton of milk on the window ledge outside, like a student. “It feels a bit profligate having a whole fridge just for one pint of milk,” he said when I visited. His desk faces a window that overlooks a commuter railway. When I remarked that the clatter of passing trains must distract him, Armstrong looked surprised, as if he’d never noticed it before. “If you’d asked me if I could hear the trains from my office, I would have told you, ‘I don’t think so,’ ” he said. “I’d be a terrible—or brilliant—estate agent.”

Armstrong, who is fifty, has a scruff of salt-and-pepper beard that comes and goes, intelligent brown eyes that he often closes in concentration when speaking, and a measured voice that is lightly inflected with the accent of Shropshire, in the West Midlands, where he grew up. He is as affable as the characters on “Succession” are disagreeable. Prestige TV is prime territory for assholery, and the writers’ rooms of some of the best shows of recent decades have been arenas for conflict. Matthew Weiner, the creator of “ Mad Men ,” was called “an emotional terrorist” by a former writer on the show. (“I was a very demanding boss,” he later told the New York Times .) When Aaron Sorkin , the creator of “ The West Wing ,” was accused of yelling at a female writer on his HBO series “ The Newsroom ,” he responded that writers’-room arguments are “not only common, they are encouraged.”

This is not Armstrong’s style: he prefers to engender creativity with stability. “I’ve never seen him lose his temper,” Jon Brown told me. The show employs ten staff writers, half of them British and half American, and, unusually for a comedy, there is a roughly equal proportion of men to women. Even when the show has been in production and Armstrong, in addition to his other duties, has been writing the final two episodes of the season, he has remained equanimous. Brown recalled, “When we were in Scotland filming last season, there was a time when he asked me and Tony Roche to stop talking, so he could concentrate. Me and Tony were, like, ‘Fucking hell, someone’s grumpy.’ And then, in an hour, Jesse was, like, ‘You can talk again.’ ”

Francesca Gardiner, one of the writers of Season 3, said of her boss, “He’s sort of cool-dorky.” Armstrong bakes. He’s been a vegetarian—with occasional excursions into fish—since his youth. He met his wife, who works for the National Health Service, when they were in college, at the University of Manchester. They have two children and have lived in the same unflashy part of South London for almost three decades. When I asked if he had plans to upgrade his domestic space, he said, “We might do a new kitchen. So that will be corrupting.” Jeremy Strong, who plays Kendall Roy, told me, “I think it was Flaubert who said, ‘I want to live the quiet, ordered life of the bourgeoisie so that I can be violent and original in my work.’ That’s Jesse.”

Meticulous research goes into making “Succession” feel true to the rarefied world it portrays. What kind of overcoat would Logan Roy wear? A trick question: a mogul being perpetually shuttled from corner suite to climate-controlled limousine to luxury apartment doesn’t need an overcoat, no matter how cold it gets. Each of the staff writers is tasked with exploring a different dimension of the “Succession” world—which is, Armstrong acknowledges, overwhelmingly white and privileged. “We are working to reflect the world as it is, and not as we would wish it to be,” he said. “There’s another sort of show in which edging the world a bit towards what one would want it to be doesn’t hurt the show at all, whereas our show is critical-satirical—we need to portray that very particular and very powerful bit of the world it is concerned with quite precisely.” Last season, it fell to Susan Soon He Stanton to conduct an inquiry into the ministrations provided by the staff of a luxury yacht. She reported back that attendants wipe specks of powder from the rim of a guest’s makeup compact and print out copies of the daily newspapers every morning, as if they had been freshly fetched from a terrestrial newsstand. Jon Brown took a deep, if not hands-on, dive into the kind of élite sex club that serves as the setting for Tom Wambsgans’s bachelor party in Season 1. In an early draft of the scene, Brown incorporated an incident that he’d learned about during his investigations, in which an orgy room’s music speakers failed, making the slapping sound of flesh on flesh wetly audible. “After about one second, someone shouted, ‘Put the fucking music on,’ because even they didn’t want to hear how disgusting it was,” he told me. Armstrong decided to spare Tom that particular degradation, perhaps because he would soon put him through a humiliation that deliberately echoes the kind of sadistic jokes Josef Stalin used to play on party guests. At a dinner at a corporate retreat in Hungary, Logan, determined to stop leaks to the press, invents Boar on the Floor, a game in which executives suspected of betrayal are forced to crawl and chase sausages on the parquetry. “No half-hearted oink!” he demands.

As background for “Succession,” Armstrong and his writers loyally read the Financial Times , and they have plowed through a library’s worth of media biographies. They took a close look at “ Crime and Punishment ,” in order to deepen their depiction of Kendall’s inner turmoil, and consulted histories of ancient Rome in the hope that understanding the relationship between Nero and his freedman Sporus—whom the Emperor commanded be castrated, before undergoing a sham marriage ceremony with him—might illuminate the dynamic between Tom and Cousin Greg. The show has also hired such literary consultants as Gary Shteyngart, the novelist whose 2018 book, “ Lake Success ,” also depicts the lives of the super-rich in New York; among other things, Shteyngart discussed with the “Succession” team the delusionary psychology of hedge funders who are convinced that their wealth will protect them from the consequences of climate change. Tom Holland, the author of wide-lens books about ancient and medieval history, spoke about Caligula and other dissolute Roman leaders.

Last year, Brown told me, Armstrong came into the writers’ room with a big notion about the Epic of Gilgamesh . “I am fucked if I have any idea what the Epic of Gilgamesh is,” Brown said. “But if it makes you feel like you deserve your Emmy a little more, knock yourself out.” Armstrong assured me, “I have not read the Epic of Gilgamesh. I have probably listened to an ‘In Our Time’ podcast about it.” This lapse notwithstanding, Armstrong is a serious reader. Once, when I asked him which books he’d read recently, he mentioned the memoirs of Jack Straw , the Labour Party politician who served as a Member of Parliament and as Lord Chancellor; Robert Draper’s book about the run-up to the Iraq War; “ A Little History of Poetry ,” by John Carey; and the short stories of Jean Stafford.

Armstrong is disciplined not only in his reading. At the outset of writing Season 3, he started taking early-morning swims at Brockwell Lido, an unheated outdoor pool in London; as winter closed in, he updated his collaborators with slightly smug daily reports about the increasingly frigid water temperatures. Certain aspects of Armstrong’s work habits suggest a need to exert control. In the fall of 2019, the writers’ room for Season 3 was set up in a modern office building in Victoria. Dismayed to discover that he could not personally adjust the thermostat, Armstrong drew a picture of one set to 21.5°C—about 70°F—and put it on the wall. “You are meant to have a slightly cooler room for comedy,” he told me. “Standups always like the room cold, and if you’re shooting a sitcom live you want it a little bit chilly for the audience. I don’t know why—you’d have to ask a combination of an evolutionary psychologist and a building-maintenance man.” The room in Victoria also lacked a clock, and so, on a whiteboard featuring charts denoting each character’s development episode by episode, Armstrong drew a clock set to 2:25 p.m. It’s a hopeful time of day for a TV writer, he told me, since the room officially wraps up at 3:30 p.m .: “It’s almost there—not painful, watch-checking time, but nice to be toward the end of the day.”

When the show is in development, Armstrong’s preferred practice is to begin the day with each writer, in turn, giving an account of what she or he did the previous night, a process that can last as long as an hour. Will Tracy told me, “We go round the room clockwise, and everyone says what they ate for dinner, what bad movie they watched on TV, how much sleep they got—the more mundane, the funnier and better. At first, I thought this was very odd, but I immediately noticed that it bonded the writers—we developed a kind of group rapport very quickly.” Tracy went on, “And then all kinds of stuff from those evening recaps weaseled their way into the show. Someone will mention something about a friend who lived on Staten Island and had to commute into New York, and all of a sudden there’s a little line in the script about how Greg is living on Staten Island, and he’s coming in on the ferry every day and it’s a nightmare.” (A sneer from Tom: “Dude, why stop at the ferry? Just come in from Cleveland on the Greyhound.”)

