Logan’s estranged brother (and Greg’s disappointed grandfather) shows up in the series sporadically — but always dramatically, as he is almost alone among the cast of characters in calling out the socially and morally destructive nature of the Roy family business.

“I loved him, I suppose, and I suppose some of you did too, in whatever way he would let us and we could manage,” Ewan said. “But I can’t help but say he has wrought some of the most terrible things. He was a man who has here and there drawn in the edges of the world. Now and then darkened the skies a little. Closed men’s hearts. Fed that dark flame in men, the hard mean hard-relenting flame that keeps their heart warm while another grows cold. Their grain stashed while another goes hungry.”

It turns out there’s a lot of Ewan in the actor who plays him, James Cromwell, who gave a fascinating analysis of the eulogy in an interview with Vulture this week.

“There’s the nuance in the speech itself, plus all the other things — the revelations of these human beings, Shiv and Kendall and Roman, who we’ve seen at their worst, their very worst, in pain, isolated, lost, confused,” Cromwell said. “I think Ewan notices that. I think the look over at Roman communicates both contempt and: There but for the grace of God go I. I don’t envy that life, for that man.”

The interview is worth reading in full, not least for Cromwell’s history of progressive activism, his condemnation of capitalism, and his thoughts about the ethics of artificial intelligence. “Even if it doesn’t have actual consciousness, but merely a form of self-awareness, what happens when it says, ‘I am being exploited?’” the actor asks — surely something no Roy would ever contemplate.