Succession creator Jesse Armstrong says he suffers from imposter syndrome | Jesse Armstrong

Award-winning screenwriter Jesse Armstrong said the writers’ room can feel like a “moonwalk” when it works well, but he admitted he suffered from imposter syndrome during his career.

Armstrong was behind the hit HBO drama series Succession, starring Brian Cox as global media mogul and family matriarch Logan Roy, who sets off a power struggle among his four children.

He is also an Academy Award nominee for co-writing the spin-off The Thick of It In The Loop with Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci and Tony Roache, and won a BAFTA Television Award for his work on Peep Show.

Speaking on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs to Lauren Laverne, Armstrong, 55, said: “When the writers room is doing well, it’s like you’re walking on the moon.

“You’re suddenly liberated from something that might take a week to figure out for yourself at your desk.

“Suddenly you’re walking around and picking up rocks and everything is dripping with gold, and it’s like you can get these golden moments of ideas coming from everyone and you’re all on the same wavelength and it can feel absolutely magical.”

He added: “You can have really good days and hours of work writing on your own, but when it doesn’t work and you feel like you’re not going to equal the best version of the thing you’re trying to make, I find that very difficult.

“The theoretical consoling idea that says, ‘Oh, everything will be okay because you’ve done it before,’ actually becomes another rod for your back.

“You don’t know how likely I am to be a really bad writer because you don’t see all these drafts where it’s really bad.”

Succession, which has won 19 Emmy Awards including Outstanding Drama Series and nine Golden Globe Awards, concludes 2023 with its fourth series.

Despite the many awards, the writer said he still suffers from imposter syndrome.

“All the good writers I know and have met in my life suffer from self-doubt and uncertainty about whether what they just did is good or not,” he said.

“I think you’re probably 70% feeling like, ‘Oh, this is going to be a disaster and I’m going to be exposed as the fraud that I always thought I was all along.’

“You need 10 to 20% — if you’re lucky, 30% — to feel: ‘If I could do the version I think it should be, it could be really cool.’”

“I think maybe there’s a little bit of confidence that you know that’s what you feel, maybe it grows inside of you.

“And also knowing that negative feelings are not necessarily true.”

The full Desert Island Discs interview can be heard on BBC Sounds and BBC Radio 4 from Sunday at 10am.