Batman confronts Catwoman about her plan to take over the internet with cats.

Personal preoccupations, or nuggets of family history, find their way into the scripts, along with the writers’ research. The unfolding disaster of “Sands”—the dreadful play written by Willa Ferreyra, the girlfriend of Logan’s eldest son, Connor Roy—is informed by Armstrong’s impatience with the experience of theatregoing. “I am almost phobic about fearing that I am going to be bored, and in the theatre it’s a bit rude to leave, so I find that increases my anxiety about being bored to high levels,” he told me. The story line is enhanced by the presence in the writers’ room of some acclaimed playwrights, including Lucy Prebble and Susan Soon He Stanton. When, in an episode partially written by Stanton, Shiv meets Logan for a post-theatre supper and asks him how he enjoyed the play, his weary reply is “You know—people pretending to be people.”

When I visited the writers’ room after hours one afternoon in late 2019, I peeked at the whiteboards, along with other visual evidence of the group’s creative discussions, such as photocopied images of paintings, by Goya and Rubens, of Saturn devouring his son. There was a chart documenting a group competition to predict the results of the recent U.K. general election, which had secured Boris Johnson ’s position as the country’s Prime Minister (to the dismay of the liberal intelligentsia of London, among other constituencies). The clear winner was Armstrong, who had predicted a Conservative margin of victory far greater than even the most pessimistic of his collaborators thought possible. “One of the privileges of doing a show like this is that you are able to think about the world with some other smart people,” he told me. “Do you know that W. H. Auden quote—‘Poetry makes nothing happen’? To some extent, poetry can stand in for this kind of work as well. I don’t suppose it is going to have any direct influence on the world. But it is still a way of being in it, and feeling like you are part of it, instead of entirely being acted upon.”

More than a decade before Armstrong wrote the pilot of “Succession,” he was commissioned to write a documentary-style teleplay set at a family dinner party celebrating Rupert Murdoch ’s eightieth birthday. That project didn’t get far off the ground, but it did come to the attention of Frank Rich, the former New York Times columnist who is now an HBO producer. That and other Armstrong scripts impressed the network enough to green-light “Succession,” which takes inspiration not only from the Murdoch dynasty but also from other media families, including the Maxwells and the Redstones. Among Armstrong’s unmade but most admired projects is a bio-pic of Lee Atwater , the scabrous Republican strategist who helped elect George H. W. Bush to be Ronald Reagan’s successor as President. “It’s morning in America . . . and I tell you what, I have morning fucking wood,” Armstrong’s Atwater announces on page 1. Rich described the script to me as “a history of right-wing politics up to that time, with a comic touch,” adding, “I couldn’t believe this British writer could write such a compelling piece about American politics.”

At first glance, it might seem surprising that “Succession”—a show saturated in knowing detail about Manhattan, even if it is concerned with a global corporate business—was conceived by a British showrunner and is the product of a writers’ room in London. The Roys, though, have British roots: Logan is from a working-class Scottish background, and the mother of the younger Roy children, Caroline, is a frosty English aristocrat. Armstrong told me that in considering Caroline’s class background he had in mind someone like Lady Caroline Blackwood, the author and the daughter of the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, who was married to both Robert Lowell and Lucian Freud. The barb-trading discourse of the family, and also its aversion to the expression of emotion, are recognizable as culturally inherited traits. When Kendall visits his mother and tries to confide in her late one night, she recommends that they wait until morning, so they can talk “over an egg,” then scarpers before he rises. Brian Cox, who plays Logan—and who, like his character, was born in Dundee, Scotland—has an apartment in London, and when I met him at a café in Primrose Hill he told me, “The show has a kind of Swiftian satire. It’s in the vibe of this country.”

The “Succession” scripts are peppered with the type of memorably lurid cursing that another British writer, Armando Iannucci , helped make a hallmark of HBO, with “ Veep .” Armstrong has a rule: an insult “should be at least as expressive of who the character uttering it is as it is eloquent, or ineloquent, about its target.” At one point, Kendall warns Stewy, a onetime school friend turned business rival, “I will come to you at night with a razor blade, and I will cut your fucking dick off”; Stewy airily replies, “And then push it up your cunt until poo-poo pops out of my nose hole.” But the show’s linguistic ingenuity extends well beyond scatology. The characters in “Succession” often employ weirdly original turns of phrase, as if they were generating on the spot the inventive speech of an individual caught between two cultures. When Tom learns that Cousin Greg is driving his grandpa from Canada to New York, he taunts, “Canada? With the health care and the ennui?” When the mischievous Roman Roy returns from a brief corporate posting in the sticks, he gives Logan’s butler an almost Falstaffian greeting: “Hail, my fellow toiler man, I have returned from real America, bearing the gift of sight.”

Will Tracy told me, “Jesse has a very particular kind of phraseology for the way people speak—even particular obscenities or analogies. The characters will use a kind of dialogue that makes me think, I’ve never really heard somebody speak that way. But it feels real, and not like a TV writer writing a line of what feels like dialogue.” Tracy, who is American, recalled that, when he first heard certain phrases in the writers’ room, he assumed that they were Britishisms. “But it turns out they are just Jesse-isms,” he said. “Like, he’ll say, ‘Tom is completely freaking out—he’s completely shit his whack.’ I said, ‘Is that a British thing?’ Jesse said yeah, but Tony and Georgia and Jon said no . Jesse thought that it was a thing.” The phrase will be introduced to the lexicon in an upcoming episode.

Armstrong has been interested in America since he was a teen-ager growing up in Oswestry, a market town on the border with Wales. His father, David, was a high-school English teacher who later turned to writing crime fiction; his mother, Julia, worked at nursery schools. Armstrong told me, “Oswestry’s a bit in the middle of nowhere—quite tough, and quite English, in the way border towns are.” In 2013, he made a short film, “No Kaddish in Carmarthen,” centered on Gwyn, a fifteen-year-old Welsh high schooler with a fascination for Woody Allen , who adopts black-rimmed non-prescription glasses and claims to be Jewish. “Mam’s a Methodist,” Gwyn says. “It’s the same thing—it’s similar.” Armstrong calls the film a “short-story version of an element of my youth.” His parents were gently countercultural, in a health-food-and-alternative-energy kind of way; they were also eager to expose Armstrong and his younger sister, who is now a graphic designer, to the world beyond their provincial town, with family trips to Greece and Tunisia.

In the spring of 1990, Armstrong and a friend took a budget trip to New York City, where they crashed on the couch of some Cooper Union students whom Armstrong had met while backpacking in Europe. “We walked around and had the tops of our heads blown off, just seeing what the city was like,” Armstrong told me. Upon returning home, he matriculated at the University of Manchester, ninety minutes northeast of Oswestry. He chose the university partly because it had an excellent American Studies department, and partly because the city had a vibrant cultural scene, with the celebrated Haçienda night club having hosted such bands as the Smiths and New Order. “When I was choosing where to go to university, we used to try to go to the Haçienda, and we were always turned away,” Armstrong said. “I felt like if I went to the university I could try more frequently, at least.”

As part of his degree, Armstrong spent a year at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Student life there was bracingly political in a way that Manchester at the time was not, and Armstrong contributed to the school’s daily newspaper. But rural Massachusetts felt much less sophisticated. “I’d never before seen people carrying around four cans of beer, like they’d captured some amazing trophy,” he recalled. He drew on the experience of his year abroad for an unrealized dramatic-comedy script in which two friends—a nerdy white guy from UMass and an affluent Black graduate of Amherst College—pool their resources to buy a cocoa plantation in a fictional African country, planning to make bespoke chocolate for American hipsters.

