Nicholas Braun emerges, socks and sandals first, from a Town Car at the entrance of Coney Island’s Luna Park, game for anything. This includes enthusiastically strapping into a ride that looks like a seesaw designed in hell. This means remaining unfazed when the irate man running the kiddie rides refuses to let him sit in a miniature car because Braun is six feet seven, even though the only apparent risk to the car is that it will seem even tinier than usual.
The sole, fleeting sign that Braun is merely 99 percent psyched to do something comes when he’s on his way to board the Cyclone, the amusement park’s crown jewel, a rickety wooden roller coaster that was built before the Great Depression. “It's just a bunch of plywood,” he quietly observes to himself while gazing up at the bunch of plywood on which he’s about to risk his life.
Then he gets on the Cyclone anyway.
Braun’s low-key, agreeable nature is uncannily reminiscent of Cousin Greg, his endearingly bumbling character on HBO’s sleeper hit Succession. The show, a gloriously scathing portrayal of one-percenters behaving badly, follows media mogul Logan Roy (Brian Cox) and his four terrible adult children while deftly straddling the line between comedy and drama. Cousin Greg, the mostly guileless grandson of Logan’s estranged brother, conspicuously trips over that line and hurtles directly into the former. When we meet him, he’s just started working at a Roy family theme park, a gig that abruptly ends when he gets too stoned and pukes out of the eyeholes of his mascot costume. But his most memorable moment comes after he finagles his way into a Roy office job and receives his first big paycheck.
Cousin Greg reveals that he intends to take his windfall to California Pizza Kitchen, whose cuisine he talks up with trademark dopey, childlike delight—"They make a Cajun chicken linguine just the way I like it”—only to have his boss and frequent antagonizer Tom Wamsgans (Matthew Macfadyen) brutally mock him for his pedestrian taste. It’s both deeply hilarious and exquisitely heartbreaking, an exchange so visceral that it leaves the viewer wanting to offer Greg a reassuring pat on the back with one hand while stifling laughter with the other.
“I wasn't sure how I was coming across the first season,” Braun, 31, says midway through the Nathan’s hotdog that he’s been intent on procuring since we entered the park. “So many of these scenes, I feel bad and embarrassed. I would leave the scenes feeling like, Oh, God, I fucked that scene up!”
He did not, it turns out, fuck those scenes up. Far from it, actually: Cousin Greg emerged as the runaway fan favorite. As a wide-eyed outsider suddenly plunged into a world of extreme wealth, he serves both as the audience proxy and the show’s beating heart. And though he's demonstrated the potential to be as cunning as his relatives, whether he’ll end up irredeemably corrupt is one of the most anticipated plotlines when Succession returns for its second season this month.
Of course, Braun’s world extends well beyond Cousin Greg and California Pizza Kitchen. (For the record, he’s never tried their Cajun chicken linguine, though he calls their frozen barbecue chicken pizza a “staple.”) He’ll be playing a whole different shade of incompetent in the upcoming Janicza Bravo film Zola, based on the megaviral 2016 tweet thread by a Hooters waitress named Zola, whose two-day trip to go stripping in Florida with a brand new acquaintance named Jessica ended up involving an angry pimp named Z and an armed kidnapping. Braun stars as Dereck, Jessica’s long-suffering dirtbag boyfriend, a role for which he dropped 25 pounds off his already lanky frame in just three weeks. “I was kind of moody,” he admits of his experience crash dieting. “Janicza probably wouldn't have minded, but I just felt like he's a guy whose relationship is eating him up. I thought, I should feel as frail as I can get.” He pulls up a photo of himself in costume as Dereck on his phone, where, all chin strap and saggy jeans, he looks like a man who subsists entirely on Monster Energy drinks and Juul pods.
Braun also hopes to direct the movie he’s writing about a woman who ends up on a reality dating show she’s obsessed with after a friend signs her up, inspired by his affection for the algorithm-based MTV reality show Are You the One? “I know I'm writing the right thing, because I continue to think about it all the time,” he says. “It's basically a catchall for all the weird stuff that dating brings, and being lost in your 20s and trying to try on different identities.”
All this talk about dating leads Braun, who got out of his last relationship a few months ago, to volunteer to show me his profile on the Raya app. His slideshow, set to the song “GRoCERIES” by Chance the Rapper, includes an atmospheric winter shot of himself in a beanie, a picture of himself with Bernie Sanders, and a photo of a friend’s dog, alone. “My friend wanted to design my thing, so he chose my pictures because he thinks he's really good at it,” he tells me. That friend, it turns out, is Christopher Mintz-Plasse, better known as McLovin in Superbad.
