I Don’t Care If His Life Is Loveless, Connor Roy Is Pure Evil

There’s no shortage of people with truly rancid vibes in Succession. But in a recent interview with Esquire, Keiran Culkin (who plays Roman) proposed that Connor Roy is the most evil character in the show. It’s a big claim and, since the world is in full Succession mode, I thought it warranted a deep dive. 

Played to bombastic falsely benevolent perfection by Alan Ruck, Connor is the oft-forgotten eldest son of family patriarch Logan Roy. But unlike his three younger siblings, Connor has never been considered as a serious successor to the Waystar Royco throne. While these reasons have never been made explicitly clear, it’s heavily implied that Connor’s mother was institutionalised for mental illness and that Logan abandoned Connor during this time likely because he saw Connor as merely a faulty son of a faulty mother.

Each of Logan’s children are endowed with one or more of his worst qualities. They don’t call it a cycle of abuse for nothing. Much like his father, Connor shares a total disconnect from reality that prevents him from evaluating the morality of his actions. But, unlike his father, he doesn’t have any instinct for business to come out on top. An evil yet pitiful combination that’s most obvious in his politics. 

They’re Played For Laughs, But Connor’s Politics Are Absolutely Diabolical

Connor’s cluelessness plays a core comedic role in the show. As his siblings vie for their father’s favour to an increasingly tragic end, Connor Roy is consumed with a delusional bid for the presidency as a libertarian independent and “man of the people”. It’s a goal so misguided, it even earns the condescension of family parasite Cousin Greg.

There’s some comfort in how unlikely it is that Connor can win at this point. As Greg points out, his approval rating of one percent could not be lower. However, there is something frightening in Connor’s blind determination to see himself in the most powerful position in the country purely because he can and wishes to enact his will upon the social fabric of the land. 

Even after his own father backs neo-fascist Jeryd Mencken, Connor is undeterred, running on vague policies like waiving taxes (to protect his own wealth). As Ruck told Variety, Connor views the presidency as a “popularity contest” he can win to get the attention he is always denied. 

Disrupting democracy and poisoning public discourse with lies so you can get the attention daddy never gave you reaches  a corny James Bond level of villainy that’s easily dismissed but difficult to stomach in such a realistic setting. 

Willa Is In Connor’s Prison

Willa Ferreyya (played by Justine Lupe; possibly named as a cheeky nod to the show’s producer Will Ferrell) is Connor’s… partner. She’s also, essentially, his prisoner. When we meet them in Season 1, Willa and Connor seem sweet enough as a couple, but it is quickly revealed that Willa is a high-end escort Connor has hired after they connected through Roman.

It goes without saying that there isn’t anything inherently wrong with the existence or employment of escorts in real life. But Connor’s use of Willa’s services turns into the malignant and manipulative possession of an individual whose fear is only acknowledged as a humiliating tidbit when the Roys joke about her as a “prostitute”.

Over three seasons, Connor isolates Willa from her old life, telling her to quit her escort job and move to his remote ranch so they can be exclusive. In exchange, he promises to financially support her dreams of being a playwright – so she reluctantly agrees. However, her career as a playwright amounts to a failed theatrical run that is reviewed poorly even by Waystar press and Connor himself. With no play, no career, no friends, and no financial independence, Willa is essentially trapped by Connor in an unrequited, financially abusive relationship that’s treated as a family joke. 

While we never see Connor physically abuse Willa, it’s clear she fears his retribution. When she angers him, like at Shiv’s wedding, where she cracks a joke about Connor doing nothing with his life, he becomes cold and insulting. In his attempt to schmooze with campaign investors, he informs Willa that he’s agreed to have her stay with a rich venture capitalist as a means to get funds for his campaign — which she has not consented to. Despite forcing her out of her profession, it’s clear Connor is happy to pimp Willa out against her will if it means gaining the power he so desperately wants. 

I’m sure many people don’t see her relationship with Connor as abusive because she supposedly gets something out of it. But this is also what Connor believes, why else would he aggressively haggle her into a marriage she so clearly does not want? Connor holds total power over Willa’s career. Like his father, because of his father, Connor views interpersonal relationships as predatory business arrangements. 

He Claims To Love Them, But Connor Treats His Siblings Like Trash

Connor Roy has said on multiple occasions that he loves his siblings, but what does that really mean when your primary role model for love was Logan Roy? As we learned in the most recent episode, it means very little. 

After a botched wedding rehearsal that Willa skips, the four siblings hit up a bar to cheer Connor up and reveal Logan is selling Waystar to GoJo. With his inheritance in danger and fiancee MIA, Connor rats on his sibs to Logan and tells him where they are, all while illegally tracking Willa’s location. 

This family reunion goes about as horrifically as you would expect. Logan offers his adult children a half-assed apology for his abuse in an attempt to stop them meddling with the GoJo merger. But Kendall and Shiv pointedly remind Logan of the pain he has caused them and their siblings, bringing up how he hit Roman and abandoned Connor.

Connor eviscerates his siblings for this, claiming that, unlike them, he does not need his father’s or anyone’s love because he’s learned to live without it. He even claims that he does not care if Willa loves him, making his surveillance, possession and desire for control over her all the more insidious. 

Despite it paralleling his own, Connor dismisses his sibling’s anguish over their father’s abuse and chooses to side with their father purely for financial gain. But this is far from the first time he has done this to them. In Season 1, Roman tells his siblings how much he hated them locking him in a cage and making him eat dog food when they were kids. Kendall and Shiv claim not to remember, but Connor casually informs Roman that Roman actually enjoyed the “game” they played at the time. 

Connor also intentionally tries to hurt Shiv by reminding her that her bid to take over from Logan is no different to when their dad let her stamp his letters before posting them as a child. Connor frequently weaponises his knowledge of his siblings’ childhoods for his own gain. 

What does love mean coming from a man who claims to not need or care about it? It’s merely another form of leverage, a form of abuse, a cage, a marketing technique that gets Connor what he really wants: attention. Despite cruel comments from his family on how unliked he is, Connor Roy doesn’t see himself as unlikeable, he sees himself as justified; as a man cosmically entitled to cruel interest on all the love he does not have. This is what malevolence looks like.

Does it make him the most evil in the show? In his family? Perhaps. But if you have a family where one member is financially and psychologically abusing a woman and no one in that family does anything about it except make it into a joke… you have a family entirely alike in evil.