After college, Armstrong worked for two years in Westminster, London’s political district, as an assistant to Doug Henderson, a Member of Parliament and the shadow minister of home affairs for the opposition Labour Party. “We had a weirdly broad brief—everything from the Channel Islands to dangerous dogs to asylum and immigration,” Armstrong recalled. He did not take to the corridors of power; at the 1996 Labour Party conference, held in Blackpool, he so dreaded the prospect of schmoozing at parties that he spent his evenings feeding coins into video games at the amusement arcades on the pier. He was less interested in exercising influence and more interested in noting the quirks of those who held it, such as Ann Widdecombe, a right-wing politician whose office had two posters on display: an anti-abortion image of a fetus, and an image of Garfield, the cartoon cat, bearing the legend “If you want to look thinner, hang out with people fatter than you.” Armstrong told me, “She didn’t mean them to relate to each other, but to see them together was intriguing.” Though he disliked Westminster, the experience helped him as a writer on “The Thick of It,” a profane satire of British politics created by Armando Iannucci.

At the University of Manchester, Armstrong had become close friends with Sam Bain, a classmate from a creative-writing course. Bain, a privately educated Londoner, told me that he was interested by Armstrong’s quite different background. “He wrote one short story that had a character working on a building site,” Bain said. “It took me a while to realize that it was based on his own experience.” After Armstrong abandoned politics, he and Bain began regularly collaborating on comedy scripts. Armstrong discovered that having a writing partner was an amenable way to live. “There’s this third entity, Bain & Armstrong Industries, so, when you stop work and go home, you feel more like you’ve gone home from work than you do when you are working solo,” Armstrong said. “And you have got somebody who is exactly as interested as you are in your career.”

Their first big show, a British reboot of the U.S. sitcom “That ’70s Show,” was a flop. But in 2003 they had a breakout success as the co-creators and principal writers of “Peep Show,” a sitcom about sad-sack flatmates: Mark, a bank-loan officer, and Jeremy, a failed musician. The scripts, instead of featuring snappy dialogue, were anchored by the interior monologues of the two protagonists, from whose perspective scenes were often shot. The show, which ran for nine seasons, is widely considered to be a British comedy classic; Chris Morris told me that Armstrong and Bain became known as “the ultimate word in flawed male psychology.” One celebrated episode is predicated on Armstrong’s aversion to theatre: Mark is drafted to join Jeremy on a double date to a low-budget play, and they endure the experience as if undergoing a dreadful medical experiment. “When do we get to go out?” Jeremy whispers to Mark as they sit between their dates. Mark, looking crucified, replies, “As far as I can make out, we get to go out for a bit in an hour, and then we have to come back for two hours .”

Armstrong’s background in half-hour comedies can be detected in the economy of the “Succession” scripts, and in the premium the show places on keeping things lively. “I still think a half hour of comedy is the most intensive form of writing you can do,” he said. Kieran Culkin, who plays Roman, told me that Armstrong is allergic to shtick: “If it’s just a little bit—half an inch—too far-leaning into something, he’s going to catch it. On any other show, people would be, like, ‘Oh, that’s funny, let’s do that.’ And he’ll always be the voice of reason: ‘Yes, it’s funny, yes, it’s great, but it doesn’t work.’ ”

Armstrong rejects the privileging of drama over comedy, and happily calls “Succession” a satire. But the characters are far more complicated individuals than are likely to be found in a sitcom; their stunted interiority is explored with a combination of empathy and dispassion. Such nuance is possible, in no small part, because of the actors playing these roles. Brian Cox is a Shakespeare veteran, as is Sarah Snook, who told me that playing Shiv had helped her understand the role of Cordelia, in “King Lear,” rather than the other way around. “I felt like I understood the weight of familial responsibility, and the love and compassion a daughter can have for a father and leader, though he may be difficult,” Snook said. Jeremy Strong approaches Kendall with an immersive rigor, not with the audience-pleasing instincts of a standup. Strong told me that, during the filming of the pilot, he asked Armstrong at one point whether they could spend some extra time exploring Kendall’s history. “Jesse said, ‘Let me sit with this for a minute,’ and I went and got some lunch, and then twenty minutes later I got an e-mail entitled ‘Window Rumination.’ It was a fully realized monologue—a memory he’d created of Kendall visiting the office when he was six years old. He was like this little prince in the office, and everyone was adoring of him and smiling, and he kind of wandered off a little too far, and there was this huge guy, a security guard, who didn’t know who he was, and it sort of escalated, and this six-year-old Kendall was powerless and tongue-tied, until his father came and found him. It was a poignant and beautiful piece of writing, and, to me, central to this character’s struggle and experience—being lost in this oceanic moment and being saved by his father’s embrace.” The scene didn’t make it into the pilot, “but it’s all embedded,” Strong told me. “It was an amazing experience of finding this character together.”

Armstrong told me that his ability to empathize with the Roys’ flaws is likely connected to his having reached an age at which “you’re more aware of the tragic things that can happen to yourself, and other people.” He went on, “So-called dark or serious things can still be funny, but, as you get older, more terrible things happen to more people you know. The things you laughed at as a young person—you’d better be careful, because they could happen to you tomorrow. With jokes about old people wearing nappies, or infirmity—what are you laughing at? It’s going to be you, or your mum and dad, tomorrow. There’s nothing funny about that, and, if you think there is, you had better wonder about who is the subject of that joke.”

In early 2020, when it became clear that the filming of Season 3 would not begin that April, as planned, Armstrong hunkered down in South London. Around that time, he wrote me an e-mail that captured the tenor of the city: “Panic buying is still at the embarrassed, English, ‘what, I always buy this many lentils’ stage.” He told me that it remained to be seen whether current events would make it into the show “as a whiff or a stench.” By the spring, the crisis had come into darker focus: Mark Blum, the actor who played the cruise-division executive Bill Lockhart in Seasons 1 and 2, had died from covid -19 in New York City.

Weeks of delays turned into months. HBO executives were telling him to wait, Armstrong reported, “rather than have Logan do a series of Webinars we can put out on HBO Max.” During the course of the next few months, the show’s executive producer, Scott Ferguson, figured out the logistics of layering a covid -19 safety unit on top of the regular production crew, at a cost of millions of extra dollars. Production finally resumed, in New York City, in November. In the end, Armstrong decided not to incorporate the pandemic into the plot. This time, the characters’ habitual jetting around may seem even more exorbitant than usual.

The sequence at the Florence airport was filmed late in the shoot—an aberration. Armstrong prefers to film “Succession” in order. Although he begins the first day of production with a firm idea of where his characters will end up, their precise route is adjusted and refined along the way. In Florence, some dialogue was written on the spot, under the awning.

The dates of the airport shoot were dictated by location choices for the concluding episodes, which were to be set in the Tuscan countryside and around the Northern Italian lakes—landscapes of such loveliness that even the pitiless eye of Mark Mylod would have a hard time remaining jaundiced. At the Florence airport, Ferguson told me, “Quite honestly, I think every season Jesse has wanted to go to Italy. He also wanted a yacht the first season. So last season we got the yacht, and Italy is the second white whale.”

In Italy, Armstrong was showing a tentative degree of confidence that the season would achieve what he had hoped for it. At the airport, we went into a hangar and retired to what he referred to as his “office”: a solitary chair set up by a wall. “With any project, you go through waves of anxiety,” he told me. “I had moments of ‘Fuck, did we ever say that thing that we intended to say?’ ” He went on, “They say sometimes tennis players can see the ball quite big, and they feel like everything feels full of opportunity, and sometimes it will feel small, and nothing’s coming together. Sometimes you feel, ‘Oh, yes, I can do this , and now I can go there , and this sets up this .’ That sense of ‘I think I know what everyone’s thinking—I can see this room is full of all these people, and they all have their own perspectives, and I can feel them all.’ Then it feels full of possibility. I’m just wandering around the party, hearing what Gerri’s saying to Karl. That’s a fun feeling.”

For the scenes shot in Tuscany, Armstrong wanted to play with the E. M. Forster version of the region—or, at least, with the visual fantasies promulgated by the popular Merchant Ivory film adaptation of “ A Room with a View .” He said, “I just felt it was a fun thing that British people do—that relationship to Tuscany, and those British vibrations of quite complicated snobbery about an area that has a certain resonance of cultural value for the British.” Even if American viewers didn’t pick up on all the ways in which “Succession” smuggles observations about British class into the narrative, he said, they would respond to the depiction if it rang true.