Braun urges me to read his bio, because he’s especially proud of it. “Just finding someone who has a passion for escape rooms,” the paragraph begins. “If we happen to make out or something after we successfully solve the puzzle, that's fine with the priority as escaping.” Though Braun is obviously self-aware and wryly funny, he embodies many of Cousin Greg’s mannerisms, playing up any strange enthusiasms and self-effacing tendencies for laughs. So, naturally, I wonder if he’s being ironic.
“I love escape rooms,” he assures me, dead serious. “I am a massive fan of escape rooms.”
Before Braun became America’s most lovable failson, he had a lengthy acting résumé under his belt. He was born on Long Island and, after his parents divorced when he was five, grew up splitting his time between weekdays in Connecticut with his mother and weekends in New York City with his father, Craig. The elder Braun is a legendary music industry figure—he was responsible for finalizing the Rolling Stones tongue logo and creating the zippered-fly cover for the band’s Sticky Fingers album—who decided he wanted to pursue a career as an actor in his 50s. As he was learning the ropes, he decided to teach his son, too. “He would try and make me do the Meisner technique,” Braun tells me, referring to the popular training method that emphasizes following one’s emotional impulses. “It was really fun—he was coaching me as though it was a sport.” Braun landed his first role at 11, in the Showtime movie Walter and Henry, which is available in all its grainy entirety on YouTube. He plays Henry, a hypercompetent, tough-talking city kid who lives in an Airstream trailer with his street-musician father, Walter, and is, in every way possible, the anti–Cousin Greg.
Braun went on to boarding school in Massachusetts, then spent two years at Occidental College in Los Angeles before dropping out to act full-time. Along the way, he was booking tween-friendly parts like in the Disney Channel movie Princess Protection Program, with Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato; the watered-down ABC Family sitcom version of 10 Things I Hate About You; and The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Wary of getting stuck in a Disney rut, he deliberately held off from going all the way in that direction.
He also shot up to his current troposphere-grazing height, which he admits can be “limiting,” though he tries not to focus on it. “People are afraid of you feeling too big on the screen,” Braun tells me. “They're afraid of you towering over other lead actors or the female leads you are with. If I'm playing the son of anybody, there's a good chance I won't be cast. I can't be Steve Carell's son.” (On Succession, his height is used to maximum advantage through what he calls Cousin Greg’s “looming energy.”)
When Braun read for what would become his breakout role, he didn’t quite understand its tone. But he was a huge fan of Succession’s executive producer, Adam McKay, and thought that even if he wasn’t right for this project, perhaps McKay would like him enough to consider him for something else. Braun channeled a lot of his own anxieties into the character. “My fears about not being the smartest person in the room, or not knowing how to say the right thing....I think Greg tries more than me. If I feel dumb in a room, I usually just shut down, but he kinda still goes for it, which is fun to play.”
“It was always clear from the audition that Nick was going to be very funny as Greg. He’s got such a great combination of vulnerability and also slight entitlement and weird thrusting confidence,” Succession creator Jesse Armstrong told me in an e-mail. “He’s gauche, but it’s gaucheness with a purpose.”
Braun says that the lines between the other actors and their roles end up getting blurred on set, too. He brings up Kieran Culkin, who plays Roman Roy, Logan’s sleazebag youngest son and television’s most unequivocally fun asshole. “Kieran revs himself up and starts to bully. He's got me a few times. But then again, I like being a target sometimes, because it makes me feel kind of bad and makes me feel lesser than everybody in a room, and that stuff helps me,” he explains. “I like feeling afraid of Brian [Cox] still, even though we've been doing [this] for a long time. Sometimes I'm like, I wish it was easier, but I think it helps to feel a little intimidated by him always.”
Post-hotdog, Braun and I decide to wander around the park for a bit, trying our luck at the carnival games. We hurl beanbags at stacks of tin cans and, between the two of us over the course of a few rounds, manage to knock down exactly one can. Braun, undeterred by the inherent futility of what we’re attempting, urges us to move on and try something else for “diversity of sport.” We settle on a basketball game that involves trying to score in one of four adjacent hoops, which a sign warns us are not regulation size. After failing to make his first shot, Braun is overwhelmed with the urge to purchase another chance at glory. So he pulls out his wallet, which turns out not to be a wallet at all. It’s a precarious bundle of cash and cards held together by a single black binder clip—an affectation that’s such pure, unadulterated Cousin Greg that I feel like I’m being pranked. I'm not, though, and Braun has a thorough, earnest explanation.
“The wallet always became too clunky,” he explains. “[This is] so much better. And I’ve never lost anything.”
Braun pays and gathers himself to take his final shot. The ball arcs upward toward the hoop and, at the last second, clanks off the makeshift headboard. But whatever, he says, because “it felt good coming off the fingers anyway.”
Gabriella Paiella is a GQ staff writer who uses a regular wallet.
