An auction house in Dallas that is usually stocked with fine art and rare baseball cards now holds a six-foot dog mascot suit last seen in Episode 1 of the HBO drama “Succession.” Audiences may recall a nauseated Cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun) putting on the costume and puking through its eyeballs.
The item has been thoroughly cleansed of prop vomit, according to auction staff members, and is now among 236 lots of memorabilia from the show that are up for bidding on the Heritage Auctions website through Saturday.
“Even the eyeholes are mostly clean,” said Robert Wilonsky, a spokesman for the auction house.
“Succession,” the story of ultrawealthy siblings jockeying for control of their father’s media empire, ended its four-season run in May and is up for 27 Emmys on Monday — the most of any series. Fans and collectors wanting to own a piece of the show can bid on luxury suits worn by the show’s cast or the vape pen puffed by its Season 4 antagonist, Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgard). Fear not: It comes with a charger.
The auction’s most coveted item may be a boxy Burberry tote ridiculed by Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen) when it is carried to a family event by an interloper. “She’s brought a ludicrously capacious bag,” he says. “What’s even in there, huh? Flat shoes for the subway?”
The bag was viciously memed. On Friday, it was the most viewed lot in the auction, with a leading bid of $4,100.
Other instruments of humiliation include the Vitamix blender used to douse Roman Roy (Kieran Culkin) in Season 4 and the prop sausages from a hazing ritual in Season 2 called “boar on the floor.” Taxidermy boars from the same scene could not be put up for auction because they are “kind of hard to store,” said Monica Jacobs, a prop master for the show.
Even the most mundane props could take weeks to create, Ms. Jacobs said. Credit cards were fabricated specifically for the show — don’t get your hopes up, none of them work — and handwritten speeches for a funeral scene were scrawled by a member of the show’s art department. (Jeremy Strong, the actor who played Kendall Roy, requested to write his own, she added.)
HBO has previously auctioned off props from the shows “Insecure” and “Watchmen,” joining A24 and Netflix in a crowded field of Hollywood memorabilia auctions that can generate buzz — and profits — long after filming has wrapped. Sales will be shared between HBO and Heritage Auctions.
Items for the auction were selected while Season 4 was being filmed in the early months of 2023, said Jax Strobel, a managing director in entertainment for Heritage Auctions. He was invited by HBO to snoop around sets in New York and earmark items — say, the bayonet sword hanging on the wall of Logan Roy’s office — that should be set aside.
“What will a fan remember or recognize?” he said. “The things that show up often, or that have a special moment or memory attached.”
Also up for auction are several of the costumes that helped spawn a frenzy over “stealth wealth” — the subtle flexing of understated pieces that are in fact quite expensive. See: the brown Brunello Cucinelli blazer worn by Kendall in Season 2.
The show’s characters “stand for money,” Michelle Matland, the costume designer, said in an interview last year. “They stand for affluence. They stand for position and posture.”
Ms. Matland dressed them accordingly, beginning with their shoes, which she called “the most important article of clothing on a person’s body.” Her selections from brands including Prada, Saint Laurent and Lanvin appear in the auction at various levels of wear and tear.
Some fans of the show grumbled on social media about the markup on a blue children’s T-shirt from Walmart worn by Roman in the series finale. Bidding on the shirt and a corresponding pair of salmon shorts from Old Navy had surpassed $1,000 on Friday.
Ms. Jacobs, the prop master, is encouraged that the show’s carefully selected signifiers of wealth, status, self-absorption and poor taste are still being appreciated by fans.
Some of them were headaches to procure. She ordered around 20 dried scorpions for the paperweight that Tom gives to Shiv Roy (Sarah Snook) in Season 4, and reshaped their tails into “attack mode.” She dried the scorpions in the oven of her apartment before one, cast in resin, enjoyed just a few seconds as a guest star on prestige TV.
“My kitchen smelled terrible for a couple weeks,” Ms. Jacobs said, “but it was worth it.”