Armstrong hadn’t had much time to himself since arriving in Florence, he said, though he had taken a walk from his hotel to visit the Palazzo Vecchio, which in the sixteenth century was the seat of Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici. With international tourism all but halted, the exquisite city, marked by monuments to the dynastic powers that held sway five hundred years ago, was quieter and emptier than it had been in decades. Armstrong joked, “It’s a little bit Logan Roy—‘Close Florence, I’m coming through.’ ”

After two days at the airport, the production moved south, to the Val d’Orcia. Hundreds of crew members were scattered around villas and in hotels in various small towns. Armstrong landed in Pienza, a hilltop settlement built according to Renaissance principles of town planning at the order of Pope Pius II, a scion of Sienese nobility. Pienza’s narrow pedestrian streets were scented with jasmine and pecorino, and its museums, former palazzi overlooking the valley, were empty. In the evening, the piping voices of a handful of Italian children playing in the town square echoed against the travertine façade of the cathedral. Then, when the clock struck eleven, a nationwide curfew began, and the town fell as silent as it would have been in the dark of a fifteenth-century night.

The first day in the Tuscan countryside, a scene from the penultimate episode was being shot, featuring Sarah Snook and Matthew Macfadyen as Shiv and Tom. The setting was Bagno Vignoni, an ancient spa settlement, and showed the couple seated at a café, then walking together around a sixteenth-century bathing pool in the center of the village. It was a successor scene, Armstrong told me, to their brutal picnic in the final episode of Season 2, in which Tom confesses to Shiv, “I wonder if the sad I’d be without you would be less than the sad I get from being with you.” Armstrong said, “I saw this as ‘What’s the next accommodation they will come to?’ It’s an intimate scene in which they either are frank with each other or appear to be trying to be frank with each other.” The scene also harked back to the Season 1 finale, set on the couple’s wedding night, in which Shiv belatedly tells Tom that she wants an open marriage, and ventures as close as she ever has to emotional honesty: “Love is, like, twenty-eight different things, and they all get lumped in together in this one sack, and there’s a lot of things in that sack—it needs to get emptied out. There’s fear, and jealousy, and revenge and control, and they all get wrapped up in really nice fucking wrapping paper.”

As the crew arranged the scene, readying extras and setting tables, Armstrong, leaning against a honey-colored wall, said, “That’s what’s interesting about the people in the show—hopefully, they are not incapable of honesty.” He went on, “Shiv is a passionate, driven, smart person, who I think occasionally gets glimpses of the way that her life could be integrated and whole and truthful. But they’re really hard to keep hold of, especially when they brush up against other people. And, like the other characters in the show, she hasn’t got very good facilities for compromise, or for taking into account other people’s feelings.” This was a moment, he said, in which his preferred Marxist lens—men and women make their own histories, but not the terms of their own making—proved useful as a way of situating the personal within the sociological. He observed, “We are all individuals with our own psychological makeup and impulses, and yet we find ourselves in vises of social and economic situations, which means that we are bent in and out of shape—and we’re bent out of shape by the psychologies of our families. So navigating the space between those—that you can act outside of your material interests, but will you?— that is a good area for where the conflict between human beings happens.”

As part of his background research for shooting in the area, Armstrong had been reading “ War in Val d’Orcia ,” the 1947 memoir of Iris Origo, the daughter of an American diplomat and Anglo-Irish aristocrat. Born in 1902, Origo, who became a biographer, was reared by her mother in a Medici palace in Florence, and married a member of the Italian nobility. In the twenties, the couple moved to La Foce, an estate in the Val d’Orcia. Origo’s memoir chronicles, in diary form, the effects on the region of the advent of the Second World War, during which Origo and her husband took in children who had been evacuated from the cities and also housed fifty British prisoners of war.

In reading the book, Armstrong had been struck—just as he had been after the table read of the “Succession” pilot, in November, 2016—by how quickly people adapt to altered conditions: a change in political circumstance; the onset of a pandemic; even the encroaching horrors of war. “There’s a moment when Mussolini is deposed, in 1943, and there’s a sense of hope—the Allies are coming, and it feels like it might be the day after tomorrow. But there’s still two more years of the war to go, and Iris Origo doesn’t know it,” he said. He had momentarily pulled down the face mask that covered his nose and mouth, in order to speak more clearly. “It’s just very human, that thing of adjusting yourself to a new position,” he went on. “Within seconds, the new world feels completely real and vivid, and you’re very quickly accommodated to it.” Then Armstrong raised his mask as he was called back to a video monitor, to watch another take. Snook and Macfadyen artfully interacted, with subtle variations in tone: more or less playful callousness on the part of Shiv, more or less submerged hurt and anger on the part of Tom. The characters moved and adjusted to their opulent constraints, in an evolving struggle whose conclusion—arriving in a future season—Armstrong had imagined but had yet to write. ♦

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

Superyachts on film are not uncommon: The Bond series is famous for its fast cars and sleek luxury yachts, while recent Netflix film Murder Mystery was filmed aboard 60m/198ft motor yacht SARASTAR , but M/Y SOLANDGE has brought new heights of glamour to the small screen as the notable backdrop in Season Two of hit TV series Succession .

SOLANDGE top deck – star of the HBO TV series Succession

The comedy-drama centres around the Roy family as patriarchal figure Logan Roy, who owns and controls a worldwide media conglomerate, declines in health and his children are sized up for taking his place as head of the empire.

Mega yacht SOLANDGE

SOLANDGE is a yacht worthy of a media mogul, boasting an enormous amount of onboard amenities, a supply of water toys just as large and exquisite living areas from the beach-club to the bedrooms. She was refitted in 2019 to have her looking better than ever, and she’s available for charter throughout the year.

SUCCESS VIDEO TRAILER

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 Espen Oeino , while the interiors from Rodriguez Interiors transport guests to a more elegant age using classical styling, golden accents and detailed patterns of Eastern origin.

Impeccable service by the professional and highly trained crew is offered at all times

Built with a steel hull and aluminium superstructure, she provides an excellent balance between stability and power, reaching a top speed of 17.5 knots.

Logan Roy (Brian Cox) on the top deck of the yacht.Photograph by Graeme Hunter / HBO

Accommodation

The lavish on board accommodation provides for up to 12 guests in a choice of eight en-suite cabins: 1 Master suite, 1 VIP stateroom, 3 double cabins, 2 double cabins convertible to twins and 1 twin cabin.

Master suite offering utmost in luxury and unprecedented views

Master suite offering the utmost in luxury and unprecedented views

The majority of the guest accommodation is placed on the main deck, where the elevated position provides better views and more natural light into the spacious and light interiors. Each has a classical appearance using light coloured wood and inlays in mother of pearl, and a subtle Middle Eastern motif in the patterns.

Master stateroom with a private deck area

The guest companionway is unique in offering hot and refrigerated drinks as well as snacks so that guests can get what they desire late at night without needing to call the crew.

Owner’s bathroom – Photo by Klaus Jordan

The Owner’s suite is a part of its own dedicated deck, which includes an office and separate his-and-hers dressing rooms and bathrooms. There is a salon more casual in appearance the opulent main deck lounge, and the bedroom itself contains hand-made Italian furniture and a stunning chandelier above the central bed. Its forward position overlooks the bow through 180-degree windows, where there is a private spa pool.

One of the best spots to enjoy the views while relaxing in the Jacuzzi

There are also 15 cabins to accommodate a professional and highly skilled crew of 29, ensuring that guests are treated to a truly indulgent experience while on board, from health and beauty treatments in the spa massage room to Scuba diving deep underwater.

