“Oh my god, I wish I didn’t know about this.” Sorry to this man—this man being Nicholas Braun, whom Vanity Fair just had to ask about the curious press release that landed in inboxes Thursday afternoon, as Succession press rained down ahead of the show’s third season premiere on Sunday.
In a stroke of PR-piggyback cunning, CamSoda, a livestreaming platform that has already marketed sex toys that pleasure users according to the rise and fall of their bitcoin stock, introduced Greg the Egg. The adult toy connects to a user’s streamed content through BlueTooth, and whenever Cousin Greg enters the chat, well, off you get.
And we quote:
The love and admiration for Cousin Greg has reached a fever pitch. He’s everyone’s favorite character on Succession. Since he has become so popular, he has turned into an Internet fueled sex symbol. Even Tom knows. He said you can’t have a Tomelet without Greggs. We here at CamSoda wanted to provide people with an outlet to orgasm to Cousin Greg while he graces them with his presence every Sunday evening this fall. So we developed ‘Greg the Egg – cast’ to do just that turning Succession into Sexsession.
CamSoda is not totally wrong, even if they’re in the wrong. (It doesn’t seem like “Cousin Greg” necessarily consented to starring in “Sexsession.”) Guileless Greg is one of the few Roys or Roy-adjacents who may have a capacity for love; everybody else on Succession is deeply into self-love, but not that kind. And Braun is having a sustained moment, or multiple moments, beyond Succession—he’s currently filming Cat Person (based on the viral New Yorker short story) and soon will take a turn as Adam Neumann in a limited series about WeWork, which he’s also producing.
Braun says that “a friend” forwarded him the release, ahead of his press junket for Succession. “I think, uh… Is it a compliment?” he told V.F., sounding partly repulsed and partly like he was surprised to accept this sexual Emmy. “That’s such an intimate thing to do with yourself—or with another person participating or watching. So the fact that Succession and Greg can be on their mind as that’s going on, it’s not something that any of us expected.”
Braun doesn’t know what the toy looks like (“and maybe I don’t want to?”), but we did tell him we’d look into it. And we did.
It’s not a toy, in fact; it’s a free technology that allows any Lovense “teledildonic” to sync with audio—not unlike your Sonos and iTunes, but very horny and duly specific. In addition to crypto, the company has created triggered vibrations for the World Series and the Super Bowl.
Greg, says a CamSoda spokesperson, is “America’s sweetheart and has captured the hearts of many across social media. Just scroll through Twitter on Sunday night and you’ll see people lusting after him. We thought this would be a nice compliment to people’s infatuation with him.” The company considered Siobhan pairings as well as the “sexual perversions and proclivities” of Roman, but “ultimately landed on Greg.”
Braun himself mused about the idea of “a Logan based vibrator, stimulator… it’s a whole different thing”—BDSM?—before landing on gratitude. “Thank you to whoever invented this.”
Imagine it as a Greg voiceover: The egg is getting… laid? Suddenly, “Successionhead” takes on a whole new meaning.
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