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

Day or night, guests will be tempted outside to live under the Mediterranean sky by the choice of sumptuous seating designed for cocktail evenings while dockside or roaring parties away from the city lights. The sweeping central staircase from the lower deck to the main deck aft makes a statement by itself and is a great opportunity for a photo-shoot before heading in to view the splendour within.

Close up of the aft decks

Sunbeds, a swimming pool and stern-side seating only partially fill the spaces across each deck, leaving plenty of room for dancing the night away or yoga in the fresh morning air.

The contra-flow swimming pool

M/Y SOLANDGE can accommodate hundreds of guests for dockside events, who have plenty of choice when it comes to refreshments from the wet bars. On the Owner’s deck and the sundeck, where a forward Jacuzzi lets you wallow under the stars. The Owner has a private Jacuzzi and sunpads on the foredeck that’s perfect for lazy afternoons after a big celebration or nightcaps and stargazing before bed.

Aft deck sunbathing

The exceptional decor by Rodriguez Interiors is what has given luxury yacht SOLANDGE her character and was no doubt a deciding factor in selecting her over many other options for the superyacht in Succession: Opulence is around every corner and guests ascending the main deck aft staircase will be awestruck by the extravagant main salon where golden tones in the furnishings and light fixtures are contrasted by cool blues in the surrounding wall panelling.

Ultra-luxurious interiors with amazing attention to detail and carefully selected materials and furnishings

The Owner’s salon meanwhile has a comfortable lounge setting in front of a widescreen TV, a fireplace with armchairs and a games table for entertaining small groups on cosy nights indoors.

The most impressive of all however is the Tree of Life at the centre of the stairwell, which stretches from the lower deck all the way up to the sundeck.

Central staircase – a true work of art

Special Features

Motor yacht SOLANDGE is expensive for a reason: She lavishes upon her guests almost every modern convenience conceivable. The beach club alone contains a DJ station, a dance floor hiding a spa pool beneath, and a golden bar with 14 matching stools. Across the decks there is also a massage room and hair salon, an indoor cinema, a sauna, steam room and gym plus a helipad for getting to and from the airport in style.

Amazing beach club with shower

Water Toys and Equipment

There is an extensive collection of water toys on board to suit all ages, interests and fitness levels, and with status as an Approved RYA Water Sports Centre and a Certified PADI dive centre, guests have the opportunity to earn a jet ski and Scuba diving license during their time on board. The collection contains:

6 x Paddleboards
5 x wakeboards
3 x Yamaha Waverunners (2 pax)
3 x Seabobs (F5 model)
3 x inflatable kayaks
2 x surf boards
1 x Jet ski
fishing gear
snorkelling equipment
Scuba diving equipment, and

Beach club set up for easy access to the toys and water

There is also a well-equipped gym and the swimming pool onboard provide guests with additional options to wear off energy during a cruise.

Charter Locations

Luxury yacht SOLANDGE is available for charter throughout the Mediterranean, from the Balearic Islands of Spain to the ancient majesty of Antalya, Turkey. The summer season is when she is most in-demand and she is most coveted for events such as the Cannes Film Festival and Monaco Grand Prix. Christmas and the New Year are also popular times for charter yachts and it is advisable to book ahead to secure her for your own special occasion.

The yacht has an amazing amount of deck space and areas to unwind and relax

Charter Price

As of winter 2019, luxury yacht SOLANDGE is available for charter from $1,000,000 USD (€1,136,000)* per week plus expenses such as food, drinks, fuel and taxes. (*the price at the time of publication, please contact CharterWorld for up to date rates and information)

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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 .

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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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

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 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

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 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

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 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

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

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

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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Inside the Shocking Sicily Yacht Tragedy: 7 People Dead After Rare Luxury Boat Disaster

There was a violent storm, but even then, luxury yachts are built to weather such events. so why did this boat sink off the coast of sicily, leaving seven people dead.

Nobody was trying to reach the lowest depths of the ocean or otherwise test the boundaries of human endurance .

But what was supposed to be a routine pleasure cruise aboard a superyacht turned deadly all the same on the morning of Aug. 19 when the 184-foot Bayesian got caught in a storm and sank off the coast of Sicily .

"I can't remember the last time I read about a vessel going down quickly like that," Stephen Richter of SAR Marine Consulting told NBC News . "You know, completely capsizing and going down that quickly, a vessel of that nature, a yacht of that size."

Of the 22 people onboard, including crew, seven people died. The last of the bodies was recovered Aug. 23, an expectedly sad coda to what had already been a tragic week as the search for answers as to how this happened got underway.

And to be sure, every minute of the Bayesian's ill-fated outing is being fiercely scrutinized, starting with the general seaworthiness of the vessel itself.

Because, frankly, this was a freak occurrence.

"Boats of this size, they’re taking passengers on an excursion or a holiday," Richter explained. "They are not going to put them in situations where it may be dangerous or it may be uncomfortable, so this storm that popped up was obviously an anomaly. These vessels that carry passengers, they’re typically very well-maintained, very well-appointed."

But in this case, a $40 million yacht sank, seven people are dead—including a billionaire tech mogul and his 18-year-old daughter—and morbid fascination doesn't need a second wind.

Here is how the story of the Sicily yacht tragedy has unfolded so far:

What happened to the yacht that sank off the coast of Sicily?

The Bayesian had set off from the Sicilian port of Milazzo on Aug. 14 at capacity with 12 guests and 10 crewmembers aboard.

The aluminum-hulled vessel was built in 2008 by Italian shipbuilder Perini Navi and registered in the U.K. Cruise sites listed it as available for charter at $215,000 per week, per the Associated Press.

On the morning of Aug. 19, the superyacht was anchored off the coast of Porticello, a small fishing village in the Sicilian province of Palermo (also the name of Sicily's capital city), when a violent storm hit.

The vessel "suddenly sank" at around 5 a.m. local time, seemingly due to "the terrible weather conditions," the City Council of Bagheria announced shortly afterward, per NBC News .

At the time, only one person was confirmed dead—the ship's chef—but six others were said to be missing. The 15 survivors—who managed to make it onto an inflatable life boat, according to emergency officials—were rescued that morning by the crew of another yacht that had been nearby when the storm hit.

"Fifteen people inside," Karsten Borner , the Dutch captain of the ship that was able to help (the Sir Robert Baden Powell), told reporters afterward, per Reuters. "Four people were injured, three heavily injured, and we brought them to our ship. Then we communicated with the coast guard, and after some time, the coast guard came and later picked up injured people."

When the storm hit, his boat ran into "a strong hurricane gust," Borner said, "and we had to start the engine to keep the ship in an angled position."

They "managed to keep the ship in position," he continued, but once the storm died down, they realized the other boat that had been behind them—the Bayesian—was gone.

The wreck ended up settling 165 feet below the surface, according to Italy's national fire department.

Fire officials said that divers, a motorboat and a helicopter were deployed to search for the missing.

Meanwhile, footage was captured of the ship capsizing on closed-circuit TV about a half-mile away from where it was anchored.

In the video obtained by NBC News, the illuminated 250-foot aluminum mast of the ship appears to list severely to one side before disappearing completely. Survivors recalled having just a few minutes to literally abandon ship.

"They told me that suddenly they found themselves catapulted into the water without even understanding how they had got there," Dr. Fabio Genco , head of the Palermo Emergency Medical Services, told NBC News Aug. 22. "And that the whole thing seems to have lasted from 3 to 5 minutes."

Genco said he got to Porticello about an hour after the Bayesian capsized.

Survivors "told me that it was all dark, that the yacht hoisted itself up and then went down," he said. "All the objects were falling on them. That’s why I immediately made sure, by asking them questions, if they had any internal injuries."

Why did the yacht sink?

Italian prosecutors are investigating to determine what transpired before the boat went down, according to NBC News.

Meanwhile, the CEO of shipbuilder Perini's parent company The Italian Sea Group defended the vessel itself as "unsinkable."

Perini boats "are the safest in the most absolute sense," Giovanni Costantino told Sky News Aug. 22 . What happened to the Bayesian "put me in a state of sadness on one side and of disbelief on the other," he continued. "This incident sounds like an unbelievable story, both technically and as a fact."

Costantino said it had to have been human error that led to the boat sinking, declaring, "Mistakes were made."

"Everything that was done reveals a very long summation of errors," he told newspaper Corriere della Sera Aug. 21, in an interview translated from Italian. "The people should not have been in the cabins, the boat should not have been at anchor."

The weather was "all predictable," he continued, adding that the storm "was fully legible in all the weather charts. It couldn't have been ignored."

The yacht's captain, identified as James Cutfield of New Zealand, was taken to Termini Imerese hospital for treatment. From there, he told La Repubblica , per Sky News , that he didn't see the storm coming.

Borner, the captain of the ship that rescued the 15 Bayesian survivors, told NBC News that he noticed the storm come in at 4 a.m. local time, and saw what looked to him like a waterspout, a type of tornado that forms above water.

The International Centre for Waterspout Research posted on X Aug. 19 that it had "confirmed 18 waterspouts today off the coasts of Italy. Some were powerful waterspouts, one of which may have been responsible for the sinking of a large yacht off of Sicily."

Borner said he didn't know why the Bayesian sank so quickly, guessing "it may have something to do with the mast, which was incredibly long." (A tall mast, even with its sails down, means there's more surface area exposed to wind, which can result in tipping.)

Confirming that one person was dead and six unaccounted for immediately following the wreck on Aug. 19, Salvo Cocina of Sicily's civil protection agency told reporters that a waterspout had struck the area overnight.

"They were in the wrong place at the wrong time," he said.

Who were the seven people who died when the yacht Bayesian sank?

The tragedy initially became headline news because billionaire tech mogul Mike Lynch —"Britain's Bill Gates ," some U.K. media called him—was among the missing. His body was ultimately recovered Aug. 22 .

The 59-year-old founder of software firm Autonomy had been on the trip with his wife Angela Bacares and their 18-year-old, Oxford-bound daughter Hannah to celebrate his recent acquittal in the U.S. on fraud and conspiracy charges stemming from the $11.7 billion purchase of his company by Hewlett-Packard in 2011.

In a bizarre turn of events, Lynch's co-defendant at trial, Stephen Chamberlain , the former vice president of finance at Autonomy, died after being taken off life support following a road accident on Aug. 17. Chamberlain's attorney told Reuters Aug. 20 that his friend and client had been out for a run when he was "fatally struck" by a car.

Meanwhile, multiple people who contributed to Lynch's defense were on the cruise with him and his family.

The bodies of Morgan Stanley International Chairman Jonathan Bloomer —who testified on Lynch's behalf—and his wife Judy Bloomer , as well as lawyer Chris Morvillo , a partner at the U.S. firm Clifford Chance, and his wife Neda Morvillo , a jewelry designer, were recovered on Aug. 21 .

In a LinkedIn post thanking the team that successfully defended Lynch, Morvillo wrote, per Sky News , "And, finally, a huge thank you to my patient and incredible wife, Neda Morvillo, and my two strong, brilliant, and beautiful daughters, Sabrina Morvillo and Sophia Morvillo . None of this would have been possible without your love and support. I am so glad to be home. And they all lived happily ever after…"

The first casualty confirmed Aug. 19 was the ship's Canadian-Antiguan chef, later identified as Recaldo Thomas .

"He was a one-of-a-kind special human being," a friend of Thomas told The Independent . "Incredibly talented, contagious smile and laugh, an incredible voice with a deep love of the ocean and the moon. I spoke to him nearly every day. He loved his life his friends and his job."

Hannah's body was the last of the missing six to be found , with divers bringing her remains ashore on Aug. 23.

Lynch and Bacares, who was rescued, also shared a 21-year-old daughter, according to The Times.

While awaiting trial, Lynch—who maintained his innocence throughout the proceedings—had spent 13 months under house arrest in San Francisco. Back home in London afterward, he admitted to The Times in July that he'd been afraid of dying in prison if he'd been found guilty. (He faced a possible 25-year sentence.)

"It's bizarre, but now you have a second life," he reflected. "The question is, what do you want to do with it?"

(E!, NBC News and Sky News are all members of the Comcast family.)

Watch CBS News

5th body recovered from Mike Lynch's family yacht off Sicily as questions mount over luxury vessel's sinking

By Anna Matranga

Updated on: August 22, 2024 / 10:48 AM EDT / CBS News

Rome — Divers recovered the body of a fifth victim of the Bayesian superyacht wreck Thursday morning, Sicily Civil Protection Chief Salvo Cocina confirmed to CBS News, and the Reuters news agency cited Italian Interior Ministry official Massimo Mariani as saying it was the body of Mike Lynch, the British tech magnate whose wife owned the vessel.

Italian Coast Guard spokesperson Vincenzo Zagarola told CBS News that teams were still working to recover the body of the sixth and final person left missing when the boat went down. The six bodies had remained stuck inside the 184-foot luxury yacht for days after it sank early Monday morning off the coast of Palermo, Sicily in a severe thunderstorm.

Four bodies were retrieved Wednesday from the Bayesian, which was resting on the seafloor at a 90 degree angle at a depth of over 160 feet. The vessel's position and items that moved around inside the ill-fated yacht made recovery efforts slow and hazardous.

Italian authorities have not officially identified the remains recovered from the Bayesian, which belonged to Lynch's wife Angela Bacares. She was among the 15 people who managed to escape from the boat as it sank quickly on Monday morning, but Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah were among those left missing.

Another victim, the Bayesian superyacht's chef, was found dead soon after the boat capsized.

Along with Lynch and his daughter, the technology mogul's American lawyer Chris Morvillo and his wife Neda, and British banker Jonathan Bloomer and his wife, were believed to have been trapped in the yacht when it sank.

Questions as to how the state-of-the-art boat could have gone down so quickly have mounted steadily since the accident.

Italian media were reporting Thursday that, after questioning survivors and witnesses, Italian prosecutors had opened an official investigation into a possible "culpable shipwreck." No individuals had been named as potential suspects.

On Thursday, Giovanni Costantino, head of the Italian Sea Group, which owns the company Perini Navi, which built the Bayesian in 2008, blamed human error.

"A Perini ship resisted Hurricane Katrina, a Category 5 [hurricane]. Does it seem to you that it can't resist a tornado from here?" he remarked to the newspaper Corriere della Sera. "It is good practice when the ship is at anchor to have a guard on the bridge, and if there was one he could not have failed to see the storm coming. Instead, it took on water with the guests still in the cabin. ... They ended up in a trap, those poor people ended up like mice."

One possible factor could have been that the ship's keel — a fin-like structure that sticks out from the bottom of the boat, designed to provide stability and counterweight to the huge mast — was not fully deployed. The yacht had a retractable keel that could be raised for entry into shallow harbors. But a raised keel at sea would have made the ship much more vulnerable to instability in the strong winds that struck early Monday morning.

When asked whether divers had seen the ship's keel in a raised position, a spokesman for the Italian Coast Guard told CBS News that only the prosecutor investigating the incident could confirm such information but that the Coast Guard "was not denying" it.

The ship's captain, 51-year-old New Zealand national James Cutfileld, was questioned for two hours by prosecutors on Thursday, according to Italian media.

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Five bodies found inside superyacht that sank off Sicily

PORTICELLO, Sicily — Divers recovered four bodies Wednesday from inside a superyacht that sank in a sudden storm off Sicily , Salvatore Cocina, director of the island's Civil Protection Agency, confirmed to NBC News.

Cocina later confirmed to Sky News that a fifth body had been found and was being brought to shore. One passenger remains missing.

The identities of the bodies were not immediately released. Their recovery follows a dayslong search in the deep waters off Italy where British tech tycoon Mike Lynch and several others were believed to be trapped in the hull. Fifteen of the 22 people aboard survived.

The rest had been missing since early Monday, when the Bayesian was caught in the storm anchored off the coast of Porticello, a village near the Sicilian capital city, Palermo.

The body of the ship’s cook, identified as Recaldo Thomas, a Canadian Antiguan national, was recovered Monday.

On Wednesday, NBC News witnessed what appeared to be at least three body bags being lifted from fire department boats after they pulled into port at Porticello. It was unclear whose bodies they were. Some were later transferred to ambulances and driven away from the dock.

Lynch’s 18-year-old daughter, Hannah; Morgan Stanley International Chairman Jonathan Bloomer and his wife, Judy; and Clifford Chance lawyer Chris Morvillo and his wife, Neda, are also missing.

The Bayesian is owned by a firm linked to Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, who was among the survivors rescued by a nearby vessel after they got into a lifeboat.

Built by the Italian shipbuilder Perini Navi in 2008, the U.K.-registered yacht could carry 12 guests and a crew of up to 10, according to online specialist boating sites. Its nearly 250-foot mast is the tallest aluminum sailing mast in the world, according to CharterWorld Luxury Yacht Charters.

Regularly described in U.K. media as “Britain’s Bill Gates,” Lynch was acquitted of fraud by a San Francisco jury this year, stemming from the sale of his software company Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion in 2011.

The Mediterranean sailing vacation was designed to be a celebration for Lynch, who brought Bloomer, who testified in his defense, and Morvillo, one of his U.S. lawyers, on the trip.

Lynch's co-defendant Stephen Chamberlain was not aboard the Bayesian, but in what appears to be a tragic coincidence, a car struck and killed him Saturday as he was jogging in a village about 68 miles north of London, local police said.

Claudio Lavanga and Claudia Rizzo reported from Porticello. Henry Austin reported from London.

Claudio Lavanga is Rome-based foreign correspondent for NBC News.

Claudia Rizzo is an Italy based journalist.

Henry Austin is a senior editor for NBC News Digital based in London.

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Everything We Know About the Final Moments of the Passengers Who Died in the Sicily Yacht Tragedy

Five of the seven victims had been "searching for air pockets" as the luxury yacht sank on Aug. 19, authorities said

PERINI NAVI PRESS OFFICE/HANDOUT/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

The luxury yacht Bayesian that sank off the coast of Sicily on Monday, Aug. 19, resulted in the deaths of six passengers and one crew member.

Less than a week later, on Saturday, Aug. 24, Ambrogio Cartosio, the Chief Prosecutor of Termini Imerese, announced that Italian authorities were launching a manslaughter investigation into the sinking , and he identified all of the victims.

The seven victims who died in the tragic sinking were yacht chef Recaldo Thomas; British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch and his daughter, Hannah Lynch; Christopher Morvillo and his wife, Neda ; and Morgan Stanley International chairman Jonathan Bloomer and his wife, Judy .

As authorities attempt to answer questions about what exactly led to the sinking of the 183-foot British-flagged vessel — which went down during a "violent storm,” the Italian Coast Guard previously told PEOPLE in a statement — here is what we currently know about the victims’ final moments.

FAMILY HANDOUT/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

During the Aug. 24 press conference, Girolamo Bentivoglio Fiandra, head of the Palermo Fire Brigade, revealed that as the Bayesian began going down early Monday morning, “It was quite clear that people were trying to hide in the cabins.”

“In the left-hand side, we found the first 5 bodies in the left-hand side cabins, and the final body on the right-hand side,” Fiandra said. “We found them on the highest part of the ship, which was closer to the surface. The vessel had three cabins on each side.”

The five victims, who "took refuge” on the luxury yacht’s left side, had been "searching for air pockets" in a final attempt at survival," he added.

HANDOUT/Vigili del Fuoco/AFP via Getty

As for why the victims were in the cabins in the first place, Giovanni Costantino — who leads The Italian Sea Group, the company that now owns Perini Navi, which built the Bayesian back in 2008 — told CNN it was due to a “very long sum of errors."

"Everything that has been done reveals a very long sum of errors,” he said in his interview, translated from Italian. “The people should not have been in the cabins, the boat should not have been at anchor. And then why didn't the crew know about the incoming disturbance?”

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE's free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

Prior to the storm and subsequent sinking, some of the luxury yacht’s passengers were in celebration mode. They had been commemorating the recent acquittal of one of the victims, Lynch, 59, a source close to the survivors previously told PEOPLE.

Two months ago, Lynch was acquitted on all counts of a series of fraud and conspiracy charges he faced in the U.S. after a years-long legal battle dating back to 2018.

Patrick McMullan/Patrick McMullan via Getty

He celebrated the acquittal on the Bayesian with his daughter and his wife, Angela Bacare, who was rescued along with 14 others on board.

Also celebrating were Morvillo, 59, who represented Lynch in the case, and Bloomer, 70, who was a close friend of the tech entrepreneur.

What is known about the sinking of a luxury yacht off the coast of Sicily and those aboard

Emergency services at the scene of the search for a missing boat, in Porticello, southern Italy, on Aug. 20.

PORTICELLO, Sicily — Specialist cave divers working in 12-minute underwater shifts were searching Tuesday for six missing passengers and crew, including British tech tycoon Mike Lynch, believed to be in the submerged wreck of a luxury yacht that was slammed by a powerful storm and swiftly sank off Sicily.

The sleek yacht, named the Bayesian, was carrying a crew of 10 people and 12 passengers when it suddenly sank near the Mediterranean island that is part of Italy at about 4 a.m. on Monday. One body has been recovered and 15 people survived.

Fire rescue officials have said the six believed to remain in the sailboat's hull will be considered missing until they are located in the wreckage.

Here's what we know so far about the sinking and those who were on board.

What happened?

Italian civil protection officials believe a sudden and fierce storm that battered the coast of Sicily in the early hours of Monday whipped up a waterspout in the exact spot where the 56-meter (184-foot) British-flagged Bayesian was moored.

Karsten Borner, the captain of another yacht moored nearby, said he saw the Bayesian during the storm but when the wild weather passed it was gone and he saw only a red flare lighting the night sky, the Italian news agency ANSA and the Giornale di Sicilia newspaper reported.

Borner and one of his crew boarded their tender and found a lifeboat carrying 15 people, some of them injured. They took them aboard their yacht and alerted the coast guard.

Rescue authorities said the wreck was resting at a depth of 50 meters (163 feet) about a half mile offshore of the picturesque fishing village of Porticello.

Who was on board?

British tech magnate Mike Lynch walks into federal court in San Francisco on March 26.

Among the missing is 59-year-old tech tycoon Mike Lynch, sometimes described as the British Bill Gates. Lynch was acquitted in June of all charges in a US fraud trial linked to the $11 billion sale of his software company Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard in 2011.

Lynch still faced a potentially huge bill stemming from a civil case in London that HP mostly won during 2022. Damages haven’t been determined in that case, but HP is seeking $4 billion. Lynch made more than $800 million from the Autonomy sale.

A Cambridge-educated mathematician, Lynch made his name running Autonomy, which made a search engine that could pore through emails and other internal business documents to help companies find vital information more quickly.

Lynch’s 18-year-old daughter Hannah was reportedly among the missing. His wife, Angela Bacares, and 14 other people survived.

Among others still missing Tuesday, according to the civil protection agency, were one of Lynch’s US lawyers, Christopher Morvillo of Clifford Chance, and Morvillo’s wife, Neda. Morvillo was regarded as an elite defense lawyer and was also a federal prosecutor in New York after 9/11.

Also missing was Jonathan Bloomer, the non-executive chairman of Morgan Stanley International, and his wife, Judy. He is the former head of the Autonomy audit committee and testified for the defense at Lynch’s trial.

Bloomer was also chair of the Hiscox Group, an insurer that does business on the Lloyd’s of London market.

“We are deeply shocked and saddened by this tragic event,” Hiscox CEO Aki Hussain said in a statement.

Among the survivors was Charlotte Golunski, who said she momentarily lost hold of her 1-year-old daughter Sofia in the water, but then managed to grab her and hold her up over the waves until a lifeboat inflated and they were both pulled to safety, ANSA reported. The father, identified by ANSA as James Emslie, also survived.

The Dutch foreign ministry said a Dutch man survived. The ministry, citing privacy, did not release his identity.

One body was recovered on Monday, identified as the on-board chef.

What is the Bayesian?

The Bayesian was a luxury yacht built in 2008 by the Italian firm Perini Nav. It was known for its single 75-meter (246-feet) aluminum mast — one of the world’s tallest. Online charter sites listed it for rent for up to 195,000 euros (about $215,000) a week.

Its registered owner is listed as Revtom Ltd., based on the Isle of Man, according to online maritime database Equasis. Lynch’s wife is listed as Revtom’s sole owner, according to corporate registration documents from the Isle of Man.

The yacht's name is an apparent reference to “Bayesian inference,” one of the two main approaches to statistical machine learning and the one that was used by Autonomy.

What is a waterspout?

Waterspouts are tornadoes that form over water and can happen when a storm moves across warm water.

According to the US National Ocean Service, there are two types of waterspouts — fair-weather and tornadic.

Tornadic waterspouts “have the same characteristics as a land tornado. They are associated with severe thunderstorms, and are often accompanied by high winds and seas, large hail, and frequent dangerous lightning,” the service says on its website.

While scientists haven't attributed the specific event to climate change, average monthly surface temperatures have been at record highs for months. Hotter air can hold more moisture, making heavier storms more likely.

Sicily has been baking under intense heat this summer, and the United Nations’ panel of climate change experts notes the Mediterranean Sea is particularly vulnerable to climate change, with warming rates roughly 20 percent higher than the global average.

The map above shows where a superyacht sunk off the coast of Sicily on Aug. 19.

How rare is it for a huge sailboat like this to capsize?

Experts say it is extraordinarily rare for a luxury sailboat of this size to capsize due to weather events.

“This just doesn’t happen. You know, boats sink because things like keels fall off, or they run aground and breach the hull ... whereas just from a weather angle, a boat that big being pushed over on its side is absolutely extraordinary,” said Skip Novak, a lifelong sailor who has taken part in multiple round the world yacht races and written books about sailing.

Novak said he believed that strong gusts likely pushed the yacht over 90 degrees to its side, and the vessel did not recover because of the weight of the huge mast and because it was anchored. He suggested that internal doors were likely not closed, and water quickly poured in to sink the vessel.

“When you’re at anchor, even if it’s blowing with a storm in the Mediterranean, you rarely shut the whole boat down because nobody expects something like this to happen," Novak told The Associated Press. “So if the boat wasn’t completely watertight at the deck, you’d have flooding going in. It would take a couple minutes and that would be it."

What happens next?

As the search for the missing continues, authorities already have begun trying to piece together exactly what happened.

Prosecutors from the Sicilian town of Termini Imerese have opened an investigation, as is normal in such events even when no suspects are identified. To date, they have not commented publicly.

The British Marine Accident Investigation Branch said four of its inspectors were being deployed to Palermo.

Corder reported from The Hague, Netherlands. Associated Press writer Sylvia Hui in London contributed to this report.

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Final Body Is Recovered From Yacht That Sank Off Sicily

Hannah Lynch, the 18-year-old daughter of the British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch, was on board a yacht that was hit by a storm and went down in the early hours on Monday.

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Rescue workers in orange wet suits on the deck of a boat with a green body bag.

By Emma Bubola and Elisabetta Povoledo

Emma Bubola reported from Porticello, Italy, and Elisabetta Povoledo from Pallanza, Italy.

For nearly a week after a violent storm sent a luxury yacht to the bottom of the sea off the coast of Sicily, Italian scuba divers plunged deep underwater, moving through ropes and fallen objects inside the yacht in a desperate search for the six people missing.

On Friday, the recovery of the body of Hannah Lynch, 18, put an end to the wrenching search and to the slim hopes that any of the missing people might have survived.

Ms. Lynch, the daughter of the British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch, who also died in the yacht’s sinking, was the last person to be formally unaccounted for since Monday after tragedy struck a group that had been celebrating her father’s acquittal in a high-profile fraud case.

There were 10 crew members and 12 passengers on board the 180-foot vessel, the Bayesian, when it was hit by a storm and went down about 4.30 a.m. on Monday, the boat’s management company said on Friday.

Fifteen survived.

The body of the ship’s cook, Recaldo Thomas, was found on Monday, a few hours after a downpour hit the northwestern coast of Sicily, near the port of Porticello, where the yacht had been anchored.

But it took several days to recover the bodies of the six passengers who were apparently trapped inside the yacht: Mr. Lynch and Ms. Lynch; Jonathan Bloomer, the chairman of Morgan Stanley International; his wife, Judy Bloomer; Christopher J. Morvillo, a lawyer at Clifford Chance; and his wife, Neda Morvillo.

On Friday, a round of applause could be heard from the firefighter’s tent set up on the dock in Porticello after the last body was pulled out in what the corps described as a “complex” search operation at a depth of about 165 feet. The firefighters said they had made 123 immersions into the sea to try to retrieve the bodies.

The body bag was then loaded onto an ambulance. A local man had left a small wooden cross on the rocks in front of the dock where the bodies were brought ashore.

Mr. Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, was among those who managed to reach the safety of a raft. They were rescued by a sailing schooner that had been bobbing about 150 yards from the yacht.

In a statement, the family thanked the search teams and said that it was enduring a “time of unspeakable grief.”

“The Lynch family is devastated, in shock and is being comforted and supported by family and friends,” the statement added.

As prosecutors from the nearby city of Termini Imerese began conducting interviews with the survivors and possible witnesses, the crew and passengers of the Bayesian have been confined to a local hotel, where the news media have been denied access.

Salvatore Cocina, the head of Sicily’s civil protection agency, said on Thursday that the survivors had turned down the psychological assistance his department had offered to them.

In Porticello, the sprawling presence of rescue services made a haunting backdrop for an otherwise tranquil port town. People sunbathed and ate ricotta-filled pastries, and stores selling sandals and dried fruit opened as normal, while coast guard and firefighting vessels came and went from the shore, taking scuba divers out to the shipwreck.

Other reminders of the tragedy could be seen along the coast, among palm trees and ice cream shops, with groups of onlookers staring out at the sea, now tranquil and flat.

Local and national news organizations have complained that prosecutors have not issued a statement or held a news conference. Prosecutors may shed more light on the yacht’s sinking when they hold a news conference on Saturday.

The marine accident investigation branch of the British transportation ministry was also looking into the shipwreck of the vessel, which was registered in Britain.

One of the major questions is what caused the boat to sink: Was it the fault of the boat maker, of the crew or of a powerful act of nature — or some combination of the three? None of those who were onboard the Bayesian have spoken publicly.

The luxury yacht, built by the Italian manufacturer Perini Navi and launched in 2008, had the second-tallest aluminum mast in the world, according to its makers.

Giovanni Costantino, the chief executive of the Italian Sea Group, which in 2022 bought Perini Navi, has been assertive in defending the design and construction of the yacht, saying that the Bayesian would be “unsinkable” if the proper procedures were followed.

But yacht design experts have cautioned that the lesson of the Titanic, the ocean liner that sank on its 1912 maiden voyage, showed that no vessel, no matter how robust, was worthy of that label.

Nautilus International, a maritime-focused labor union, criticized any implication that the crew had been at fault, especially at this stage. In a statement , the union’s general secretary, Mark Dickinson, said, “Experience tells us that maritime tragedies are always the result of multiple, interconnected factors,” and he urged people to refrain from drawing any conclusions until a thorough investigation had been carried out.

The investigation into the causes will take months, prosecutors said.

Michael J. de la Merced contributed reporting.

Emma Bubola is a Times reporter based in Rome. More about Emma Bubola

Elisabetta Povoledo is a reporter based in Rome, covering Italy, the Vatican and the culture of the region. She has been a journalist for 35 years. More about Elisabetta Povoledo

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